Strategic consulting
Enterprise SEO teams are usually capable. What they sometimes lack is someone who has already made the specific decision they are facing, at scale, more than once. That is what strategic input is actually for.
When teams reach for a specialist
It is rarely because they cannot do SEO. It is because the decision in front of them is expensive to get wrong and hard to reverse: an international expansion where the market and URL structure choices will outlive everyone in the meeting, a platform decision with rendering consequences nobody has fully traced, or organic growth that has plateaued for reasons the reporting cannot see.
The common thread is asymmetry. The cost of the wrong call is months of revenue; the cost of a second opinion is a conversation.
What good advisory looks like
- Reviewing decisions before they ship, not auditing the damage afterwards.
- Speaking both languages: technical enough for the dev team to trust, commercial enough for the executive team to act.
- Strategic direction that respects the team doing the work. The advisor who tries to take over has misunderstood the job.
- Covering AI search alongside traditional search, because the engines answering questions about your products run on the same crawling and rendering infrastructure.
- Making the team stronger over time, so the need for outside input shrinks rather than grows.
Where my version of it comes from
Running organic search in-house for lululemon across APAC, and six years agency-side leading strategy for adidas, Chemist Warehouse, Nando's and Lyka. In-house teaches you what it takes to get things shipped inside a large organisation. Agency teaches you pattern recognition, because you see the same decision play out across many companies. Advisory work draws on both.
