Why hire an enterprise SEO consultant instead of an enterprise agency?
Different failure modes. Enterprise agencies sell process and headcount: useful when you need volume execution, expensive when what you actually need is judgement, the senior read on a migration plan, a crawl-economics diagnosis, a governance framework your teams execute. A senior consultant embeds alongside in-house teams and dev squads, supplies the judgement layer, and costs a fraction of an agency pod whose juniors your team ends up training anyway. Many enterprises run both: agency for arms and legs, consultant for the calls that cannot be wrong.
What does SEO look like at enterprise scale?
Different physics: at hundreds of thousands to millions of URLs, crawl budget is real (Googlebot samples, it does not read everything), template decisions multiply by page count (one weak pattern equals a million weak pages), internal-link architecture outweighs any external campaign, and log-file analysis replaces guesswork about what Google actually fetches. The levers are structural: faceted-navigation control, index-bloat pruning, template-level content logic, and change governance so releases stop breaking rankings.
What is migration protection and why does it matter most?
Replatforms, redesigns, domain consolidations and internationalisation projects destroy more enterprise organic value than algorithm updates ever do, and the destruction is preventable: full crawl-and-ranking inventories before, redirect mapping at template logic level, staged validation, launch-window monitoring against the baseline, and rollback criteria agreed in advance. We have rescued migrations mid-collapse; protecting one costs a tenth of rescuing it, and it is the single most valuable engagement enterprises buy.
How do you work with in-house SEO teams?
As leverage, not replacement: second-opinion on the calls with big blast radius, specialist depth on log analysis and rendering, prioritisation frameworks that survive stakeholder politics, and ammunition (documented, defensible recommendations) for the internal fights over dev resource. In-house teams usually know what is wrong; a senior outside voice gets it scheduled. We measure success partly in your team's roadmap velocity.
How does governance stop enterprise SEO decay?
Enterprise rankings mostly decay by a thousand cuts: a template tweak here, a parameter change there, a market team spinning up duplicate content, none reviewed for search impact. Governance is the fix: SEO checkpoints in release processes, template-change review, redirect standards, internationalisation rules (hreflang at scale breaks constantly), and a decision log so institutional knowledge survives staff churn. Boring, and worth more than most link budgets.
Do you handle enterprise AI-search readiness?
Yes: at scale, AI-answer visibility becomes an entity-and-structure problem, consistent organisation data across thousands of pages, schema governance, answer-shaped templates for the query classes that matter, and measurement of AI-referred traffic across markets. The same governance machinery carries it, which is why it belongs inside the technical programme rather than sold separately.
What does enterprise SEO consulting cost?
Advisory retainers from £3,500/month for embedded senior judgement (fortnightly cadence, on-call for big calls); migration-protection engagements scoped per project from £6,000; standalone diagnostics (crawl economics, log analysis, governance review) from £4,500. No pod, no rotation: the person you hire is the person on every call.