What does an SEO consultant do?

An SEO consultant analyses a website and works with the team that owns it to make it more findable in search engines and AI answer panels. The work breaks into four areas - technical audits (crawling, indexation, Core Web Vitals), on-page SEO (titles, headings, schema, internal links), off-page SEO (digital PR, partnerships, reclaiming unlinked mentions) and local plus AI search (Google Business Profile, AI Overview and ChatGPT citation). A senior consultant writes specs your developers can ship and reports against rankings, organic traffic and conversion impact.

SEO Consultant UK | Jason Burns

// 01 - what I do

SEO that earns its place in the budget.

Six pieces of work that move rankings and revenue. Each one starts with a measurable problem and ends with a measurable result. No dashboards full of vanity metrics.

Workflow	Manual reality	After	Result
Technical auditSite-wide crawl + fix list	Screaming Frog spits out 4,000 issues. Nobody knows which 12 actually matter.	Prioritised ticket list - critical, big-win, nice-to-have. Acceptance criteria your dev team can ship.	4,000 issues→12 fixes
Content briefsFor your writers + agencies	Generic "write 1500 words on X". Article ranks page 4. Nobody knows why.	Briefs built from real SERP data - intent, structure, entities, internal link targets.	Page 4→Top 10
Internal linkingThe lever most sites ignore	Hub pages have 3 internal links. Money pages have 0. Crawl budget burning on tag archives.	Link graph rebuilt around your money pages. Done in your CMS, not a third-party plugin.	Buried→Surfaced
Migration supportReplatform, redesign, domain change	Site relaunches Tuesday. Traffic drops 40% by Friday. Nobody saw it coming.	Pre-launch crawl, redirect map, post-launch verification. Traffic holds, then grows.	-40% risk→Held
Core Web VitalsLCP, INP, CLS - field data, not lab	PageSpeed says 32. Dev team fixes "lazy loading", says 33. Frustration.	Real diagnosis from CrUX + RUM. Spec written for your stack. Verified in field data.	Poor→Good
Lost traffic recoveryUpdate hits, indexing issues, cliff drops	Traffic dropped after a Google update. Agency says "keep posting". Months pass.	Forensic diff - what changed, when, on which queries. A fix list mapped to the actual cause.	Cliff→Climbing

Got a problem that is not on the list? Send me the URL and I will tell you whether SEO is the right fix.

// 01a - the question buyers actually search

What does an SEO consultant actually do?

An SEO consultant is a specialist who analyses a website and works with the team that owns it to make it more findable in search engines and AI answer panels. The job is part technical, part editorial, part change management. In the UK, the engagement usually breaks into four pieces:

Technical audits

Crawling, indexation, Core Web Vitals in real user data, log file analysis. Identifying what is blocking the site from being crawled and ranked.

On-page SEO

Page-level optimisation - titles, meta descriptions, headings, schema, internal links and the structure of the content itself. The boring fundamentals that move rankings.

Off-page SEO

Digital PR, partnerships, reclaiming unlinked mentions. Building domain authority without anything that puts the site at risk under Google policy updates.

Local + AI search

Google Business Profile, local landing pages, citations. Plus the newer work of getting cited in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode.

A senior SEO consultant does not push tickets to interns. They write specs your developers can ship, brief your content team in their own language, and report against the numbers that matter - rankings, organic traffic, conversion impact - against targets agreed at the start. Anyone selling generic packages without diagnosing your site first is not doing consulting, they are selling retainers.

// 01b - UK pricing

How much does an SEO consultant cost in the UK?

Three standard engagement shapes. Real UK ranges, based on a senior IC consultant working directly with a client team. No agency markup, no junior delivery.

Engagement	UK range	Best fit when
Hourly advisoryAd hoc strategic input	£150 to £300 per hourSenior IC, no minimum block	An in-house team that wants senior judgement on specific decisions - migrations, audits, agency proposal reviews, hiring shortlists.
Monthly retainerOngoing strategy + delivery	£1,500 to £5,000+ per monthHalf-day to two days a week	A team that needs a senior consultant embedded over a defined window - usually 6 to 12 months - to own strategy and shape execution.
Project feeFixed scope, fixed price	£3,000 to £15,000 per projectAudits, migrations, recovery	One-off pieces of work - full technical audit, site migration support, lost-traffic recovery - where the scope and deliverables are clear at the start.

My own rates fall inside these ranges. The SEO pricing calculator gives a rough estimate based on the kind of work you are scoping. Send me the brief if you want an exact quote.

// 01c - consultant vs agency vs in-house

When you need an SEO consultant (and when you don't).

A consultant is not always the right shape. Three honest scenarios:

Your situation	What usually fits	Why
You have an in-house marketing teambut no senior SEO	Senior SEO consultant	The team owns delivery. You buy senior judgement on strategy, audits, priorities and agency proposal reviews. The day rate or retainer buys decisions that move rankings without doubling headcount.
You have no in-house team at alland need someone to do the work	SEO agency (with senior oversight)	An agency provides delivery hands - account manager, technical SEO, content writers, link outreach. A consultant can run senior review alongside them, which keeps the agency honest, but cannot replace the delivery team.
You have a senior in-house SEO alreadydoing the strategic work	Specialist freelancers or no extra help	If the in-house lead is competent, another consultant just adds politics. Better to invest in specialist freelancers for narrow gaps (Core Web Vitals, schema, digital PR) and let the in-house person run strategy.
You are scoping a migration, recovery or auditwith a fixed window	Project-based consultant engagement	A fixed-scope, fixed-fee consultant project is usually the cleanest way to deal with a defined event - replatform, drop-recovery, post-merger site consolidation. Agency retainers are designed for ongoing work, not one-off engineering events.

If you describe your setup in a short brief, I will tell you honestly which of those scenarios you sit in - even if the answer is "you don't need a consultant right now". Free, no follow-up sequence, and saves both of us a pitch call that goes nowhere.

// 01d - honest constraints

What an SEO consultant cannot promise.

A short list of the things every honest consultant tells you upfront - and that most agencies bury in the small print.

Guaranteed rankings

Nobody can guarantee a specific position on a specific keyword. Google's ranking signals shift constantly and the SERP for most commercial queries now includes an AI Overview that fundamentally changes click distribution. Anyone promising you "position 1 in 90 days" is selling you something. Walk away.

Traffic in week one

Technical fixes can move impressions in days. Real organic traffic from content and authority work needs 90 to 180 days to compound. Anyone claiming faster is either lying or pointing at brand-name growth that was already coming. Plan engagements against 6-12 month windows, not 4-week sprints.

Recovery without root-cause

If a Google update wiped your traffic, no consultant can recover it without first diagnosing what specifically changed. "Just publish more content" is the lazy advice and usually makes it worse. Recovery starts with a forensic diff against the pre-update state, not a generic content sprint.

Immunity to AI search disruption

AI Overviews are eating click-through on informational queries. Nobody can rebuild that lost click volume. The honest reframe is to shift content toward queries that still drive clicks (commercial, navigational, comparison) and aim to be the source AI Overviews cite, not bypassed by them.

Cheap link building that lasts

Private blog networks, link farms, paid guest posts at scale - all carry policy risk. They can move rankings short-term then get the site penalised. Honest link work is digital PR, partnerships and reclaiming unlinked mentions. It is slower and more expensive, and it is the only kind that survives a Google policy update.

Replacing your dev team's work

An SEO consultant writes specs, prioritises, briefs and reviews. They do not replace the engineering team that has to ship the actual change. Anyone selling "we do everything" is either bundling agency dev hours at a markup or doing none of it properly. Be clear who ships what.

The reverse is also worth saying: a senior SEO consultant can reliably move rankings on the commercial terms that matter, recover from updates given a real root-cause, ship a clean migration without losing positions, and report against numbers that influence revenue. Most useful first conversation: tell me which of these is the actual brief, then we will know whether this is worth either of our time.

// live · rank movement, not vibes

What it looks like when SEO actually works.

A live mockup of the rank tracker I run for clients. Position 9 to position 1 over 90 days on a target keyword - while the competitors do not move. This is the shape of every engagement.

Rank tracker - jasonburns.co.uk LIVE

// 02 - how I work

Audit. Fix. Measure.

Three steps. Most agencies skip the first and fake the third. That is why their work does not stick.

audit-findings.md 12 priority issues

P1Missing Article + FAQPage schema+18% CTR
P1Pagination wiping internal links+22 ranks
P2LCP 4.8s on category pages+9% CVR
P2Cannibalising blog vs landing+1.5k clicks
P3Orphan pages in sitemapindexation

// 01 - audit

Audit

I crawl the site, pull GSC and analytics, and find the 12 things actually holding rankings back. Not 4,000. Twelve. Each one with the cost of leaving it broken.

Most agencies 4,000-row PDF report

Here 12 issues, prioritised, with impact

SEO-127 Add Article + FAQPage schema DONE

Acceptance criteria

JSON-LD valid in Schema.org validator
Rich result preview shows in GSC
Deployed via existing template

2 days · 1 dev +18% CTR (measured)

// 02 - fix

Fix

Tickets your dev team can ship. Briefs your writers can use. Internal links rebuilt in your CMS. The unglamorous work that moves rankings while everyone else chases the next AI tool.

Most agencies "Recommendations" devs can't ship

Here Tickets with AC + impact baked in

monthly-report.pdf 1 page

Organic clicks +312%

Avg position 8.4 → 3.1

Revenue (assisted) £182k

CTR (top 10) +47%

// 03 - measure

Measure

Position movement, click-through, conversions, revenue assisted by organic. In a one-page report you can read in three minutes - not a 40-tab dashboard.

Most agencies 40-tab Looker, no narrative

Here 1-page PDF, 3 min read, monthly

// 03 - applied to one engagement

How it works, with a real example.

Same shape every time. To make it concrete, here is the household staffing agency from the case study below - step by step.

01 - audit

Find the 12 things

Crawl, GSC export, analytics diff. Surface the 12 fixes worth doing - not the 4,000 issues a tool will spit out.

02 - fix

Ship the tickets

Indexable category pages, location landing pages without doorway flags, internal links from blog to money pages. All done in their existing CMS.

03 - publish

Briefs to their writer

20 content briefs over 3 months - one per high-intent query. Real SERP analysis, real entities, internal link targets baked in.

04 - measure

Watch it climb

Weekly position tracking on the 30 queries that matter. Monthly one-pager on what moved, what did not, what to do next.

Same shape works for technical audits, migrations, lost-traffic recovery and Core Web Vitals. The work changes. The discipline does not.

Case study Household staffing agency · UK

Stuck on page 2 for 4 years.
Position 1 in 6 months.

12-person agency placing nannies, housekeepers and private chefs across the UK. Beautiful site, decent content, zero ranking traction. They had been "doing SEO" with three different agencies since 2020.

One audit found the issue in 90 minutes - their location pages were flagged as doorway content, their category pages were noindexed by accident, and their internal link graph pointed everything at the homepage. 90 days of focused work fixed all three. 6 months in, organic up 400% and they own position 1 for their target query.

Search Console - Position trend LIVE

Clicks · last 28 days 2,418 +412% vs prev

+400% organic in 6 months

Position 9 → 1

Target query, 6 months

+400%

Organic traffic vs baseline

0 → 5x

Non-brand impressions

1 audit, 90 days

From start to first results

// the workflow

How a stuck site becomes a ranking one.

01

One audit, one fix list

90 minutes of forensic work. Crawl, GSC export, render check, internal link map. The 12 things holding the site back, ranked by impact.

02

Tickets the dev team shipped

Removed accidental noindex, rebuilt category templates, added schema markup, fixed canonical chains. All in their CMS, in 4 weeks.

03

20 content briefs in 3 months

Real SERP analysis, real entities, target internal links baked in. Their writer turned them into pages that ranked.

04

Authority work in parallel

Digital PR pitch with their CEO landed coverage in The Times and Tatler. 14 referring domains in 6 months, all legit.

An airline client. Organic traffic doubled in 12 months.

Straight out of Google Search Console. Twelve months of technical fixes, content and authority work - organic clicks roughly doubled, on 1.6M impressions and 24.9K clicks from search.

Google Search Console performance report for an airline-industry client: organic clicks roughly doubled over twelve months, reaching 24.9K total clicks and 1.6M impressions. — Live Google Search Console export. Client anonymised at their request.

// 06 - questions

SEO Management FAQ.

How long until I see results?

Technical fixes can move the needle in days. Content and authority work takes 90 to 180 days to show in rankings. Anyone promising faster than that is either lying or pointing at brand-name growth that was already coming.

Do you do link building?

Yes - digital PR, partnerships and reclaiming unlinked mentions. No private blog networks, no link farms, no anything that puts your domain at risk. If a tactic would not survive a Google policy update, I will not run it on your site.

What about local SEO?

Covered. Google Business Profile setup and optimisation, local landing pages that do not get flagged as doorway content, citation cleanup and review systems. Most local SEO problems are 60% on-page and 40% Google Business Profile - I work both sides.

Will you fix our Core Web Vitals?

Yes. I diagnose what is breaking LCP, INP and CLS, write the spec for your dev team, then verify the fix landed properly in field data - not just lab scores. If you have no dev team, I bring one in.

Can you work with our existing dev team?

That is the default. I write tickets your developers can ship - clear acceptance criteria, before/after measurements, no SEO jargon they have to translate. Most of my work is making other peoples teams faster.

// sector SEO

SEO for the pages that make the money.

Different sectors break in different places. These are the commercial SEO pages I would check first if your site has a clear vertical.

// regions I work in

SEO work by region.

Where SEO and technical SEO work tends to land. Two variants here - AI-assisted SEO for content and search workflows, plus technical SEO for the engineering side.

// adjacent

Related work.

Other ways I help teams - plus the proof points to dig into before you book.

SEO consultant UK for teams that need the work shipped.

SEO that earns its place in the budget.

What does an SEO consultant actually do?

How much does an SEO consultant cost in the UK?

When you need an SEO consultant (and when you don't).

What an SEO consultant cannot promise.

What it looks like when SEO actually works.

Audit. Fix. Measure.

Audit

Fix

Measure

How it works, with a real example.

Find the 12 things

Ship the tickets

Briefs to their writer

Watch it climb

Stuck on page 2 for 4 years.
Position 1 in 6 months.

How a stuck site becomes a ranking one.

One audit, one fix list

Tickets the dev team shipped

20 content briefs in 3 months

Authority work in parallel

An airline client. Organic traffic doubled in 12 months.

Performance

SEO Management FAQ.

Bring me the site that should rank.

SEO consultant UK for teams that need the work shipped.

SEO that earns its place in the budget.

What does an SEO consultant actually do?

How much does an SEO consultant cost in the UK?

When you need an SEO consultant (and when you don't).

What an SEO consultant cannot promise.

What it looks like when SEO actually works.

Audit. Fix. Measure.

Audit

Fix

Measure

How it works, with a real example.

Find the 12 things

Ship the tickets

Briefs to their writer

Watch it climb

Stuck on page 2 for 4 years. Position 1 in 6 months.

How a stuck site becomes a ranking one.

One audit, one fix list

Tickets the dev team shipped

20 content briefs in 3 months

Authority work in parallel

An airline client. Organic traffic doubled in 12 months.

SEO Management FAQ.

SEO for the pages that make the money.

Ecommerce SEO consultant

B2B SEO consultant

Programmatic SEO

Google Ads Management

SaaS SEO consultant

Law firm SEO consultant

Manufacturing SEO consultant

Fintech SEO consultant

SEO work by region.

London SEO and AI consultant

Manchester SEO and AI consultant

Bristol SEO and AI consultant

London technical SEO consultant

Manchester technical SEO consultant

Technical SEO Consultant UK

Related work.

AI Consulting

GEO Consulting

AI Search Optimisation

Digital Strategy

Row HQ - 233k impressions in 90 days

About Jason

SEO vs GEO - the real difference

How to rank in ChatGPT

UK law firms in AI search - 2026 study

Bring me the site that should rank.

Stuck on page 2 for 4 years.
Position 1 in 6 months.