What the consulting work has in common
I have been practicing SEO since 1996, and the thing that has changed least in that time is the shape of the problem. A client arrives with a symptom — traffic fell, a launch underperformed, a competitor appeared from nowhere, a name they wanted is taken — and the symptom is almost never the problem. The work is diagnostic before it is anything else, and the six practice areas on this page are six diagnostic vocabularies for what turns out to be one question: is this site reachable, is it understood, and is it the answer a search engine is willing to give?
I want to be plain about what that means in practice, because the industry's marketing has made it sound like something else. There is no lever anyone can pull that produces rankings. There is no relationship at Google to cultivate, no submission that matters, no package that guarantees a position. What exists is a set of systems that behave predictably when you give them something predictable to work with, and a long, unglamorous list of things that stop them from doing so. Most of my consulting time is spent finding which item on that list is currently costing the most money.
Why these six, and not a menu of thirty
Agencies tend to list services the way a restaurant lists dishes, because it makes the buying decision easy. It also makes the diagnosis worse, because the client picks the service that matches the symptom rather than the cause. I would rather describe the work by what it actually is.
Technical SEO is the foundation, and it is the one people most often skip. It does not win rankings; it loses them. A site that generates an unbounded number of URLs out of filters and sort parameters will spend its crawl attention on combinations no human ever requested while the pages that make money get revisited monthly. A canonical tag that contradicts the rest of the site's signals will be overruled. A navigation built on click handlers rather than anchors is, to a crawler, not a navigation at all. None of that is visible in a rankings report, and all of it caps everything you do afterwards.
Website and domain migrations are the single most reliable way to destroy organic traffic that took a decade to build, and they are almost always undertaken for reasons that have nothing to do with search. A rebrand, a replatform, a merger, a consolidation of three sites into one. The work is an inventory problem before it is a redirect problem: you cannot map what you have not listed, and the list has to come from the crawl, the sitemaps, the logs and Search Console together, because each of those four sources knows about URLs the others do not.
Search engine marketing sits next to organic rather than opposite it. The useful reason to run both is that paid search answers questions organic takes months to answer — whether a term converts, whether a landing page holds up, whether the demand exists at all — and it answers them in a fortnight for the price of a test.
Domain name strategy is the part of this list that most consultants do not touch, and it is where I have spent as much time as I have in search. A domain is not a marketing decision that happens once. It is infrastructure with a registrar account, a set of DNS records, an expiry date and a history, and every one of those has taken a business down at some point.
Domain name recovery is what happens when that goes wrong deliberately. A name is transferred without authorization, or the registrar account is compromised, or the DNS is repointed. It is the most time-sensitive work I do; evidence at registrars, hosts and mail providers is short-lived, and a name that has been resold once is a materially harder problem than one that has not.
Online reputation management is the discipline of what a search for your own name returns. It is search work, not public relations: the results are ranked pages, and the way to change what ranks is to change what exists and what points at it.
How I actually work
Access first, data second, opinions last. The single biggest determinant of the quality of an engagement is what I was given at the start, and access requests take longer to fulfil than the analysis takes to run. Search Console for every property variant, including the ones nobody looks at. Raw server logs rather than a summarised report. Analytics with the configuration, because filters are the most common source of numbers nobody can reproduce. A crawl of the site as delivered and a second one with rendering disabled, because the gap between those two is where a surprising number of indexation problems live.
Then a baseline, before anything is changed. Impressions and clicks by page group, index coverage counts, crawl volume from the logs. Without a baseline you cannot demonstrate that a recommendation worked, and an engagement that cannot demonstrate that is indistinguishable from one that did nothing.
The deliverable is a ranked list a development team can put into sprint order — each item stating the problem, the evidence, the specific change, how to verify it after release, and what happens if it is not done. Not a ninety-page document nobody opens twice. Ten items that will move revenue beat three hundred that fill a spreadsheet, and the extra two hundred and ninety are how audits get shelved.
Things I will tell you are bad ideas
Buying links. Spinning content. Publishing to a monthly quota rather than to a reader. Building a second site to try to rank twice. Paying anyone for guaranteed rankings. Registering a defensive portfolio of near-miss domains in the belief that it protects a brand — it mostly funds renewals. Blocking a URL in robots.txt to try to get it out of the index, which does not work, because blocking prevents crawling rather than indexing and a blocked page with inbound links can still appear with no description at all.
None of these are wrong because they break a rule. They are wrong because they stop working, and unwinding them later costs more than the results were ever worth. A reference that only flatters is not a reference, and a consultant who never says no is selling agreement rather than judgement.
Where the engagement actually happens
This site is my professional record, not a booking page. It publishes no rates, takes no briefs and promises no response times, because a biography that also sells is neither. Consulting work runs through Hartzer Consulting, which is where scoping happens and where a conversation can be had about whether the question you have is one I am the right person to answer. Sometimes it is not, and it is better to find that out in the first conversation than in the third month.