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The Search Marketing Index

Everything on this site in one place: the services, labeled with how each is engaged, and the answers, labeled with what each settles. Every card carries that label, so you can scan the whole site before opening anything.

Services

14 entries

Strategy and Advisory

Search Marketing Strategy

A written plan that puts the work in order: what organic and paid are each accountable for, what depends on what, and how each call gets judged

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Strategy and Advisory

AI Search Visibility

An evidence-graded account of AI search visibility: what can be influenced, what cannot honestly be promised, and how you would know either way

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Strategy and Advisory

Fractional Search Advisor

Standing counsel rather than delivery — available for decisions, reviewing the roadmap, sitting in on vendor selection, checking others' work

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SEO Consulting

What SEO consulting covers, what it produces, and the situations where you do not need a consultant at all

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Technical SEO Consulting

Getting technical findings implemented and verified in production, which is a different purchase from the audit that identified them

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SEO Audits

The diagnostic artifact — findings ranked by what they cost you, each specified well enough for your own developers to build

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Site Migration Consulting

Baseline, URL mapping, tested redirects, launch verification and post-launch monitoring — the sequence that keeps a move from costing you traffic

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Link Profile and Penalty Recovery

Telling a manual action apart from algorithmic suppression, because the two look identical from the outside and share no remedy

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PPC Consulting

Ongoing paid search management and strategy — the work that comes after a diagnosis, and a different purchase from the audit itself

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Google Ads Account Audits

A one-off diagnostic ending in a findings document — what the account is actually doing, what it is costing, and what to change first

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By Platform and Market

E-commerce SEO Consulting

Faceted navigation, product and category indexation, out-of-stock handling and product markup — inside the constraints your platform sets

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By Platform and Market

Local Search Consulting

Business Profile mechanics, categories, service areas, reviews and NAP consistency — with an honest account of what distance already decides

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By Platform and Market

International SEO Consulting

hreflang, ccTLD versus subdirectory versus subdomain, and the market questions that most international SEO problems turn out to be

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By Platform and Market

Enterprise SEO Consulting

What changes above a certain size is governance, not technique — templates instead of pages, and a queue your developers can actually ticket

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Answers

14 entries

Choosing Someone

How to Hire an SEO Consultant

How to define the problem, screen a shortlist on checkable evidence, run the first call, and structure an engagement that can end

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Choosing Someone

Questions to Ask Before You Sign

A usable list for a sales call: what to ask, what a good answer sounds like, and what a bad one does instead

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Choosing Someone

Consultant vs Agency vs In-House

What each model is structurally good at, how each one fails, and why the choice is about fit and capacity rather than price

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Choosing Someone

Red Flags in an SEO Proposal

The seven patterns worth walking away from, why each one is a problem, and what a proposal should contain instead

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Choosing Someone

Why Ranking Guarantees Are a Warning

The mechanism behind the warning, the wording tricks that make guarantees technically true, and what an honest commitment looks like

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Cost and Commitment

What SEO Consulting Costs

What actually moves the price of search work: site size, difficulty, whether implementation and content are included, and what a low quote means

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Cost and Commitment

Retainer vs Project vs Hourly

What a retainer, a fixed-scope project and hourly counsel each actually buy, which problems suit which, and how each one fails

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Cost and Commitment

How Long SEO Takes to Work

Where three-to-six months really comes from, what determines the timeline on your site, and the order in which results actually appear

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Measurement and 2026

How Results Are Measured

What each measurement source actually reports, the limits nobody states out loud, and what an honest search report looks like

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Measurement and 2026

How AI Overviews Changed Search Marketing

The click evidence with its caveats, the volatile prevalence data, and an honest account of what did and did not change

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What This Work Is

What an SEO Consultant Does

What the work actually consists of, where advising stops and executing begins, and what lands on your desk at the end

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What This Work Is

What Search Engine Marketing Includes

What sits inside search engine marketing, why the term means two different things, and how to tell which one a proposal is actually selling

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What This Work Is

What a Technical SEO Audit Covers

The scope of a technical audit domain by domain, what falls outside it, and how to tell a real audit from a crawler export

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What This Work Is

What Enterprise Search Marketing Means

The three meanings of enterprise search marketing, the thresholds where scale actually changes the work, and when the label is only a price tier

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