If you have capable people in-house, paying an agency to write your content and file your tickets is a poor use of budget. We provide the strategy, review, and second opinion instead.
A common pattern: a SaaS company has a decent content writer, a developer who can ship changes, and someone owning SEO part-time. They hire a full-service agency, and most of the retainer goes on production work their own team could have done — while the strategic questions they actually needed help with get a monthly call.
Consulting inverts that. We provide the strategy, the audit, the prioritisation, and the review. Your team executes, which they can, and which is cheaper and usually faster because they know the product.
It's a genuinely smaller engagement and we price it that way. We'll also tell you honestly if your team can't execute — in which case a retainer is the right answer and we'd rather say so than sell you advisory that sits unactioned.
An honest assessment of your internal capacity determines this, and we run it before quoting.
Best for: Teams with capable in-house people who need direction, review, and a second opinion rather than delivery.
Best for: Teams without spare execution capacity, or where speed matters more than building internal skill.
Four things, none of which is doing your production work.
What to work on, in what order, and what to ignore. Most in-house teams don't lack ability, they lack a defensible sequence and something to say no with.
The technical, entity, and content diagnostics that need specialist tooling and pattern recognition to run properly.
Reviewing briefs, drafts, technical specs, and implementations before they ship — catching the expensive mistakes cheaply.
Documentation, standards, and training so your team internalises the approach rather than depending on us indefinitely.
Scoped to your team's actual gaps rather than a fixed package.
A full AI visibility and technical audit up front, so strategy is grounded in your actual situation rather than general best practice.
A sequenced plan your team executes, with effort and impact estimates so you can resource it realistically.
Working sessions with the strategist — not status calls. Bring problems, decisions, and drafts.
Reviewing content briefs, technical specifications, and implementations before they ship, and verifying afterwards.
Written standards for structure, schema, and internal linking so quality holds without us reviewing everything.
Independent citation-share tracking alongside advisory, so you can measure your own team's work objectively.
It works well in specific situations and badly in others.
Writers, developers, and an SEO owner already in place. The gap is senior strategic direction, not hands.
Your SEO lead left, or you're hiring one. Fractional senior input keeps the programme coherent meanwhile.
You have a delivery agency and want independent technical review of what they're producing.
If nobody can execute, advisory produces a roadmap that sits unactioned. A delivery retainer is the honest recommendation.
Every engagement runs the RON Loop — diagnose, map, build, prove — then repeats it monthly.
We assess what your team can genuinely execute and run the full technical and visibility diagnostic.
We build the prioritised roadmap with effort estimates, scoped to what your team can realistically deliver.
Regular working sessions plus review of briefs, specs, and implementations before and after they ship.
Independent measurement where you want it, with the roadmap re-sequenced by what actually moved.
The goal is a team that doesn't need us at the same intensity in a year. Standards documentation, review that teaches, and explicit reasoning behind every recommendation are how that happens.
The questions clients ask us most before starting. If yours isn't here, ask us directly on a consultation call.
We advise, you execute. Consulting covers strategy, diagnostics, review, and capability building. A retainer includes us doing the production and implementation work.
Consulting typically costs substantially less, and it only works if your team genuinely has capacity.
We assess it before quoting. If you have writers, developer capacity, and someone owning SEO, consulting usually makes better financial sense.
If execution would stall, we'll recommend a retainer instead — an unactioned roadmap helps nobody.
A full diagnostic audit up front, a prioritised roadmap, then regular working sessions plus review of your team's briefs, specs, and implementations.
Sessions are working sessions, not status updates. Bring decisions and drafts.
We specify and review it; your developers implement. We'll write developer-ready specs and verify afterwards that the change did what it was supposed to.
Where a specific piece is genuinely beyond your team, we can scope that as a separate fixed-fee project.
Typically six to twelve months, with intensity reducing over time as your team internalises the approach.
We'd rather scale down than manufacture ongoing dependency.
Yes, and it's a common arrangement. Independent audit and deliverable review, with clear communication about the boundaries so it doesn't become adversarial.
We'll tell you honestly if their work is good, which sometimes it is.
Yes. Consulting is delivered by a named strategist who ran your audit, not rotated among account staff.
It's a real constraint on how many consulting clients we take.
Typically $2,500–$6,000 monthly depending on session frequency and review volume, plus the initial audit as a fixed fee.
Materially less than a delivery retainer. Detail is on our pricing page.
We'll assess what your team can genuinely execute and tell you honestly which engagement makes financial sense — including when that's neither.
No commitment · 45 minutes · Immediate value