An SEO consultation is a working session about your specific situation: what is happening, why, and what would be worth doing about it. It is not a sales call with a diagnosis attached, and it is not a free audit.
This page sets out what happens, what to bring, and what you leave with, so you can decide whether it is worth your time before booking.
What a consultation is for
It suits situations where the question is bigger than a single answer but smaller than an engagement.
- Organic traffic has fallen and you need to know where to look first.
- You are planning a migration, redesign or replatform and want the risks named before you commit.
- You hold SEO proposals and cannot tell which describes real work.
- Search matters commercially but nobody internally owns it.
- Existing SEO work is producing reports rather than results.
- You want a senior read on whether a direction is sound before spending against it.
What it is not
Worth being direct, because these are the common expectations and mismatched ones waste everyone’s time.
- Not a full audit. An audit is days of work. A consultation can identify likely causes and where to look, not enumerate every issue on the site.
- Not a guaranteed diagnosis. Some problems need log analysis and a full crawl before anyone can be certain.
- Not a pitch. Where the honest answer is that you do not need outside help, that is the answer you get.
- Not a keyword report. Tools produce those and they are not worth a conversation.
What to bring
The session is far more productive when the evidence is available. Ideally, in advance:
- Search Console access, or exports covering the relevant period.
- Analytics access, particularly organic landing page data.
- The approximate date any decline began.
- A deployment, migration and content change log for the surrounding period.
- Any existing audit, proposal or strategy document.
- A clear statement of what you actually want more of: enquiries, sales, or something specific.
That change log is consistently the most valuable and most often missing item. Without it, correlation between changes and outcomes is guesswork.
What happens
- Establish what you are trying to achieve commercially, not just in search terms.
- Work through the evidence available and what it does and does not show.
- Name the likely causes, and say what would confirm or eliminate each.
- Identify what is worth doing first, and what can wait.
- Be explicit about what cannot be determined without deeper work.
What you leave with
- A clear statement of the likely problem, or a ranked list of candidates where evidence is genuinely ambiguous.
- What to check next, specific enough to act on.
- An honest view of whether this needs outside help at all.
- Where it does, what shape that work should take and roughly what it should cost.
Where a deeper diagnostic is warranted, that would be an SEO audit. Where the cause is a decline, SEO recovery. Where direction is the gap, SEO strategy.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a consultation take?
Usually an hour, occasionally longer where the situation is complex or several people need to be in the conversation.
Do I need to prepare anything?
Access to Search Console and analytics makes the biggest difference, along with a rough change log. Without data the conversation stays general, which is less useful to you.
Will you tell me what is wrong with my site?
Often the likely cause, yes, and what would confirm it. Certainty sometimes requires a crawl and log analysis that an hour does not allow. You will be told which situation you are in rather than given false confidence.
What if I just need someone to do the work?
Then the consultation is about scoping it properly, which is worth doing before committing budget. See SEO services and SEO consultancy for the shapes that work usually takes.
Consulting CTA
If any of the situations above describes yours, book an SEO consultation and bring whatever evidence you have. If the answer turns out to be that you do not need help, you will be told that.