SEO consultancy for in-house teams, agencies and remote SEO functions
Most businesses that call us already have someone doing the work. What they lack is anyone senior enough to say which of the fifty possible actions matters most this quarter, and why. That is the job a consultancy does.
- ✓10+ consultants on the bench
- ✓Led by a founder in search since 2010
- ✓No minimum commitment
- Topical mapping
- Entity architecture
- Technical direction
- Team coaching
- AI visibility
What the first meeting gives you, before anything is quoted
- ✓A read on which of the three deliverables you actually need
- ✓The parts of your current plan we would stop
- ✓An honest view on whether your existing provider is doing good work
- ✓A scope and a figure, after we understand the work and not before
Nothing charged for the call. Nothing assumed about what follows it.
Six things to know before you engage a consultancy
Read the page for the detail. Read these and you already know how the engagement works and whether it fits you.
A consultancy sells judgement and direction. An agency sells delivery. Many businesses need both.
Three deliverables sit at the centre: a topical map, a diagnostic, and a retained advisory programme.
In-house teams, agencies and remote SEO functions gain most, because execution already exists.
A named senior consultant leads your account. You get the name at the start and you keep it.
Running SEO alone with no team? Mentoring is the right shape, and it costs far less.
Every engagement is scoped in a conversation, because the work varies more than a price list allows.
Get your scope in 30 minutesWhat an SEO consultancy does that an agency does not
An SEO consultancy decides what should be done and in what order. An agency does the doing.
The distinction sounds academic until you have paid for twelve months of activity that never connected to revenue. Here is how a consultancy engagement is sequenced, and why the order matters.
We read the business first
Which services carry the margin, which customers you want more of, which competitors keep appearing in the deals you lose. A keyword list built without that produces traffic that never converts.
Then the search work gets planned
The territory your site should own, the pages it needs, the order to build them in and the entity relationships between them. Our semantic SEO and topical authority programme is the method underneath it.
You get direction with reasoning attached
Your team learns why the priority order is what it is, so they can apply the same thinking next time without calling us. Agencies rarely work this way, and the incentive explains it.
We consult with full delivery capability behind it, so the plan does not stop at a slide deck. Where you want us to execute, we execute. Where your team executes, we supervise and correct.
Consultant, agency or freelancer?
Pick a consultant when you have execution capacity and no strategy. Pick an agency when you have neither. Pick a freelancer when the task is narrow and well defined.
Cheapest, narrowest
Buys you one speciality, done well
- ✓Excellent inside a defined speciality
- ✓Fast to start and easy to stop
- ✕Thin outside their speciality
- ✕One person cannot hold technical, content, entity and analytics at senior depth
Right choice for a single defined task. Risky for anything broad.
Senior thinking as the product
Buys you the decisions, and the reasoning
- ✓Owns the strategy and the priority order
- ✓Holds your delivery to the plan, in-house or outsourced
- ✓Leaves the method inside your team
- ✓Billed against agreed KPIs rather than hours logged
The right question to ask us is not what we will do, but what we will tell you to stop doing.
Capacity, at volume
Buys you hands and throughput
- ✓Content written, pages built, reports delivered
- ✓Nothing lands back on your desk
- ✕Who plans the work varies enormously
- ✕Hourly billing rewards hours, not progress
Ask who writes your strategy, then ask who writes your content. Two different people, one of them senior, means you are buying delivery dressed as strategy.
Who an SEO consultancy is actually for
Nine situations account for almost every consultancy enquiry we take. The first three are the groups that gain most, because the execution capacity already exists and only the direction is missing.
that has plateaued
Your team knows how to publish. Nobody has seen this ceiling before.
An in-house team that has stopped improving has a strategy problem, not an effort problem. What it lacks is someone who has watched forty other sites hit the same wall.
- ✓Monthly working sessions with your team, not instead of it
- ✓A topical map nobody inside the business could build alone
- ✓An escalation route when something breaks at eleven at night
- ✓Your team keeps the work and the credit, and gains the judgement
A consultant on a fraction of a head’s cost lifts the output of every person on the team. Better return than hiring a tenth marketer.
stalled by volatility
The method that built your client base has stopped working
Google shipped multiple broad core updates through 2025, and the AI Overview layer changed what a first position is worth. Agencies that sold rankings now have to sell something harder to demonstrate.
- ✓Method transfer, so your delivery team learns semantic SEO and entity architecture properly
- ✓Output that stops depending on tactics with an expiry date
- ✓White label SEO under your brand, with your margin intact
- ✓Review of your live accounts before the client notices the gap
Agency owners tell us the same thing repeatedly. The problem is not lead flow. Delivery quality caps how many clients they can hold.
with nobody supervising
Invoices arrive, reports arrive, and nobody can judge any of it
Companies running SEO through remote contractors face a specific problem. The person approving payment has no way to tell whether the work is good.
- ✓We set the specification your contractors deliver against
- ✓We review their output and give you a straight opinion on the spend
- ✓Where a contractor is strong we say so, where the work is padding we say that too
- ✓Built for offshore functions, overseas parents and marketplace hires
The work is remote by design, which suits us. Onboarding and delivery run digitally regardless of where the client sits.
Traffic dropped after an update and nobody can tell you why
A drop needs a diagnosis before it needs a plan. The instinct is to publish more, which frequently makes a quality problem worse.
Broad core updates, spam updates and manual actions present as the same symptom and need different responses. Our read on what the March 2025 core update changed and how sites recovered shows how that call is made.
Recovery starts with removing the cause, not adding volume.
You are replatforming and SEO has not been in the room
SEO belongs in a replatform at the wireframe stage. The most expensive migrations we see are the ones where a consultant was called the week before go-live.
URL structure, internal linking, template markup and content parity lock in early and cost a fortune to unpick. Where the build itself is the problem, our search-ready web design service handles it during construction.
A few days at the start prevents a loss that takes a year to claw back.
You need an independent read on the agency you already pay
Marketing directors ask us this more than any other question. Is what I am paying for actually good? An incumbent cannot answer it, and a competing agency produces a sales pitch.
We audit the work, not the agency: technical state, content quality, link profile and reporting, with a plain answer on whether the fee matches the output.
Sometimes that answer defends the incumbent. That is the point of asking someone with nothing to win.
You are buying a business and need the organic channel valued
Organic search is often the target company’s largest acquisition channel and the least examined line in the diligence pack.
We look at concentration risk, algorithmic exposure, the durability of the link profile, and whether the rankings would survive the seller leaving.
In professional services the founder is often the entity Google trusts. That matters more than buyers expect.
You are expanding into new markets or languages
International expansion changes the architecture, not just the translation. Hreflang, market-level content ownership, subfolders against separate domains, and which market gets the canonical version of a shared page.
We plan that structure before the first translated page ships.
Retrofitting international architecture is one of the more expensive technical projects in search.
You build websites and want SEO built in rather than bolted on
Design and development studios lose recurring revenue every time a client hires someone else for search. Building the capability internally takes years. Reselling it badly costs you the relationship.
We sit behind studios in both configurations: training your team to specify search-ready builds, or delivering under your brand while you own the client.
Steady UK demand for the phrase “SEO reseller cost” tells you how many studio owners are working this out right now.
Recognised your situation in more than one of those? That is normal, and it changes which of the three deliverables you start with. Thirty minutes on a call settles it.
Book a meeting with a consultantWhat changed, and what we changed to get there
Both of these started with execution capacity already in place. Neither needed more activity. Both needed a different order of work.
Eighteen months of publishing, no measurable movement
Four articles a month, written to a keyword list with no entity structure underneath it. Forty-one published pages were competing with each other on overlapping terms.
- 1Built the semantic topical map and the build queue behind it
- 2Consolidated nineteen pages into six
- 3Ran fortnightly working sessions with the team for two quarters
Two retainers lost in a quarter to ranking volatility
The audit of their own delivery found technical work stopping at the checklist level and content built without any entity architecture. They asked for method transfer rather than outsourcing.
- 1Six-session programme with their delivery team
- 2Rebuilt the specification their work is delivered against
- 3Reviewed their next four client accounts against it
Neither engagement added headcount. Both reduced the volume of work being produced, which is usually where the gain sits.
When you should not hire an SEO consultancy
Consultancy is oversight of a team. Where there is no team, it is the wrong shape and the wrong cost.
You are a single director doing the SEO yourself. Hire a mentor, not a consultancy.
A single-director business where the owner runs the search work personally does not need strategic oversight of anyone. What that owner needs is to learn the method well enough to apply it without paying someone else every time.
- ✓Topical mapping, applied live to your own site rather than taught in the abstract
- ✓The technical checks that matter, and the ones you can safely ignore
- ✓Content structure and entity work you can carry out yourself
- ✓Measurement, so you can tell whether what you did worked
UK demand for SEO mentoring and SEO training is steady and largely unserved, which tells you how many owners have reached the same conclusion.
You want rankings guaranteed by a date
Hire someone willing to promise that. Before you do, read our view on what SEO actually costs in the UK and what drives the number, because guaranteed positions and honest pricing rarely appear in the same proposal.
You want volume content at the lowest cost per word
That is a different product from the one we sell. We reduce the amount published and raise what each page is asked to do, which is the opposite trade.
You want someone to hold the tools and nothing else
Where you need execution rather than direction, the bespoke SEO programme is the right entry point and the consultancy sits behind it.
The three consultancy deliverables
Every engagement is built from three deliverables. Some clients take one. Most take two. A full programme uses all three in sequence, and the free call decides which of them your situation needs.
The semantic topical map and content architecture
You receive the complete map of the subject territory your website should own, with every page it needs and the order to build them in.
This is the document that stops content plans from being keyword lists. It sets out the central entity your business should be understood as, the core sections you must own outright, and the outer sections that support them.
- ✓Every page carries its intent and its target query family
- ✓Internal link targets in both directions, page by page
- ✓The reason each page exists, so writers can brief themselves
- ✓Sequenced as a build queue for the next twelve to eighteen months
The method behind it is set out in our guide to the twelve steps that build topical authority a search engine will trust.
The technical, entity and AI visibility diagnostic
You receive a prioritised assessment of everything capping your performance, sequenced so the fixes that unblock other work come first.
Three layers get examined, and the third one is now a separate discipline from ranking.
- 1Technical. Crawl paths, rendering, page speed, structured data, and the faults that accumulate through years of theme and plugin updates
- 2Entity. Whether machines can establish who you are: consistent structured data, corroborated identity, a clean link between organisation, people and services
- 3AI visibility. Whether assistants can extract, verify and name you
The output is a ranked list of what to fix, why it matters, what it will move and what it costs in effort, never a 200-page tool export. Our standalone SEO audit service covers the same ground without the programme around it.
The retained advisory programme
You receive a named senior consultant, scheduled working sessions with your team, and continuous oversight of whoever is executing.
Monthly at minimum, fortnightly for active builds. Sessions cover what shipped, what moved, what to do next, and the reasoning behind the call so the team learns the method rather than the instruction.
- ✓Direct access between sessions for decisions that will not wait
- ✓Accountability for direction and for the capability of your team
- ✓Measured against KPIs agreed at the start, not against hours logged
- ✓No minimum commitment, thirty days’ notice
Clients who want us holding the tools as well take the bespoke SEO programme alongside it.
How an engagement actually runs
Discovery, diagnosis, plan, then cadence. You can stop after any of the first three, and each one is useful on its own.
Discovery
We interview whoever owns commercial strategy, read the numbers, and establish what the business needs search to do. Clients are often surprised how little of this is about search.
Diagnosis
Crawl, Search Console analysis, competitor teardown, entity assessment, and the ranked list of what is capping performance. Two to three weeks depending on site size.
Planning
The topical map and the build queue behind it. This is the point where your team stops guessing what to publish next and starts working through a sequence.
Cadence
Working sessions, oversight of delivery and course correction, continuing for as long as it earns its place.
No minimum commitment, thirty days’ notice. A consultancy that has to keep justifying the fee behaves differently from one holding a twelve-month contract, and you should be able to feel that difference in month three.
The bench behind the work
Your engagement is led by a named consultant. You get that name before you commit, and you keep it.
Mohammad A Mahmud
In search since 2010, first inside international search marketing companies and later as a founder. Trained in Koray Tugberk Gubur’s semantic method.
His background is in finance, which is why every engagement opens with the commercial numbers rather than a keyword tool. Read the full background on his consultant profile.
Julie Williams
A fractional CFO with more than thirty years of commercial experience and a certified business coach.
She reviews every strategy against margin and lead quality rather than traffic, and her role is to challenge any plan that grows visitors without growing profit.
The sectors where search decisions carry commercial weight
Regulated sectors get particular attention, because the compliance layer changes what can be published. A consultant who does not know those boundaries produces a content plan the client cannot use.
Accountancy practices
Financial advisers
Law firms
Healthcare providers
Dental practices
Hotels and hospitality
Ecommerce brands
Automotive businesses
Luxury labels
Personal brands
Ecommerce brings an architecture problem, not a copy problem
Category-level decisions determine whether thousands of product pages compete with each other or support each other. Get that wrong and no amount of content fixes it.
Professional services bring a founder problem
The founder is frequently the entity Google trusts, and the brand has not been built to survive their absence. That is a structural risk worth naming before it becomes an exit problem.
Book a meeting with a senior consultant
Pick a time that suits you. No price is quoted before we understand the work, and no obligation attaches to the call.
- ✓A read on which of the three deliverables your situation needs, and which you can skip
- ✓The parts of your current plan we would stop before adding anything
- ✓An honest view on whether your existing provider or contractor is doing good work
- ✓A scope and a figure, after we understand the work and not before
- ✓Scheduled in your time zone if you are outside the United Kingdom
Prefer to talk first? Call 0333 240 7747. The diary below books a 15 minute slot, and longer sessions are arranged on the call.
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Open the booking diarySEO consultancy questions answered
What does an SEO consultancy do that my agency does not?
An SEO consultancy owns the strategy and the priority order, while an agency owns the execution. A consultant tells you which of fifty possible actions matters most this quarter and why, then holds your delivery, in-house or outsourced, to that plan. Many businesses run both, with the consultancy setting direction and the agency or in-house team doing the work.
How much does SEO consultancy cost?
Engagements are scoped and quoted after a conversation, because the work varies too much for a published figure to be meaningful. A diagnostic for a fifty-page professional services site and a topical map for a ten-thousand-product store are different projects. Book a free 30 minute call and you will leave with a scope and a number.
Do you work with companies outside the UK?
Yes. Our onboarding and delivery run digitally, so international clients receive the same working sessions, the same deliverables and the same KPI reporting as UK clients, scheduled in their time zone. We consult to UK businesses with offshore teams and to overseas businesses targeting UK search.
How long before a consultancy engagement pays for itself?
The diagnostic pays for itself immediately for most clients, because it stops spend on work that would not have moved anything. Ranking and revenue effects follow the usual search timescales, with early indicators inside twelve weeks and competitive positions between month six and month twelve.
Can you train our in-house team rather than doing the work?
Yes, and it is one of the more common engagements we run. Method transfer through scheduled working sessions leaves the capability inside your business, which suits companies that already carry the headcount and want to stop paying an agency for thinking they could do themselves.
Who will actually be working on my account?
A named senior consultant leads every engagement and you get that name before you commit. Supporting consultants are drawn from a team of more than ten, matched to the sector and the technical demands of the work.
Three guides that show how we think
The twelve steps that build topical authority a search engine will trust
The framework behind deliverable one, written out in full so you can judge the method before buying it.
DiagnosisWhat the March 2025 core update changed and how sites recovered
How a drop gets read: the date, the pattern across page types, and what changed in the preceding quarter.
BudgetWhat SEO actually costs in the UK and what drives the number
Written for buyers comparing proposals, including the questions that expose a quote built on hours rather than outcomes.
The services a consultancy engagement draws on
Thirty minutes, and you will know which deliverable you need
A senior consultant will read your situation, tell you which of the three deliverables applies, and give you a scope and a figure. No obligation attaches to the call and no price is quoted before we understand the work.
True SEO Consultants Ltd
Startup Stiwdio, University of South Wales, 86-88 Adam Street, Cardiff, CF24 2FN
Telephone 0333 240 7747 · Company number 16563516
Consulting to businesses across the United Kingdom, and onboarding international clients through a fully remote digital process.
