SEO Consultancy

Some organisations do not need an agency to do the work. They need someone senior to tell them which work is worth doing, settle an argument the internal team cannot settle on its own, or check whether the plan they have been sold makes sense. That is SEO consultancy: judgement and direction, delivered by the two people who would run the account, without the account.

When you need a brain, not a retainer

Buy consultancy when you already have people who can execute (developers, writers, a marketing manager) and the constraint is knowing what to point them at. Buy a retainer when the constraint is capacity. Getting that the wrong way round is the most expensive mistake in this market: paying an agency to do work your team could have done, or paying your team to do work nobody has correctly specified.

What’s included

Strategy sprint. A fixed-length engagement that ends with a written plan: where the organic opportunity actually is, which pages and templates to build or fix, in what order, and what each move is worth. It includes the analysis that supports it (search demand, competitor positions, your current index coverage) so the plan is arguable rather than asserted.

In-house team support and training. Regular sessions with the people doing the work. Reviewing briefs before they are written rather than pages after they are published, sitting in on planning, answering the questions that would otherwise cost your team a fortnight of guessing. Where useful, structured training for writers, developers or a marketing team new to search.

Audit second opinion. You have an audit from someone else and it is either 200 pages of warnings or twelve lines of assertions. We read it, tell you which findings are real, which are noise, which are missing, and what we would do first. This is a common purchase and a cheap one, and we have talked clients out of expensive rebuilds on the strength of it.

Agency selection review. Independent help choosing between proposals, or assessing an incumbent. We look at what is being promised, whether the pricing and resourcing add up, what is measurable, and what the contract commits either side to. We disclose the obvious conflict up front: we are an agency. Where an engagement is a genuine fit for us we say so, and you can take that as an interested opinion rather than a neutral one.

Board-level reporting. Organic performance turned into something a board can act on: contribution, cost of acquisition against other channels, honest risk assessment, and what the trend says once seasonality and algorithm updates are separated out.

How consultancy engagements run

The two-day sprint. Two consecutive days of senior time. Day one is discovery and analysis, access to your Search Console, analytics and site, a full crawl, and interviews with whoever owns the roadmap and the content. Day two is the plan, built with you in the room rather than delivered a fortnight later. You leave with a prioritised roadmap and the reasoning behind it. This is the most common way clients start with us.

Monthly advisory. A fixed block of senior hours each month for an in-house team that owns delivery. Typically a standing call, review of work in progress, and asynchronous access between calls for the questions that come up mid-sprint. This works best when your team has real capacity and needs direction rather than hands.

Project oversight. Named senior involvement across a defined piece of work with a deadline and a risk attached: a replatform, a domain change, a site merge, an international rollout. We specify what has to happen, review it before launch, monitor the launch, and stay through the recovery window. This is the engagement clients most often wish they had bought before, rather than after, a migration went wrong.

Who you actually get

Consultancy is not delegated. It is the two of us, named, for the hours you buy.

Patrick, Founder and CEO. He founded Terrier in 2015 and has spent over a decade on brand growth and organic revenue across recruitment, FMCG, retail and professional services. His diagnostic process is two calls: the first to understand the commercial model (what a customer is worth, what the sales cycle looks like, where the margin is) and the second to present what search can and cannot do about it. He leads strategy sprints, board reporting and agency selection reviews.

Fionn, Operations Manager. He runs systems, measurement and AI integration across the agency. On consultancy engagements he handles the parts that live in tooling: analytics and Search Console configuration, whether the reporting can be trusted before anyone draws conclusions from it, workflow and process for in-house teams, and AI visibility measurement. If your reporting and your revenue disagree, he is the one who finds out why.

Every engagement states which of us you get and for how many hours, in writing, before it starts. If we cannot resource it properly we will tell you rather than sell it and staff it down.

Proof

888 Vapour is consultancy working exactly as intended. A structured SEO consultation in one of UK e-commerce’s most saturated markets shifted the site from brand-dependent traffic to non-brand acquisition (80%+ organic traffic growth year on year, a 94% increase in organic sales and 111% growth in non-brand organic) and the engagement was built around knowledge transfer, so the team could maintain and extend the work themselves afterwards.

Venner Shipley shows the oversight model. A European IP firm facing a migration that risked the visibility it had already earned: we oversaw the migration alongside on-site and structural work, the transition completed with minimal disruption, and organic visibility grew 48% year on year with non-brand organic up 58%.

Mazars is the advisory case. An international audit, tax and advisory firm whose visibility was almost entirely branded. Correcting the strategic error, targeting service queries rather than defending the name, produced top three rankings for financial advisory terms and 46% organic traffic growth.

Day rates and retainers

Consultancy is priced per engagement and quoted before it starts. A two-day strategy sprint, a monthly block of advisory hours and project oversight through a migration are three different commitments, and the variables that move the price are site size, market count, how many stakeholders are in the room and how much of the analysis has already been done. You get a fixed number, in writing, in advance, never an open-ended clock.

Where a consultancy engagement concludes that you need delivery rather than direction, our SEO retainers start from £1,250 a month ex VAT, and GEO is included in every plan at no extra cost. If you would rather start with a diagnosis than a conversation, our free SEO audit tool and GEO visibility score will give you something concrete to bring to the first call.