An SEO strategist diagnoses why a company is not being found and specifies exactly what to do about it. We produce the analysis and the build specification. Your existing team, or your existing agency, does the implementing.
Fixed scope. No retainer. Nobody has to be replaced.
An SEO strategist establishes why a company is not being found and specifies what to build about it. The work ends with a document, not a monthly deliverable. Implementation is carried out by whoever already maintains the website.
The distinction matters commercially. An agency is paid to produce work every month, which creates a structural incentive to find work every month. A strategist is paid once for a diagnosis and once for a plan, which creates an incentive to be right rather than to be continuous.
Because a firm that sells implementation cannot credibly tell you that a market has a finite number of pages worth building. We can, and frequently do.
The number of terms worth owning in a given market is not unlimited. In one industrial market analysed in July 2026, the entire core commercial keyword set totalled roughly 700 monthly searches. Sixteen pages would have covered it completely. A retainer built to produce four pages a month would exhaust the genuine opportunity in a single quarter and then produce padding.
From our own measurement: in that same market, one company had published a monthly blog post for over a year. Twelve posts collectively held fewer than twenty ranking keywords and produced no measurable traffic. The work was competent. It was simply aimed at nothing, because nobody had established what the market would actually support.
From our own measurement: in one industrial category analysed in July 2026, the term “pick and pack fulfillment services” carried a keyword difficulty score of 14 and a cost per click of $32.57. The 219-keyword cluster around it averaged a difficulty of 6. Difficulty that low on terms priced that high does not normally coexist: advertisers established the commercial value while the organic positions went unclaimed.
Fractional SEO usually means a senior practitioner engaged part-time on an ongoing basis, often for an in-house team. This is narrower: two fixed-scope deliverables and an optional third, with no standing commitment on either side.
The direction of travel is documented outside our own work. Semrush tracked Google AI Overview appearance rising from roughly 6.5 percent of queries in January 2025 to a peak near 25 percent that July across a ten-million-keyword sample. BrightEdge, measuring nine commercial industries, recorded 48 percent of queries triggering an AI Overview by February 2026. Seer Interactive measured organic click-through on those queries falling from 1.76 percent to 0.61 percent. Prevalence estimates vary by methodology and should be read as a range rather than a figure.
| Rung | What it is | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Analysis | Where you stand, who is beating you, and why | Fixed scope |
| Specification | Every page mapped: term, URL, headings, schema, links | Fixed fee |
| Pages | Written to the specification. Optional | Per page |
| Monitoring | Position and AI citation tracking. Optional | Monthly |
The specification is written to be handed over. It states the target term, URL, title, heading structure, the questions each page must answer, the schema block and the internal links, so a developer can work from it without further interpretation.
Three pieces, in order: an analysis establishing where you stand, a build specification stating exactly what to construct, and optionally the pages themselves. Most companies start with the first and decide from there.
Your position in search and AI answers, who is beating you, what share of your market you capture, and the reasons behind all three.
Every page mapped. Target term, URL, headings, schema, internal links, priority order. Written so your developer can work straight from it.
Optional, quoted separately. Most specifications die on delivery because nobody writes the pages. We write them if you want us to.
Send your company and your market. We will run the analysis and send back a summary naming your competitors, the terms they are winning, and where you sit against them.
No call required and no obligation. Read it, check it yourself, and decide. If the findings are worth discussing after that, we can talk then.