My 7 Keys To Any SEO Engagement

People ask me what makes an SEO strategy actually work, as if there’s a secret tactic nobody else knows.

There isn’t. What I’ve got instead, after 14 years of doing this across in-house, agency, and freelance work, is a process I run every time — before I touch a single piece of data.

1. Understand The Business First

It’s very easy as an SEO consultant to look at a site and think “yeah I know what they want and need”, especially if you’re familiar with the niche.
The danger of that assumption is you jump straight into the project working towards something the client might not want.

The other assumption that’s easy to make is about what success is to them. As an example, I recently worked with a non-profit on understanding their ‘North Star Metric’. Looking at the site, you’d immediately think ‘donations’, but actually when we unravelled it, it was about engaged visitors on certain types of content.

Then there’s the team – who will you be dealing with and are they ultimately the decision makers?

Questions I Ask

• How does it make money?
• Who is behind it?
• What’s the aims – short term and long term?
• Who are the main stakeholders and decision-makers?
• How does it measure success?
• How will it measure SEO or GEO success?

2. Understand the Industry

Every industry and niche has its own nuances. E-comm is very different to local SEO, for example.

If I’m working on an industry I’m not familiar with, I want to spend time understanding it.

Things I Do:

• Look at the SERPs – who are the competitors? What kind of things appear in the SERPs?
• What kind of pages rank for the client’s main terms?
• What are the likely intents and pain points visitors might have?
• Who are the main competitors and why?
• What kind of content and link strategies are competitors using?

Top tip: If it’s an industry I really don’t know, or it’s very technical, I use NotebookLM to speed up the learning. I feed it a bunch of competitor URLs, maybe some YouTube videos, PDFs etc – then get it to make a slide deck, explainer video and ‘podcast’.

3. Make Every Strategy Bespoke

No two audits look the same, because no two sites are in the same position.

A brand-new domain needs authority (links) before it needs technical polish. An established site with a mountain of technical debt needs the opposite.

Running the same playbook on both is how you waste a client’s time and budget.

4. Know What’s Realistically Executable

This is the one most consultants skip. I want to know a client’s actual resources — content production capacity, digital PR capability, budget, in-house team vs. outsourced — before I recommend anything. A brilliant recommendation nobody can execute isn’t a strategy. It’s a wishlist.

Things I Ask:

• Who does what? Is it all done in-house?
• What resources/budget is there for content, links and digital PR?
• How quickly can content be shipped?
• How much content can be created?

5. Understand Stakeholder Knowledge

Jargon doesn’t impress anyone; it just slows things down. Every recommendation needs to be clear on three things: what it is, how to actually do it, and what impact it’ll have. If a stakeholder can’t repeat back why we’re doing something, I haven’t explained it properly.

Same with doing GA4 and GTM – not everyone will understand me if I’m banging on about tags, custom definitions and so on.

I’ve got this wrong before and it impacts the rapport you have with a client. It’s worth finding out more before digging into an audit or document with a client.

6. Always Tie Back To Value

More traffic, more conversions, more ad revenue — value looks different for every client, and the strategy needs to be honest about which one actually matters for this business, not SEO metrics for their own sake.

This goes back to asking the right questions. Often a client will think value is ‘more traffic’ (which might be true for a publisher), but for a SaaS or B2B client it’s more likely to be conversions and revenue.

7. Set Expectations From The Start

I want to understand what a client expects from the work and from communication. And I want them to understand the same from me. Half of every difficult client relationship I’ve seen could have been avoided by having this conversation in week one instead of month three.

None of this is complicated. It’s also not fast, which is probably why it gets skipped so often in favor of “here’s your keyword list, go.” But it’s the difference between a strategy that gets implemented and one that sits in a shared drive nobody opens again.

Questions I Ask

• How do you want us to work together?
• How do you like to be communicated with, and how often?
• What results are you expecting?

Want to learn more about how I can help? Let’s chat.