How I Work

The first conversation, and what it costs

It costs nothing, it carries no obligation, and it is not a sales call with a different name. Its purpose is to establish three things: what is actually happening on your site, whether it is a problem worth spending money on, and whether I am the right person to spend it with.

You describe the symptom — traffic fell, a launch went badly, the rankings never came. I ask for the evidence behind it: which pages, since when, from which source, and what else changed in the same window. Most of that comes out of Search Console and analytics in a few minutes, and it usually reduces five plausible explanations to one likely one.

It ends in one of three places. A scope worth writing down. A recommendation to do something that does not involve me. Or a plain statement that I am not the right person for it. Nobody is asked to decide anything at the end of a first call, and no proposal arrives unrequested.

The first answer is often that you do not need what you think you need

A buyer often arrives already self-diagnosed, from something they read or something a vendor told them, and the diagnosis is wrong.

• Crawl budget. Google names the conditions where it matters: roughly a million pages changing weekly, ten thousand changing daily, or a large share of URLs sitting in Discovered — currently not indexed. Most sites meet none of them.
• A disavow file. Google's position is that most sites will not need the tool. Filing one because rankings fell, with no manual action showing in Search Console, is a remedy applied to a diagnosis nobody made.
• A migration project where no URLs are changing. That is a checklist and a monitoring window.
• Search work at all, when the real constraint is that the pages convert badly, the offer is not competitive, or the demand is not there.

Saying so costs me the engagement and is still the correct answer.

How scope gets defined

Scope is written down before anything starts, specific enough that either party could tell afterward whether it was delivered.

It begins with the problem stated as a symptom with evidence, not as a solution. Organic sessions to the category templates fell by a third from the second week of March, with impressions flat is something a stranger can price. The SEO needs to be better is not. Where a problem arrives framed as its own solution, I push back to the symptom.

From there the scope names what is in it as work rather than as outcomes, what is explicitly out of it, the artifact you receive, which is a document, a specification set or a verification record rather than consulting, and who implements, by name or by role. If it cannot be written that way, the problem is not understood yet, and the honest response is a short diagnostic first.

The three shapes an engagement takes

An audit is a one-time diagnostic with a defined end: what is wrong, what each problem is plausibly costing, in what order to address it, each finding specified well enough for a developer to build from. It is also the lowest-risk way to find out whether you want to work with me.

A project is fixed scope with a defined end, for a bounded piece of work: a migration, an implementation program after an audit, a penalty diagnosis, an ad account restructure. It finishes, and you can judge the result before buying anything ongoing.

A retained engagement is a standing monthly arrangement, and it suits a continuous problem — a site that changes often, a channel where a bad release is costly, a team that can execute but has nobody to decide what to execute. It is the wrong purchase when nothing can be built, when the site is small and static, or when one clear problem would close under a project.

What I need access to, and why each one matters

Read access at the least privilege that does the job, on an account you can revoke at any point.

• Search Console, at property level rather than a filtered view. It is the only source that reports impressions and position at all, and the only place a manual action ever appears. Without it, diagnosis is inference.
• Analytics — not for the traffic line but for commercial weighting: which templates and URL groups produce revenue, so findings rank by consequence rather than by a tool's severity label.
• The content management system, or a named developer contact. I need to know what can be changed, by whom, and how long a change takes to ship, because a fix that is technically correct and organizationally impossible is not a fix.
• Server log files where the platform exposes them. They show what crawlers actually requested and what was served, including URLs no report mentions.

Access is routinely the slowest part of starting, so it is worth assembling before kickoff. It is handed back at the end.

How the work is reported

In writing, dated, and structured so that someone who was not in the room can follow it. A report states what was found, what was recommended, what actually shipped, what was verified in production, and what is still outstanding. That fourth item is what separates work done from work described.

Measurement is reported with its limits attached. Search Console for impressions, clicks and position — noting the 1,000-row export cap, the sixteen-month retention window, the queries withheld for privacy, and that average position means the position of your topmost result, not of all of them. Analytics for revenue, with its consent and tracking-prevention gaps stated. Rank tracking as a sample from a personalized results page, used to explain movement, never to declare success.

There is no single blended score; a provider reporting one is reporting their tool's opinion of your site.

What I will not do

No guarantees of ranking, traffic or revenue, in any phrasing. What can be committed to is the work, the artifact and the standard it is held to. What cannot is the behavior of a system operated by somebody else — Google's own documentation states outright that there is no guarantee that changes to a website will produce a noticeable impact in search results.

No undisclosed link buying, no private blog networks, no paid placements passing ranking signals without disclosure. Those are spam policy violations, the risk sits with your domain rather than with whoever sold them, and it outlives the engagement.

No lock-in. Retained work is rolling and cancellable. Counsel secured by a long minimum term has less reason to be candid in month four.

No content published under someone else's name without their review, and no change to a live site without telling you what changed and why.

No engagement on a site I do not believe can be helped. If the pages simply are not the best answer to the query, or the constraint is the product, the offer or the demand, no technical work resolves it. Saying so at the start is most of the ethics in this job.