Every question
I get on first calls.

Realistic UK rates in 2026: SEO retainers from £950/month, ongoing social media from £700/month, bundle deals from £1,500/month. Starter websites from £700, Custom Business from £1,500, Full Build from £2,800, Enterprise / E-commerce from £4,000. If someone is quoting £299/month for a national campaign in a competitive sector, either the work is being farmed offshore to a spam operation, or the deliverables are reports describing work that is not actually happening. Senior UK SEO work settles where it does because the work takes time and judgement.

Technical fixes, crawl issues, schema, Core Web Vitals, often show impression growth within 4–8 weeks. Content and link work on competitive terms realistically takes 3–6 months to move from page three to page one, and 6–12 months to hold positions in competitive UK verticals like financial services, legal, or property. If a consultant promises top-three rankings inside 30 days, they are either lying or planning to use tactics that will penalise your domain in the next core update.

Small and mid-sized businesses are where I do my best work. Founder-led businesses in the £500K–£10M turnover range, big enough to have real commercial stakes, small enough for decisions to happen without committees. If you are a FTSE 250 with a large in-house digital team, I am probably not the right fit. If you are pre-revenue, a free fit-check call is a better starting point than a retainer.

No. Nobody who respects you should. Google's ranking algorithm is not a predictable function of inputs; it reflects judgement about quality, authority, and user intent, and it changes several times a month. What I guarantee is effort, honesty, and availability, you get the same senior hand every month, a clearly documented work log, and a straight answer when something is not working. Anyone offering “top-three rankings in 90 days or money back” is either running a link scheme or selling you a refund you will have to chase.

No. Every retainer runs month-to-month with 30 days notice. No twelve-month lock-ins, no 90-day notice clauses, no break fees. I ask for a 3–6 month runway on SEO retainers because that is the realistic window for meaningful commercial results, but you are free to leave any time within that window. The incentive structure is correct: if I am not earning the fee, you should be able to walk.

Not for pages that go live on client sites under their brand. Short first drafts, outline help, section rewrites, fine, as assistive tooling. Full published pages written by an AI model and signed under my client's name, no. Every core update since March 2024 has sharpened Google's ability to detect and demote low-effort AI content. I have cleaned up too many sites that adopted aggressive AI strategies in 2024 and watched traffic halve through 2025 to recommend the approach now.

AI Overviews appear on 15–30% of UK queries and reduce clicks on informational searches. Commercial, local, and branded queries are largely unaffected. The critical data point: 92–99% of AI Overview citations come from pages already ranking in the top ten organic positions. Traditional SEO is not competing with AI search, it is feeding AI search. Foundational work matters more than ever. The tactical changes are answer-first content, stronger E-E-A-T signals, and proper schema. Nothing radical.

Depends entirely on your business. A recovery operator can use a WhatsApp agent to take enquiries, quote by postcode distance, and dispatch to the nearest driver. An e-commerce brand can route returns and order-status queries to an agent. A clinic can book appointments. I build on N8N with OpenAI or Gemini. Roughly half of the agent enquiries I get end with me telling the founder their use case does not actually benefit from one, I would rather save you £4,500 than ship a novelty.

Migrations are the highest-stakes work in SEO and most of the horror stories I hear trace back to a replatform where someone assumed Google would “figure it out.” I handle URL mapping before launch, 301 strategy, schema preservation, internal link rebuilding, and post-launch monitoring for 30–60 days. I also do migration rescue when the damage is already done, slower and more expensive than doing it right first time, but usually recoverable.

Yes. E-commerce is the most technical, product schema, category architecture, faceted navigation, canonical discipline across variants. UK SaaS plays a long game, content has to earn attention across an 11-month buying cycle. Legal and financial services require compliance-aware content; I understand SRA and FCA constraints well enough to draft work your compliance team can approve without tearing apart. Healthcare YMYL I approach cautiously, medical claims need citations and the content must demonstrate real expertise.

Every month you get a short written note, two pages maximum, and a thirty-minute call. The note covers: Search Console impressions and clicks by query group, position changes on tracked commercial terms, what technical or content work shipped, what is planned for next month, and anything I think you should be worried about. If a month was quiet, I will say so. Dashboards are available if you want them, but they are not the primary artefact, the note is.

Yes, and often this is the cleanest setup. I write the specs, your developer ships the code. I can also implement directly on WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, and most modern stacks. What I will not do is politely nod while an existing agency makes decisions that will harm the site, if I think the current direction is wrong, I will say so, and we will work out what to do about it together.

Generally no. First calls are 30 minutes and the information exchanged is not usually commercially sensitive, we are mostly establishing whether the work is a fit. If your business genuinely cannot describe what it does without NDA cover, I am probably not the right consultant for it. Once we agree to work together, I will sign your standard commercial NDA happily.

Yes. Active clients in USA, Canada, Australia, and across Europe. Everything is remote, monthly calls on Google Meet or Zoom, work logs and reporting by email. Time zone handling is straightforward: I respond during UK hours, and can take calls up to 9pm UK time to accommodate US East Coast mornings and most APAC time zones.

Cookie consent, analytics configuration, and schema markup all interact with UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act. I configure GA4 and Search Console in line with ICO guidance. If we deploy AI agents handling customer data, we do a proper Data Protection Impact Assessment. I am not a lawyer and will not pretend to give legal advice, but the technical implementation will not embarrass your DPO. See the privacy policy for how this site handles your contact data.

No. Paid media is a specialism I respect too much to dabble in. I have trusted paid specialists I introduce clients to when paid is the right channel, and I will coordinate with your existing paid team on messaging, landing pages, and attribution. But I will not bill you for a channel I am not the best person to run.

Tell me. Properly, on a call if needed. Every engagement has the same unwritten clause, if the work is not landing, we have the conversation, we change the approach, or we end the engagement with 30 days notice. I would rather lose a retainer because we were not the right fit than keep billing through a slow decline. If the problem is specific, a deliverable that missed the mark, I will fix it or credit it. If the problem is directional, we change direction together.

Email sales@seo-consultant.co with your site URL, your approximate budget range, and one sentence on what you are trying to achieve. Three sentences beats three pages. If it is a fit, we book a 30-minute call. If it is not, I will usually know someone who fits better and point you their way. First calls are always free.