What is an SEO consultant?
In over simplified terms, an SEO consultant will increase your organic rankings proportionately to your investment. They should have the ability to join your business as an external consultant, look at your current situation and provide a highly effective roadmap to improving your position. Finding the right SEO consultant for your business can pose risk, be expensive sometimes and can take some business owners way outside of their comfort zone. I’ll delve into picking the right SEO expert for your business but let’s explore the types of deliverables an SEO can provide to your business.
A good SEO consultant should be able to take steer from your requirements, sometimes businesses may only need advice, other times it could be a fully hands on solution. Let’s presume here that you need a full service and looking to hand the reigns over to an experienced SEO consultant. They will likely start on the current website – this could be either through technical and analytical auditing or perhaps keyword research. One if the benefits I have is I understand Google Ads and I’ll often underpin commercial performance from Ads within this phase.
The output in this phase will likely be reframing the data you have, creating opportunistic changes and starting to shape the roadmap to increasing search engine rankings. I personally like to see robust reporting and tracking validation take shape at this stage and also competitor analysis.
The output of the first phase will likely spin up a significant amount of work through development, content and off-site work, I personally like to grade these changes based on the effort to impact ratio, so we carefully prioritise them based on cost and time required vs. potential impact. Every SEO consultant will operate their own way, as a very vague top level overview, this is the type of activity I would typically expect to see when you first embark on growing your rankings.
What makes Shane a top SEO consultant?
The ability to gain commercially viable rankings, my ability to demystify a lot of the jargon and create a sustainable route to growth, I’d say these three pillars of SEO is lacking for a lot of vendors. A few other benefits to using my services would entail strong cohesion between paid search and organic search – I’m able to marry up these channels to maximise the spend and also enhance organic performance.
My track record, over 95% of my turnover comes from clients I’ve recruited from the service I sell them. My business is almost exclusively ran on organic SEO and referrals – it has been this way for over 3 years now. I’ve also amassed a vast amount of testimonials over my 14 years of doing search, I’ve put a sample amount on my works page here.
White Label SEO
PPC, SEO and Email
SEO Strategy
Which CMS is best for SEO?
After 14+ years in search, I’ve worked with an incredible amount of businesses, using a heavily varied amount of content management systems – each often has their own benefits and negatives; which we can often work with for SEO.
Key platforms would be WordPress, Shopify, Demandware, Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce, Magento and many more – one of the benefits of having hands on experience with these platforms is I can often write things like specific developer briefs – which can save a lot of time.
My core SEO strengths
Profitability driven – which often sets me apart from 95% of the market. A lot of my peers will look at impressions, clicks and rankings – I look at sales and GP usually. What’s the difference? Profitability and commercially viable keywords will often be primary, dictating the secondary KPIs of impressions, clicks and rankings.
There is a chronic issue with a lot of the SEO industry at the moment which revolves around vanity rankings or metrics; as a commercially driven SEO consultant, I’ll move the right markers and lean my efforts into the most commercially viable and sustainable areas.
How much do I charge?
Before I tell you, I just want to highlight my issue with the traditional way of pricing. Retainers seldom reflect the amount of work going into the campaign; many agencies will try and do as little work as possible to invoice you that retainer. Value based pricing can be problematic as some clients can be charged significant amounts for little work but be high impact.
My way of working is, you pay for my time at a rate that reflects the experience and impact I can have on your business. Looking at costs is only one half of the equation, how much more revenue and EBITDA can I bring to your business is the main question. For a flat rate figure, I typically charge around the £400 + VAT per day.
Full Search Support
On-site SEO and PPC
PPC and Search
What core SEO services to I provide?
When you hire me as your SEO consultant I’ll be able to plug pretty much any and all internal skills gap – providing you with the full service spectrum. In addition to the below services I can also support internal teams with training, providing cheatsheets, help build out reporting and much, much more.
Tech SEO audits
A lacking skillset within the industry is one I probably excel most at – technical auditing and analysis. Running a combination of third party, manual and data-driven audits from your site. I have the strong ability of boxing these recommendations up into high commercial impact priority and using terminology that is easy to understand and implement.
For some clients, I’ll help provide the fixes as some would prefer me to log into their CMS and make the changes for example (non-code changes) and others would like me to liaise with their internal teams.
eCommerce SEO
I’ve had the pleasure of working with, and continuing to work with, some of the UK’s leading eCommerce brands. I’m geared up to effectively help brands who are starting up into eCommerce to the ones that fetch in massive turnovers (8-9 figures annually).
The requirements of my eCommerce often involves integrating Ads data, wider merchandising support and content heavy. You won’t find generic and thoughtless buying guide production lines with my services; it’ll be centric around driving massive growth for eCommerce brands at all stages of their digital life.
Local SEO
I get a massive thrill out of working with companies who operate within a specific geographic area – this likely entails less competition vs. national and I can often get results exceptionally quickly here.
Local businesses often take natural footfall for granted and neglect their digital footprint – often underestimating how easy it is to divert footfall to your business with the right digital and SEO strategy in place. It’s often a fast paced growth trajectory with localised search and is one of the most exciting campaigns I tend to run – solely because it tends to move so quickly.