Most business owners paying for SEO have no real idea what their consultant is doing. They get a monthly report, some numbers go up, some go down, and the invoice arrives. When things aren't working, they can't tell whether that's a strategy problem, an execution problem, or just normal SEO timescales.
I've been doing this for 20 years, across agency, enterprise, and freelance. Here's what a good SEO consultant actually does, in specific terms. Not a sales pitch, an actual breakdown.
The initial audit
Before any SEO work starts, you need to understand what you're dealing with. I spend the first few weeks of any new client engagement doing a thorough audit across four areas.
The technical audit covers the things that might be preventing Google from crawling and indexing your site correctly. Broken links, duplicate content, slow page speed, missing or duplicate meta titles, pages blocked by the robots.txt file, HTTPS issues, crawl errors in Search Console. For a small local business website, this audit might find a handful of small issues. For a larger site, it can uncover significant structural problems that would otherwise undermine everything else you do.
The content audit looks at what pages exist, what keywords they're targeting (if any), what traffic they're getting, and where the gaps are. This is often where I find businesses with fifteen service pages all targeting the same phrase, competing against each other and ranking for nothing.
The competitor audit looks at who's ranking for the terms your business needs to rank for, and why. What does their content look like? How many backlinks do they have? Are they a national brand, or is a local competitor genuinely outperforming you? This shapes whether the goal is achievable in three months or two years.
The backlink audit reviews the sites linking to you. A strong, relevant backlink profile helps rankings. A profile full of spammy links from 2012 can actively hurt them. I use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush for this, which give a picture of link quality and any patterns that might have triggered a Google penalty.
Keyword research
This is not just typing things into a tool and seeing what comes out. It's a process that takes time to do properly.
I start by identifying the categories of search that matter to the business. For a local accountancy firm in North Wales, that might be: accounting services searches (general), specific service searches (tax returns, payroll, bookkeeping), and location-specific variations. For each category, I'm looking at monthly search volume, competition level, and commercial intent.
The mistake most people make with keyword research is going after volume rather than relevance. A phrase with 5,000 monthly searches but dominated by national brands is nearly useless to a local business. A phrase with 150 monthly searches but high commercial intent and weak competition can be worth several new clients per month.
I also look for what I call "hidden intent" in longer search phrases. Someone typing "how much does an accountant cost for a small business" isn't just looking for information. They're close to making a hiring decision. Content that answers that question well and ranks for that search is commercially valuable.
I worked with a North Wales financial adviser who was targeting "financial adviser Bangor" with reasonable success but getting few conversions from it. Digging into their Search Console data revealed that a handful of longer queries, things like "how to plan for retirement self-employed North Wales" and "pension advice for teachers Gwynedd," were generating impressions but no page existed to capture them. We created content for four of those specific searches. Within five months, those pages were generating more qualified enquiries than the main "financial adviser" page, from people who had self-identified their exact need before arriving.
On-page optimisation
Once I know what to target, on-page work is about making your existing pages as relevant as possible for those target phrases, without making them read like they were written for robots.
This means reviewing and rewriting meta titles and descriptions (what appears in Google search results), making sure H1 headings are clear and relevant, checking that body copy covers the topic thoroughly, adding internal links between related pages, and making sure page structure is logical.
For a local business, this often includes ensuring the location is referenced naturally throughout key pages, adding schema markup to help Google understand the business (address, opening hours, review stars), and optimising Google Business Profile to reinforce the geographic relevance.
A typical on-page session for one service page might take two to three hours when you include the research, the rewrite, and the internal linking pass.
Content planning
One of the most consistent differences between businesses that rank well and those that don't is the quantity and quality of their content. A website with five pages of thin copy has very little for Google to work with. A website with well-written, genuinely useful content across twenty or thirty pages gives Google many more ways to match that business with relevant searches.
In a typical month for a local business client, I'll plan two to four pieces of content. Some are service pages or location pages targeting commercial phrases. Others are blog posts targeting information-seeking searches from people who are in the research phase before they buy.
I map out a content calendar, write briefs specifying the target keyword, structure, internal links, and word count, and either write the content myself or work with a copywriter. The content has to actually be useful, specific, and better than what's already ranking. Writing thin, generic content and hoping it ranks is not a strategy.
Link building
This is the part of SEO that attracts the most confusion, and most of the bad practice in the industry.
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Google treats links as votes of credibility. A link from a respected local news site or a relevant industry directory carries far more weight than links from random, low-quality sites. The goal is to earn links from authoritative, relevant sources.
What link building actually involves, done properly: identifying relevant sites to approach, writing personalised outreach emails, pitching genuinely useful content or guest posts, and following up. It's slow and often thankless work. Most outreach emails go unanswered. It typically takes months to build a meaningful number of good links.
For local businesses, local link building matters most. Getting listed in local business directories, being mentioned in local press, having the Chamber of Commerce or local business association link to you, these carry strong local ranking signals.
What it should not involve: buying links from link farms, using private blog networks, or paying for bulk link packages. These can produce short-term gains followed by penalties that take months to recover from. I've been brought in to fix the aftermath of exactly this more times than I can count.
Reporting and the monthly cycle
Every month, I put together a report covering what changed, why, and what's happening next. This includes organic traffic trends (from Google Analytics 4), keyword ranking movements, any technical issues found and fixed, content published, and links acquired.
Good SEO reporting explains the story behind the numbers. A traffic drop isn't just a number. It's either a Google algorithm update, a seasonal pattern, a technical issue, or a competitor doing something new. Part of my job is figuring out which.
In a typical month for a local business client, I'll run a crawl to check for new technical issues, review ranking movements and flag any opportunities, publish or brief one or two pieces of content, do outreach for one or two link opportunities, and check Google Search Console for any manual actions or new crawl errors.
It's not glamorous. There's no single monthly task that produces a dramatic result. SEO is compounding work: each month builds on the last, and results typically become meaningful after three to six months and significant after twelve.
What a good SEO consultant does that never shows in the report
The work that often moves rankings most is the hardest to document: reading a competitor's content closely enough to understand why Google prefers it, noticing a pattern in Search Console data that points to a conversion problem rather than a rankings problem, recommending against a website redesign because the current URL structure has 18 months of authority baked in. None of that fits neatly into a monthly report. A good consultant makes judgements, not just tasks. If your reports are full of activity but light on reasoning, ask your consultant what they decided not to do this month and why. That question tells you more about their quality than any ranking chart.
Why SEO is not a one-off project
This is worth being clear about, because I hear the opposite framing from businesses who've been burned before.
Google's index is not static. Your competitors are publishing content. Algorithm updates change what's rewarded. New competitors appear. Your site changes. All of this means that a site optimised once and then left will gradually lose ground to sites that are actively maintained.
The analogy I use: SEO is like physical fitness. You can get into good shape, but if you stop the work, you lose the gains. The businesses at the top of Google's search results are there because someone is continuously working on it.
What a good SEO consultant should not be doing
Guaranteeing first-page rankings for specific terms. No ethical SEO consultant will do this. Google controls the rankings, not the consultant. Anyone who guarantees specific positions is either going to buy links (risky) or is not telling you the truth.
Buying links. Already covered above. If a consultant mentions "a link building package" at a suspiciously low price, ask what sites the links come from. If they can't or won't tell you, walk away.
Set-and-forget. SEO requires consistent, active work. A consultant who set up your meta titles in month one and hasn't touched the site since is not doing SEO. They're invoicing you for historical work.
Vanity reporting. If your monthly report is full of metrics that look impressive but don't connect to business outcomes (rankings for terms nobody searches for, traffic from countries where you have no customers), ask for organic traffic from the UK and conversions. Those are the numbers that matter.
For more on the warning signs that SEO work isn't delivering, read I paid for SEO and it didn't work. And if you're weighing up what to budget, how much does SEO cost in the UK gives honest price ranges and what they get you.
If you'd like to talk through your current SEO situation, find out more about how I work or get in touch via the SEO page.
