Senior SEO Consultant

SEO audits are a fixed fee, from £3,000. Ongoing SEO consultancy starts at £5,000 a month, with no tie-in and 30 days' notice. What moves the number is scope: the size of the site, the state it's in, and how much of the work you want me involved in. Either way, you'll know the full fee before we start.

There's no all-in-one SEO audit: each audit is scoped to the problem the business is facing. Sites losing ground through algorithm updates usually benefit from a quality audit. Sites struggling after a replatform or migration usually need a technical audit. Large content archives that have stopped earning call for a content audit, and if you can't trust your numbers, an analytics audit. Whichever fits, the deliverable shape is the same: a written report with prioritised actions, analysed by me personally rather than exported from a tool, and a walkthrough call for your team. Most audits take two to three weeks.

SEO timelines depend on the state of the site, the competition, and how quickly changes ship. Some fixes pay back within weeks, usually the technical ones. Strategic gains tend to build over three to six months, faster when your team can implement quickly. I would rather give you an honest range than a confident number I can't stand behind.

No. No SEO consultant can honestly guarantee rankings or traffic, and Google itself warns as much. A guaranteed ranking is either a guess or a shortcut you'll pay for later. What you get instead is reporting that ties the work to what it changed: what shipped, what moved, and what it meant commercially — so you can judge the value for yourself, month by month.

Yes. Every Search Solved engagement is delivered personally by me, Mike Escott: the audit, the strategy, the calls, the recommendations. Nothing is passed to a junior team or outsourced. That is most of the reason businesses at this level choose an independent consultant over an agency.

Most agency relationships break down the same way: a generic playbook, reports full of activity, and nobody senior in the room after the pitch. With Search Solved you get one senior person who diagnoses before prescribing, ties every recommendation to a commercial outcome, and stays involved through implementation. And because there's no tie-in, I have to keep earning the engagement every month.

Lead times depend on what's already in flight: I take on a small number of engagements at a time, because everything is delivered personally. A fixed-scope SEO audit can usually start within a few weeks; ongoing consultancy depends on when a current engagement wraps up. Ask and you'll get an honest start date — and if I can't fit you in soon enough, I'll tell you that too.

Communication runs on whatever keeps your team moving: regular video calls for decisions and priorities, Slack in between, and Loom walkthroughs when something is easier shown than written. Reporting runs through a live, bespoke dashboard you can open any time — organic performance tied to the work delivered, not a PDF that arrives once a month. If something needs your attention sooner, you'll hear about it sooner.

AI is reshaping the buying journey: early research increasingly happens inside AI tools, so the visitors who do reach your site arrive later in the decision, often already holding a shortlist. That shifts the weight towards brand strength, being cited by AI engines, and pages that can close a decision rather than just attract a visit. The fundamentals still decide who appears, so good SEO still pays, and I work on AI visibility as standard, not as an add-on.