Lancashire · North West · United Kingdom
Technical audits, on-page work, and content strategy — for SMEs who’d rather not pay an agency £2k a month to send a deck. Quiet, durable rankings; honest reporting; a single point of contact.
Reports nobody reads. Dashboards full of green ticks. A retainer that quietly renews while the homepage still takes four seconds to load on a phone. The actual work — fixing crawlability, restructuring information architecture, writing content that earns links and answers questions — happens far less often than the invoices suggest.
For most small businesses the problem isn’t that SEO is hard. It’s that it’s opaque. You can’t tell whether the agency is doing the work or just talking about it. This is a consultancy designed to be the opposite: a small number of jobs, done in plain sight, with a real list of changes shipped each month.
A working engagement covers the three things that actually move rankings — and skips most of the rest.
An SEO engagement starts with a real audit — the kind that takes a fortnight, not an afternoon — covering crawlability, indexation, render, schema, and Core Web Vitals. The output is a prioritised list, not a 60-page PDF. You see what’s broken, what it costs you, and what we’ll do about it first.
From there the work splits into two halves. On-page: rewriting titles and meta, restructuring information architecture, fixing thin pages, building proper internal links. Content: a small number of long, useful pages targeting the questions your customers actually ask — written by me, reviewed by you, shipped by the end of the month.
Every month you get a short written note — a paragraph, not a slide deck — explaining what shipped, what moved, and what’s next. No vanity metrics, no traffic-light dashboards. Just the work and the result.
Most of my SEO clients look something like this. If you don’t, that’s honest information — tell me upfront.
— 01
Engineering firms, manufacturers, print houses, professional-services practices — companies where two or three good rankings would mean six-figure revenue, and where the technical detail of the work actually matters.
— 02
You have a site that converts when people land on it, but they don’t. The information architecture grew by accident, the technical foundations were never set, and the content reads like a brochure rather than an answer.
— 03
You know enough about SEO to be dangerous and not enough to be efficient. You want a fractional specialist to take it on properly — without the overhead of an agency or the politics of hiring in-house.
Week 1 · Audit
A proper technical audit. Crawl, index, render, schema, vitals, IA. Output is a prioritised list with cost-of-doing-nothing attached to each item.
Weeks 2–3 · Strategy
A short, written brief: the keywords worth chasing, the pages that need rebuilding, the questions worth answering. Signed off before any code or copy moves.
Weeks 4–8 · Ship
Technical fixes deployed, content shipped, internal links rebuilt. Where I can implement it directly I do; otherwise your developer gets a clean ticket list.
Ongoing · Measure
Monthly written progress note. Quarterly strategy review. Adjustments based on what the data actually says — not what the dashboard wants to show.
“Six months in, organic enquiries were up 84%. Rich is the only consultant I’ve worked with who could explain, in plain English, why.”
Sarah Whitaker
Managing Director
Plain answers to the questions that come up on every intro call.
Honest answer: meaningful movement takes three to six months for most small businesses, and twelve months to compound into something worth talking about. Anyone promising results inside 30 days is selling rented traffic, not durable rankings. If you need leads next week, run Google Ads alongside the SEO work — I’ll tell you that on the first call.
SEO is the work that gets you ranked in Google’s ten blue links. AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation — is the work that gets you cited by Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT when someone asks a question your business can answer. They overlap heavily in 2026 but the techniques diverge: AEO leans harder on plain-English question pages, schema, and entity clarity.
Most engagements are SEO with AEO baked in. If you want AEO specifically, there’s a separate page for that.
Usually not. About eight out of ten engagements I take on are run on the client’s existing site. If your site is on WordPress, Webflow, or any modern stack, the answer is almost always “fix what’s here.” A rebuild is only worth it when the technical debt would cost more to work around than to start over — and that’s a call we make together, with numbers, in week one.
Engagements start at £1,400 per month with a three-month minimum, then continue monthly. The first month is heavier — audit and strategy — and tapers from there. Larger sites or more ambitious targets come in higher. There’s no setup fee, no per-keyword pricing, and no clause that locks you in past the third month.
Directly. There’s no account manager, no junior strategist, no reseller layer. Every audit, every page, every monthly note is written by me. I cap the number of active SEO engagements at six at a time so this is sustainable rather than aspirational.
A 30-minute call and a free written audit of your top ten pages — the real, technical kind. No deck, no upsell, no marketing automation chasing you for six weeks afterwards. If we’re a fit we’ll talk about working together; if not, you keep the audit.