About freelance SEO consultant Guy Willett
A UK SEO CONSULTANT THAT CONSISTENTLY DELIVERS
I’M A UK-BASED FREELANCE SEO CONSULTANT WHO DEVELOPS COST-EFFECTIVE SEO STRATEGIES FOR SMES WANTING RESULTS THAT DON’T TAKE FOREVER. THIS HAS SUBSEQUENTLY CREATED A PROVEN TRACK RECORD IN INCREASING SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS FOR SMES ACROSS THE GLOBE.
Hire a UK freelance SEO consultant with a proven track record
Hiring a freelance SEO consultant is a big deal for any company, regardless of its size. Why? Working with an SEO specialist and getting it right can mean a big surge in organic traffic to your website and the possibility of generating greater sales. However, choosing the wrong consultant, agency or company for your needs also carries as great a risk as the potential rewards.
Why a risk? Ranking for the wrong keywords risks pointing an organisation towards potentially the wrong keywords or keywords with possibly little or no search volumes. In fact, maybe an even greater danger is it could also mean no longer ranking for a host of keywords you were ranking highly for that you weren’t even aware you were ranking for.
An even greater long-term risk than this is the usage of ‘black hat’ techniques, which may mean significant ranking penalties that could threaten a business rather than allow it to thrive. This dawned on me about 10 years ago when I was, like you, an end client who was hiring (and suffering) SEO companies. When I analysed some questionable backlinks created in my name, I knew it was time to take action. SEO was just too important to be left to a third party that didn’t care, and in their seeking to raise my profile, I was as likely to gain a Google penalty!
So use a consultant who has worked with over 75+ organisations across 3 continents, worked with sole traders to multi-million-pound concerns and has worked with both B2B and B2C sectors.
MY V I S I O N
To consistently offer the best value digital marketing services to SMEs in the UK and further afield through consulting, strategic thinking and in-house implementation.
How I came to be a freelance SEO consultant
My background
My entire career has been spent in various forms of marketing. Having reached Commercial Director level in my last couple of positions, I had the unenviable task of determining how to optimise the company website. Like you, I considered employing an SEO expert. Perhaps, like you, I was frequently left hugely confident by almost every SEO account manager’s pitch that I met (I say ‘met’; face-to-face meetings were very much a rarity). However, after subsequently hiring each SEO agency and numerous months of expectantly waiting, I was left thoroughly underwhelmed by the results that were delivered. Over-promised and under-delivered would summarise my every hire. In hindsight, I wish I’d watched this video from Google here on tips for hiring an SEO provider.
My typical SEO agency experience
If you’ve ever used a typical agency, your experience may be similar to mine. After wholly convincing pitches by a charismatic Account Manager, you plump for ‘guaranteed results in search engines’ and ‘astronomical rise in website traffic’. A month or so passes, and very little has been made of access to many assets, and you’re told they are still ‘setting up’.
A couple of months pass, and you’re wondering where any ranking improvements are. You’re assured that it’s very much a case of patience because ‘search engine optimisation’ takes ages to work. A few months later, you get a gnawing feeling that things aren’t happening and results aren’t forthcoming, so you call the SEO agency to see if they are prepared to do this, which, in most cases, they aren’t.
The meeting or call normally goes one of two ways. When I was asked about the activities undertaken, I was either fobbed off with ‘you wouldn’t understand the complexities’ or ‘our conscience is clear since we got some keywords to rank’. So, when I was then asked about the results, the former responded, ‘Hang in there, and magical things will happen. ‘
The latter’s response is often, ‘We got you to page one for some phrases, so it’s not our fault if you’re not getting the enquiries or sales’. What is frequently omitted from their response is that the organic search volumes for what they did have success with were practically negligible, so the chances of getting enquiries or sales were always going to be low. Of course, perhaps they wouldn’t have been chosen if the SEO agency had shared these search volumes at the proposal stage. That’s why I always share this vital information with clients as part of my free SEO audit.
The end result. The contract ends with the obvious notice period having to be honoured despite the poor performance. The SEO agency has made its money and walks away with a deluded sense of probity. And the client. The client is frequently left with little other than a jaded feeling that SEO isn’t for them and that maybe the warnings they received before hiring an SEO about it being all ‘smoke and mirrors’ were right.
Of course, this isn’t everyone’s experience. Some people experience improvements straight away, and things look great. Then, a few months or longer pass, and their rankings plummet out of the blue without warning. This is frequently the calling card of ‘black hat’ techniques employed by their SEO agency, which have come to roost with the most recent Google algorithm update. Then, there followed a long period of Google disavowals and lost sales, or maybe no longer appearing in search engine results. For many purely online companies, this can be armageddon.
Born of frustration
So, after suffering the above experiences and hearing about other people’s SEO misfortunes, I started thinking. Could I do SEO myself and do it better? So, I set about consuming every podcast, tutorial and YouTube video I could find. It turned out that ‘white hat’ SEO isn’t mystical and unknowable. In fact, it turns out to be largely following good business practices and a lot of sheer hard work. Good SEO doesn’t simply happen; it requires thought, planning and continual updating. There are very few shortcuts, and frequent cuts will contravene SEO best practice guidelines or won’t be that effective.
However, despite the steep learning curve, the unrelenting SEO training workload, and the odd cul de sac, I found it a terrifically rewarding and enjoyable process. In fact, I found it much more intuitive and creatively rewarding than the rest of the sales and marketing remit I was doing. You may think it odd that I say creative rather than analytical, which it is, but there’s so much more to SEO than cold calculations. In fact, it comes down to some very deep questions about what is at the core of what a company does. What is it that makes prospects choose to be your customer?
I determined that I would do my own SEO. SEO in 2016 is a very different beast from several years ago; Google now rewards you for building natural links within your local and trade community. Additionally, I was getting a real buzz from delivering real-world results using ethical SEO techniques to build significant ROI. In one position, the results were so significant it meant that a telemarketing team of 3 making outbound calls was reduced to just 1, who was largely reassigned to dealing with inbound calls generated from internet traffic!
The rest, as they say, is history. Over the last eight years, I’ve worked with over 220 fantastic clients, who have been a real privilege to work for. Suffice it to say I’m looking forward to the next eight years working in the challenging and ever-changing world of SEO consultancy.
Passionate About My Clients
I pride myself on developing digital marketing services that my clients continue to value. Career satisfaction for me is derived from delivering tailored solutions for each and every one of my clients and their unique marketing goals – regardless of their size, budget and location.
An active spokesperson for SEO in the business community
Though I’m a UK freelance SEO consultant based in Cheltenham, I’m passionate about spreading the word about how using SEO best practices can dramatically improve companies’ revenues to a global audience.
This includes regularly attending business networking opportunities to speak on the subject, but I also commit a considerable amount of my time to writing articles for a range of trade press publications. In addition, I have spoken at various conferences on various subjects in digital marketing, including online reputation management.
Milestones
Some remarkable events in my journey as a freelance SEO consultant.
Nov 2016
May 2017
August 2017
February, 2020
March 2020
December 2022
November 2023
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Frequently Asked Questions
What do freelance SEO consultants do?
An SEO consultant takes the time to understand a bigger picture around a business than simply accepting a brief to rank for a specific keyword without further enquiring why a client may want to rank for a keyword. This is essentially the difference between a consultant and a run-of-the-mill agency.
A consultant enters into a dialogue and, long before proposing the keywords that need to be targeted, takes time to understand the client, their target audience, and their language. The consultant reflects on this by having ongoing discussions with the client to ascertain how their website and overall business processes work to ensure a smooth transition from the initial site visit to the fulfilled order.
Do I really need a freelance SEO consultant?
This wholly depends on your own level of SEO competence and the time you have available to commit to SEO. A consultant can help you gain insights long before trying to improve your rankings. For instance, I wouldn’t dream of working with a client on SEO if their online reputation was poor.
Why? I’ll drive more people towards their site and other online assets, showing even more people their poor reputation. So, the chances of ranking, let alone converting, will be dismal. In this case, I’d propose working with the client to improve their online reputation with an online reputation management package.
How much do you need to pay for freelance SEO Consultancy Services?
This very much depends on your existing site’s on-page (own website) and off-page (your presence across other sites on the web) strengths. You might be looking at a full SEO campaign for a brand new site, which might need many SEO services I provide.
For a very established website that may already be quite optimised for search engines, it might simply be one or two SEO packages that could make all the difference for an already strong online profile. For instance, it might simply be keyword research, an on-page optimisation, or a technical SEO package that might be required since they already have a strong off-page stature.
How can an SEO Consultant help your business in the UK?
An SEO expert who is particularly experienced in your sector and your locale can be a huge asset to your company. They will come with an understanding of the technical vocabulary used for the sector and possibly more common or garden phrasing used by prospects.
Additionally, they will understand what may have worked for clients in similar business segments. Of course, you may be in a very specific niche with very few searches, or maybe you have a poor online reputation, which might mean discounting SEO activity.
However, an experienced SEO consultant may see similarities with other sectors and be able to determine an SEO strategy that drives organic traffic as your market matures and as your offering becomes more widely adopted.
How do you hire an SEO consultant?
Hiring an SEO consultant should be a rigorous process. Undertake due diligence around their online reviews. Are they rich reviews or thin reviews that may be fake? A face-to-face meeting can be a great way of determining the commitment and level of knowledge that a consultant can demonstrate and determining if they are the right ‘fit’ for you. This can be harder to measure from say a report or an online presentation.
Additionally, I understand their process, financial commitments, activities being undertaken, and timescales, both in terms of when activities are being undertaken to start seeing results and the level of involvement that will be required from you regarding access to resources and ongoing meetings.
Finally, ask for references from clients to see how they found working with them.