Owain Lloyd-Williams: SEO Consultant.

Regardless of how long we’ve been in the game or how much we feel we’ve seen or experienced in various settings – be it at agencies, in-house, or on a consultancy basis – the art of delivering SEO can sometimes feel like a perpetual battle.

When I say battle, this could encompass the persistent proving of the value of the SEO channel.

It could mean constantly having to prove and re-prove the deployment of certain SEO tactics, despite clear-cut data-led evidence that the same tactics worked only a week ago.

It could mean staving off threats from external forces; be it peripheral company structure changes, new personnel or budget shifts that are out of our control as external partners. That’s before we get to large existential changes such as the lingering narrative of generative AI and search and what this means for the future of how we work.

Of course, these challenges may get more complex, nuanced and attritional by nature the larger the organisation; but in truth, they exist in almost any business setting.

SEO, unlike other digital marketing channels, is notoriously tricky to forecast and estimate. This isn’t always the fault of the channel itself or the external partner – we may not simply have access to the right tools or data to do this readily and in a way that sweeps aside some of those aforementioned battles in a simple, fell swoop.

This isn’t a post on SEO forecasting, however.

Neither is this a post about getting buy-in or proving the SEO opportunity. I’ve talked about that before; as have many others.

Instead, I’m going to internalise things for a moment and delve into some methods that we, as consultants or as third-party partners in general can utilise to keep us going. I’ve also detailed some instances where I’ve been in this spot before and have had to deploy certain methods, which I hope are actionable.

Sphere of Influence: Still Got a Seat at the Table? Good.

While it may not be immediately apparent based on the framing of this post, there’s a good chance that some of what you’re doing for your client is right.

That’s not to suggest that I’m encouraging people to pursue the SEO definition of madness by repeatedly suggesting tactics that aren’t being taken on or haven’t worked in the past. Rather, it’s important sometimes as third-parties to take a step back and assess where we are, and pivot if necessary.

Take a bird’s eye view. Are you still being consulted on for various areas of SEO best practice? Are you still firmly in your client’s communication ecosystem and are included on recurring meetings, Slack channels or email chains? More to the point, are you still a touch point on the digital consultancy journey if your client is considering action A or deployment B? Remember, they hired you to help.

The above may sound glib and straightforward, but it can be very easy for us as third-party SEOs to quickly feel frustrated if we’re not getting our desired lot over the line in full.

In truth, when working alongside the various spinning wheels and priorities of businesses as they pulse and pivot in the face of various external factors, “full pelt SEO excellence” (an OLW patented term) is likely an unrealistic expectation.

Of course, we want what’s best for our clients from an organic search perspective. This is where we as consultants or other third-party partners need to really earn our worth and find ways to reframe what we’re trying to get across.

I’ve already mentioned that I won’t be going into it, but forecasting can help in this regard, as can competitor insights. There might be a more scalable and less resource-intensive way in which you can achieve what you’re pushing for.

You may also want to reach for a shift in how you’re presenting the particular part of your SEO strategy (the emphasis being on a particular part here: remember you’re overarching existence in the programme and its accompanying SEO strategy is still there) and for this, I have provided some recent examples where I’ve faced this directly in recent times.

Example 1: the technical SEO audit the client 100% approved has only been deployed in part

A lot of us have been here. We’re been hired in to conduct a technical SEO audit of a client’s site, and it’s returned a bounty of opportunities to improve visibility and performance.

Instead of a no-context shopping list PDF dump, you’ve diligently arranged your audit report by priority, opportunity and required resource. You’ve done your homework on their tech stack and know what can and can’t be implemented with relative ease. You’ve done your best to identify issues which can be tackled on a templated basis for optimum low effort high priority impact.

You get it. The client gets it. It’s a no-brainer.

Yet here we are, 6 months down the line, certain that you’d gotten the full requisite buy-in only to discover you’re still pushing for the implementation of item 2 of your audit during your weekly client calls.

In a lot of cases, it may be unlikely that as a third party you’re going to get free reign over their dev team or even access to a Jira board to actively push your agenda into weekly sprints.

Harking back to the point about still having a seat at the table however, reframing your agenda in a more structured manner as part of your client’s regular comms could be an option. Remember, part of your accountability as a third-party consultant is to make your client accountable too.

Go back to your audit document and repackage what’s outstanding into a project management-type document if you haven’t already. Consider the RASCI (Responsible, Accountable, Supportive, Consulted, Informed) approach and assign stakeholders to each part of the journey that ends up with the deliverable of the item of your audit.

Google Sheets is a great way to do this. As is Notion, or Monday. There are plenty of generic templates out there that you can readily modify.

It could well be that you, as the lead SEO consultant, are assigned to the bulk of these “RASCIs” across your sheet. However, there will doubtless be instances where your main client contact, perhaps a digital marketing manager or CMO, is the gatekeeper to the right people to help speed along action A within your RASCI matrix. This could be the bulk deployment of product schema across a series of SKU pages or a simple internal linking module insertion on a key page.

This keeps people accountable and encourages movement and updates on an iterative basis. Your technical audit has already set the world alight and everyone is bought in. Yet it’s amazing how a straightforward reframing of this into a project management-type format where accountability is visualised really gets people moving.

Example 2: the client keeps publishing content without my recommendations after I explicitly briefed them in

This is in relation to a scenario where you may be involved in an engagement with a client who are looking for great content. They’ve got their product and messaging in order, and are getting leads in on other channels, and want to leverage the content opportunity from an organic search standpoint.

Here, you might be brought in as a consultant to research and deliver content briefs for a blog or guide section, for example. Your role may entail conducting keyword and audience research, spotting gaps in competitor content, delivering briefs and ultimately being the overseer of all things good content.

SEO consultants will know that to get to this desired outcome, there’s a lot of hard groundwork that needs to be done to do this properly. It can be frustrating when some of this is ignored in the final output, be it a particular section of a content brief that was informed by robust keyword research or even something as “small” as a meticulously crafted meta description.

Again, it’s unlikely that as third parties we’re going to have final eyes on these types of articles as they’re ingested into a CMS and pushed live. Our involvement will typically end at the content brief delivery phase, and then we leave our trust in the internal review process.

Realistically, after an article has been reviewed internally by a myriad of stakeholders with differing positions on tone, audience and approach, it’s unlikely to exactly mirror what you, as a consultant, greenlit prior to it being sent off into the internal ether.

That doesn’t mean that tweaks to elements which we’d so carefully poured our data-led hearts into doesn’t demoralise us. Of course, there are certain hills to die on and we need to choose our battles, but as the SEO consultant in the room we need to affirm our authority.

While it doesn’t always happen, I’ve more often than not “got my way” when I’ve seen such articles go live without some of my carefully considered recommendations.

Having a paper trail of your arguments, be they detailed in your content briefs or your accompanying keyword research or competitor analysis will help here. Yet this doesn’t provide a forever solution to the issue of core elements being ignored or edited out and it’s likely to happen again.

One key message you can transmit here is time. Time and resource. As I mentioned, most client engagements won’t allow you direct access to the CMS to change things. This may appear the easiest way to fix this sort of thing (be it a funky HTML element or content tweak) but even if we had free reign, we’d still need the approval to do this anyway, and that again, takes time.

Assuming they agree with your arguments to revert the page title back to what it should be or include that content block on consumer research to bolster the authority of the article (they signed off such SEO elements in the content brief after all), then start keeping a “changelog” of these types of requests.

This doesn’t have to take the form of a Google Sheet entitled “Unexpected Article Changes We Need to Fix for SEO Purposes” (that’s too passive-aggressive and SEO prismed, even for my liking) but rather an append to your content briefing document that is vigilant in documenting these changes so they’re visible to all the relevant stakeholders (see earlier RASCI example).

Said document should, alongside the proposed article titles, links to keyword research and content briefs, also feature a trail of our proposed SEO elements that you deem important for the success of your article. It can then be relatively easy to grab any discrepancies and whack them in full display of your client. Lots of SEO tools these days also have content briefing modules built into them so they can readily compare the before and after too.

This, over time, will hopefully drive home the message that unforeseen tweaks to your diligently delivered SEO elements are costing the business time and resource. Now you just have to make sure said articles perform well…

The Importance of Peer Review & Community

On to motivation outside of our day-to-day work, then.

I haven’t told him this yet, but joining The Digital Marketing Union, a tight-knit community for business owners in the industry founded by Dan White, was the best business decision I’ve made in recent memory.

It has provided exactly what I was missing since going solo in terms of community and people to learn and bounce ideas from.

Since being a consultant, I’ve continued to regularly attend digital marketing events, contribute with talks and connect with peers on social media (Bluesky being the main platform currently). Working with good clients where I’ve been able to learn has also helped scratch this “itch” in terms of what I felt I was missing, but none of these were quite the same as having colleagues or friends in the room who are in a similar boat; something you retain readily in agency or in-house roles.

Thanks to communities like this, I’ve found reassurance in the way I work, have made new friends, received and passed on leads and have gotten a few percent better in all the areas of my work from running a business to communicating the value of SEO.

There are plenty of broad SEO or digital marketing Slack channels out there that offer great value, but I’d thoroughly recommend joining a tighter community such as this if you’re missing that camaraderie you might not get from not working for a company.

There are few other communities that offer this too (forgive me if I haven’t mentioned yours), such as Women in Tech SEO. I’ve also heard good things about Centori.

Your Expertise Is Still Greater Than the 95%

Bringing it all back home to our work then, I’d like you to take a deep breath and imagine the below scenarios (trigger warnings in advance):

“Hi, here’s an export of an SEO scan from Hubspot/SEMRush/Aherfs/Insert-Whatever-Tool showing 1,235 errors. Can you look into this and fix everything please? Also, I’d thought you’d fixed everything already?”

“The Yoast traffic lights aren’t all green for all our pages.”

“Can we SEO-optimise this SEO content?”

We’ve all been here. A little knowledge can be dangerous when it comes to SEO. I’m not trying to demonise clients here; I actually encourage clients to think this way and raise these sorts of questions with me as it opens the doors to education opportunities and ways to get things done (see earlier part of the article).

The point is that we, as external SEO consultants, will come across these types of conversations and their varying multitudes on an almost daily basis. It can be easy to forget this as we go through the motions and do our job, be it consulting on these types of questions, wider SEO strategies or being at the forefront of implementation.

Again, as external partners, as long as we’re still kept in the loop as a touchpoint along whatever SEO workflow, this is proof that our knowledge is not only valued but actively sought after. It may not always seem like it, but this is because we know our stuff.

Despite SEO being in the mainstream more often (I’ve mentioned a few times about it rearing its head as a topic on mainstream podcasts) and there being so much information out there, including by Google themselves, your experience will come out on top here.

This is particularly pertinent for specific situations for specific brands looking to do specific things at a specific time; such as…

Example: any type of site migration

As SEO professionals, migrations of any kind (be they CMS, domain or a site redesign) are certainly one area where we continue to learn regardless of how long we’ve been in the game. They can come with surprises (usually the bad kind) and discoveries along the way regardless of how diligent we’ve been from the very beginning of the process.

Conversely, migrations are also an area where there are recurring truths that transcend universally. This is an area where it’s relatively easy for us to prove our value as SEOs, and where our knowledge and experience will shine.

Think indexed staging domains. Think unnecessary URL rewriting and all the subsequent tidying up that comes with it. Think metadata not being carried over to the pages on the new CMS after go-live despite a lot of work done prior in crawling and exporting this, maintaining it as a key document within the migration workflow that was covered on daily stand-ups and subsequently handed to the right people at the right time (that one felt cathartic to get out, didn’t it?)

Final Thoughts: Looking Both Backwards & Forwards

I get it. It’s hard being an SEO consultant today, particularly when budgets are under more scrutiny than ever and the digital landscape in general becomes more complex and uncertain.

Mark Williams-Cook recently alluded to SEO in the context of the video game “Dark Souls” in terms of difficulty and complexity, and that does hit home in terms of what I’ve been trying to write about here, specifically around motivation (even if I’ve never played Dark Souls myself).

Think about where you’ve got to

The “looking backwards” part of this wrap-up, and yes, this is incredibly cheesy, is a chance for me to remind you that you are again, still in the game and still have a seat at the table.

More importantly, the fact you have a seat at said table is thanks to a lot of experience and previous success in your field. It can be easy to forget about where we’ve got to amid the cut and thrust of the daily grind.

Look back at the clients you’ve worked with. We’ve all got great case studies (I hope). Think about your career progression from when you first entered the industry and where you are now. It can be easy to forget.

Right, that’s the awfully saccharine part of the conclusion of this post done with. What better way to wrap up than with a platitude or two on the future of SEO and how we’re all going to adapt and be as relevant as ever? You’re nearly there, old friend.

Forget about the future of SEO. Our skills by their very nature are fluid

The “looking forward” part alludes to the noise in the ecosystem around the uncertainty of SEO as a discipline with regard to the rise of AI in search, or as a replacement of search engines altogether.

I’m not even going to try and wade into that and take a stab at a prediction here. There’s been a lot of great stuff written on this topic (and a lot of sensationalist guff too) though my sense at the time of writing is that we’re still learning here and no one really knows the answer.

I’m of the broad view that SEO, as it has done in recent years, will become part of the wider digital experience and will transpose into other disciplines where we become something along the lines of “search experience optimisation” consultants as others have coined. Or perhaps, “organic digital” consultants if we want to be flashy and succinct.

This isn’t the main point/platitude I want to end on however. Outside of the phrase “it depends”, I think that “well, I just kinda fell into SEO really” is right up there in terms of repeatable phrases bounded around the industry.

“Fell into” suggests we first interacted with SEO via a previous career or skill set. I certainly did, with my trajectory being English literature graduate to English teacher in China to translator to online magazine editor to SEO (with a lot of questionable poetry and songwriting in between).

As such, our skill sets by their very nature are fluid. I believe that as consultants our greatest asset, outside of our brilliant knowledge of all things SEO, is as communicators. Hopefully, communication has been a recurring theme throughout this article and justifies this hamfisted attempt at a conclusion.

Building on this further, good consultants are also great empaths and listeners, and strive to understand business, commercial, and oftentimes political needs.

Whatever the future brings, you’re in a prime position to adapt and continue to succeed based on the skills you’ve acquired and honed throughout your journey.

Keep on doing what you’re doing.