Consulting
Most companies looking at SaaS SEO consulting do not have an execution problem. They have writers, they have developers, they have a marketing team that ships. What they do not have is somebody who can look at the whole picture and name the three things worth doing next, put them in sequence, and explain why the other twelve can wait. That is what consulting sells. This page covers what it includes, the four situations where it is the right purchase, the three where it is not, what it costs, and how to judge anyone offering it.
02 / The split that costs people money
The word covers two different products, and the confusion costs people real money. Here is the split, and what you are paying for in each.
A consulting engagement produces judgment: which keywords are worth your quarter, which pages to build in which order, what is technically broken and what it is costing you, whether your current approach can work at all. The output is a plan, a set of specifications, and a person your team can ask questions.
A services engagement produces work: the pages get written, the tickets get shipped, the links get earned. The output is a site that changed. If you have neither writers nor developers, buying the work outright is the honest answer.
Most companies need both. The question is who supplies which half. If you have a marketing team and a development team already on payroll, buying execution again means paying twice for capacity you own. If you have neither, buying only decisions leaves you with an excellent plan nobody has time to run.
The expensive version of this mistake runs in both directions. Companies pay agency retainers for work their own team could have done with better direction. And companies hire a consultant, receive a genuinely good roadmap, and watch it sit untouched for two quarters because nobody owned the execution. Being honest about which one you are is the highest-return decision on this page.
03 / Inside the engagement
What is happening on your site right now and why: rendering, indexation, cannibalization, decay, competitive position, and the gap between what you publish and what your buyers search.
Not a list of everything wrong. A sequence, with the reasoning attached, because a team that fixes things in the wrong order can work hard for six months and move nothing.
Written so your people can act without interpreting. Issues an engineer can close without a translation layer. Briefs a writer can start from. Screening rules an outreach person can apply.
Organic traced through to your CRM, so the argument about whether this is working has an answer rather than opinions.
Somebody senior who knows your account and answers questions between the scheduled calls, because the value of a consultant is mostly in the questions you did not know to schedule.
What consulting is not
It is not a slide deck. It is not a crawling tool’s PDF export with a cover page attached. It is not a monthly call where somebody reviews numbers you already read. And it is not a way to get agency work at a discount, which is worth saying plainly because that assumption shows up in more first calls than any other.
04 / The right purchase
Four situations. If you recognize your company in one of them, consulting is probably the correct spend.
There are writers producing content, a developer who will take tickets, maybe a marketing manager running the calendar. Output is steady and results are flat. What is missing is the layer above execution: which topics matter, in what order, measured how, and whether the pages already published are worth saving.
A consultant fixes this at a fraction of what a full agency costs, because you are only buying the part you are missing.
Leadership wants a number before they commit a budget. Reasonable. An honest consulting engagement can tell you what share of your market’s search demand is realistically winnable at your authority level, how long it would take, and the investment required to reach it. Sometimes the answer is that organic will not be your primary channel for two years and you should fund something else first.
That answer is worth paying for. It is also the answer no agency selling a twelve-month retainer is incentivized to give you.
An SEO hire at the wrong seniority sets a company back a year. Consulting helps you define the role against your actual constraint, interview against real criteria rather than a keyword list, and give whoever you hire a working strategy on day one instead of six months of ramp.
We have written job specs, sat in on final interviews, and handed the resulting hire a documented roadmap. That handover is the point of the engagement rather than a threat to it.
Reports look busy. Rankings do not move. You cannot tell whether the problem is the agency, the strategy, the site, or the timeline being genuinely longer than anyone promised. A second opinion is a short, bounded engagement that answers exactly that, and it is the least awkward thing in the world. A good share of the audits we run come from companies who already pay somebody else.
Often enough the verdict is that the incumbent is performing and the board simply needs to wait. Being able to say that with evidence behind it is worth the fee on its own.
Answer four questions and you will get told which of those four situations you are actually in, or which of the three below. Then describe your setup on a call and point us at the site.
Four questions · 0/4 answered
Do you already have people who can execute — writers, a developer, someone who ships?
Do you know which three things to do next, and in what order?
Is your main gap authority — competitors with hundreds of referring domains to your dozen?
Is a rebuild or replatform scheduled in the next three months?
Answer the first two and this panel will tell you which of the four right situations you are in — or which of the three wrong ones.
05 / The disqualifier
Three situations where hiring us for consulting would be a poor use of your money. Reading this section before the sales call saves everyone time.
If you have no writers, no developer capacity, and no one whose job includes SEO, a roadmap is a document that makes you feel prepared while nothing changes. Buy execution, from us or from someone else, or hire before you consult.
Some companies already know exactly what to do. They have the strategy, the pages, and the technical foundation, and what stands between them and page one is that their competitors have four hundred referring domains and they have twelve. Consulting will confirm what you already know. Spend the money on the gap instead.
Any strategy written against a site that disappears in three months gets paid for twice. Do the migration properly first, then plan against what you actually have.
There is a fourth, less common one worth naming. If the honest answer is that your product has not found its market yet, no amount of search work fixes that. Search harvests demand that already exists. It does not manufacture any.
One pattern worth watching for in yourself. Companies often reach for consulting when what they actually want is permission: somebody credible to confirm a decision leadership has already made, or to overrule one they disagree with. That is a real need and consultants get hired for it constantly. It is just worth naming out loud in the first call, because an engagement bought as strategy and used as ammunition tends to satisfy nobody.
06 / Engagement models
Most companies start with the audit and roadmap and continue with the advisory retainer or the fractional lead. Click through each one.
The full diagnosis: technical, content, authority, competitive position, and AI search visibility. What you receive is a prioritized roadmap with the reasoning attached, a ticket queue your developers can start on immediately, a map assigning every worthwhile term to a page, and measurement wired through to your CRM.
Best for companies that need to know what is wrong and where to start, and have the people to act once they know. This is also the entry point for most longer engagements, because neither side should commit to twelve months before seeing how the other works.
Typical investment
Fixed fee, priced once we have reviewed the site
Most people are not, and picking wrong is expensive. Describe your situation and we will recommend one, including when the recommendation is a smaller engagement than you were expecting.
07 / The first thirty days
Consulting engagements go wrong in the same way: a long discovery period, a big document, and no momentum. Here is how ours run instead.
Week one
Analytics, Search Console, your CRM, whatever keyword work already exists, and an hour with whoever understands the product best. Your current position gets recorded in full, citations on each assistant included. Skip that record and no future argument about progress can be settled by either side.
Thirty days in, you hold a diagnosis, live work, a map, and instrumentation that reports honestly. Nobody promises you rankings in that window. A consultant who does is quietly describing paid media.
Give us the domain. The audit happens before anyone discusses fees, you get told which three problems are costing you most, and the document stays yours no matter where this goes.
08 / By stage
One discipline, three very different weightings. Getting the shape wrong for where your company actually sits wastes more consulting budget than any other error.
Funded, with marketers on payroll and a library of published work that is not paying rent. Consulting returns the most per dollar at this stage, because the machinery already runs and only the aim is wrong. The advisory retainer or the fractional lead both fit, and the choice depends on how much ownership you want us holding versus your own marketing lead.
Most of our consulting clients are here.
Where the effort goes
Enterprise reference: Gartner’s research on B2B buying puts six to ten people in the average buying group.
09 / The buyer’s rubric
You are probably comparing several. Six checks, written from the buyer’s chair rather than the seller’s. Tick the ones you will ask. Run them on us before anyone else.
Tick the ones you intend to ask on your next call. Anything left untouched is a gap the seller gets to fill.
Book the call and ask every one of these questions. If our answers do not satisfy you, you will have a better rubric for the next three conversations, which is worth your thirty minutes either way.
10 / Investment
Published market rates for independent consultants run roughly $100 to $150 an hour, and monthly advisory arrangements without execution commonly land between $2,000 and $6,000. Our own ranges follow.
Monthly ranges, to scale
Consulting costs less than a full done-for-you program because you are buying a smaller slice, not because it is a lesser product. The value comparison that matters is not consulting against agency retainers. It is consulting against the cost of a senior in-house hire, which in most markets means salary, recruitment, ramp time, and the risk that the hire is wrong. Ranges for the full done-for-you programs sit on the pricing page, printed openly rather than hidden behind a form.
11 / Proof
Two programs, written up in full, with each figure cleared by the client it describes.
Workwize · IT asset management
1,852 → 13,420
Monthly sessions
28 → 111
Qualified leads / mo
$1.16M
Organic pipeline, one month
The engagement lasted almost two years. The detail that belongs on a consulting page: our founder held their in-house SEO seat before this agency existed, so the plan was shaped by what their marketing leadership had to defend upward, not by a keyword tool’s output.
Read the full case studyDa Vinci · Cloud WMS for 3PL
25x
Organic traffic, 11 months
19 → 55
Domain rating
74
Assistant citations, 6 platforms
Neither line had flattened when the engagement closed. Neither of these came from a tactic. Both came from deciding the right things in the right order.
Read the full case study12 / FAQ
Answers reflect how we actually operate, including the parts that lose us work.
13 / Keep reading
14 / One call
Tell us the decision you are weighing and where your site lives. We audit first, arrive with findings instead of discovery questions, and name the engagement that fits, up to and including none of them. You keep the document either way.