E-mail:
jsem@patrikpilous.cz
My vision
What being an SEO consultant means to me
I think in context and work so that what I do brings my clients as much value as possible. I want to give them inspiration, working solutions and strategic recommendations. Above all, I keep the project moving forward in practice, with a focus on getting the most out of how people search in a given field (from search engines to LLMs). That is essential. I try not to build castles in the air, produce theoretical analyses that end up in a drawer or write SEO audits, and I don’t give recommendations that objectively improve a website’s SEO but do little for the client and their bottom line. Instead, I try to:
- Identify the biggest SEO opportunities with a business impact.
- Work on these opportunities regularly and explain why they matter.
- Continuously track results, evaluate them and stand behind my work.
- Work with the other people and channels on the project.
What does an SEO consultant's work involve?
Setting the SEO strategy
SEO has three main pillars (content SEO, technical SEO and link building). If you want to succeed, you need to build your SEO strategy from these pillars in the right proportions. It is important to link the SEO strategy to the company's business and to track and evaluate the results.
Website architecture and structure
The right project architecture is the foundation on which search engine optimisation for Google, Seznam (Czech search engine) and Bing is built. What is your users' search intent, and which page answers it? The architecture should be based on keyword research and expanded over time.
Identifying opportunities
Using SEO tools and experience, a consultant spots and identifies the opportunities that will bring traffic, leads and orders. A senior SEO specialist is very good at assessing priorities and opportunities. Choosing the right ones and the right way of thinking is essential!
Keyword research
One of the core SEO analyses, and one that can be used across online marketing channels. Keyword research is one of the main inputs for a project's website architecture. Having keyword research is one thing, but working with it systematically is another.
Moving things forward and implementation
In my view, one of the most important things. Even 100 analyses and documents won't get you anywhere if you don't work with them and implement them on your website or other platforms. Over the years, I have learnt to write clear development briefs.
Monitoring competitors
Knowing what competitors are doing, which products they are launching, what they are working on, what works for them and how they are performing. An SEO consultant can also be closely involved in shaping the online business. Their view of the competition and their know-how broaden the inputs for the whole project.
Who have I provided website and SEO consulting for?
My SEO services
I spend the vast majority of my time and work on my ongoing, long-term SEO and link building clients. Ongoing SEO is long-term, consistent work in which I, as your SEO specialist, move you step by step towards the goals we have set. Below you will find out how working with me goes, along with tips on how to set up an SEO consultant’s work in general. I prefer engagements of 15+ hours a month, which allow me to get fully into the project and move it forward. More about my SEO services here.
I only offer one-off SEO consulting occasionally. And I only do SEO audits when the client explicitly asks for one and it makes sense in their case. I have extensive experience mainly in investment and finance, fashion and B2B. I have learnt to do SEO from different sides and angles. I now have 8+ years of experience in the field.
Link building
Link building is a specific discipline for an SEO consultant or SEO specialist that focuses solely on what is known as off-page SEO. This means the work doesn’t depend so much on your website, and the SEO consultant can work almost without your involvement. On all projects where I work as an ongoing SEO consultant, I also work regularly on link building, which is a great complementary activity that increases the authority of both the website and individual pages.
Link building is no longer so much about buying articles. It is better to have a much richer link building mix, for example links through branded queries, work with partners, guest posts, sponsorship and well-thought-out link exchanges. Connecting the brand with business categories is the current trend, and ORM (online reputation management) may be a better name for it. Link building and brand mentions are also interesting today because of new trends in LLMs, led by ChatGPT.
How does working with an SEO specialist on a project work? What is important to set up and what can you expect?
At the start, a lot depends on whether you choose an in-house SEO specialist, a freelance SEO consultant or an agency. As I have tried all three, I know each of them has its own specifics. Some things, however, stay almost the same.
1) SEO is a technique that brings in and works with what is known as organic traffic, today mainly from the Google, Bing and Seznam search engines. An SEO specialist or consultant is the person who identifies the opportunities on your project, the allocation of time, the individual tactics and the approach in this area. Not only for large companies, it pays to create an SEO strategy for the project that reflects the project’s goals and the overall marketing strategy. This SEO strategy is not a document for SEO consultants and specialists. On the contrary, especially at the beginning, it should summarise clearly and simply what the client can expect from the collaboration and from the channel itself.
For the most part, they report to and should work with the project’s marketing manager or online marketing consultant. On smaller projects, they can work independently. An SEO specialist focuses mainly on website optimisation, although in recent years we can also do SEO for Pinterest, YouTube or the so-called GEO for LLMs. GEO is essentially SEO for AI models such as ChatGPT or Perplexity. The aim of GEO is for LLMs to understand your website and brand correctly and to mention and cite them as often as possible in the right contexts and associations. Specialists therefore focus more on the phenomenon of search itself and less on the website as a platform.
An SEO consultant should cooperate with the other channels, and on many projects the SEO specialist is the person who sets the ongoing direction and content creation. They create the SEO strategy and the website’s content strategy and delegate work to copywriters. Today, non-technical SEO takes up far more time on projects than technical SEO. Of course, large projects always need an SEO consultant with deep expertise in technical SEO, because small details applied across hundreds of thousands of pages can generate significant traffic.
For most smaller projects, it is more important to understand why SEO matters and to blend SEO copywriting in the right proportions with the brand message and the marketing communication strategy. One of the key traits of a good SEO person is that they know the industry and take an interest in the client’s business. Without that, it works very poorly. At the start of the collaboration, there is also room for initial SEO audits or, better, more comprehensive SEO analyses, so that the SEO specialist understands the project better.
2) Many SEO consultants simply start working without looking at the client’s business and the possible results. A good SEO specialist should also recognise a project where SEO will bring very little value and tell the client so. On the other hand, there are many SEO consultants with different specialisms. Some dig deeper into technical SEO, while others are great at content creation or link building. Ideally, an SEO consultant should cover all 3 parts of SEO, or on larger projects these parts should be split between several people. Ideally, they should also have some overlap with technical briefs for developers, UX and inbound marketing.
3) Depending on the size of the project, the boundaries between the SEO specialist and the other people on the project should be set right at the start. Will the SEO specialist have access to the website, what will they be able to influence, which system will they work in, what are the client’s expectations, how should the KPIs be set and much more. Simply put, you need to set expectations and the rules of the game.
If your website runs on WordPress, go for a WordPress SEO specialist who has experience with this system and will implement changes directly on the website. Yes, that’s my speciality :). However, you will also find many Shoptet SEO specialists on the market who work almost exclusively with this most popular off-the-shelf e-commerce platform in the Czech Republic. Shoptet SEO is my second favourite platform, and I have several clients on it. From personal experience, I also recommend that the SEO expert meets the people from the company at least once in a while. It helps with motivation and with understanding the project. I am based in Prague, for example, so I prefer working with brands and companies based in and around Prague.
4) Documents or real progress? Some clients prefer documents, while others don’t mind if the SEO specialist works the findings straight into the website. It often depends on the size of the project, but I lean towards the SEO specialist getting quick approval and then implementing the work directly on the website. I have seen many projects where SEO was paid for over months and the only result was a pile of analyses and SEO audits that will never actually raise traffic or revenue. If you do run audits, these documents should not just identify errors but also outline possible solutions (ideally with a clear brief as well).
5) Working on all the pillars of SEO is essential. If only one pillar is developed, the effect will not arrive to the extent you want. This is useful for the client or project manager too. They should ask how we are working on each pillar, what stage we are at and what the obstacles are. In technical SEO, just a few things are often enough on most projects, but content and link building need continuous, consistent work. Together with the client or marketing manager, an SEO consultant mainly tracks these goals and KPIs:
- Revenue from organic search and search engines.
- Number of conversions or leads on different pages of the website.
- Website speed and how users interact with the content.
- Keywords and their rankings.
- Number of indexed pages and their traffic.
- Brand vs. non-brand traffic.
- User behaviour, such as time on page and interaction with content.
- Technical health of the website and monitoring the project’s condition.
What is the difference between an SEO consultant and an SEO specialist?
An SEO consultant is an expert in search engine optimisation and helps companies improve how their websites rank in search results. An SEO consultant’s goals and techniques can be more varied, but the website is still the main focus. In my view, an SEO consultant should develop the project’s potential as fully as possible towards its business and marketing goals. That means building enough awareness of the project and above all maximising its monetisation.
Put simply, an SEO specialist says: “We’ll do it this way and I’ll develop this direction.” Whereas an SEO consultant advises: “Do it this way, here are the advantages and disadvantages.” A specialist is more of an in-house person who knows the project well and also manages all of its SEO. An SEO consultant, on the other hand, is an expert who audits, advises and recommends, most often as an external contractor. If you want SEO consulting, there needs to be someone on your side who understands these things to some extent and knows what to do with them. Someone who understands the context.
A web consultant focuses on the entire website development strategy, from architecture to UX. They also reach into other online marketing channels, and SEO is just one of their main areas.
SEO tools
If a client wants to check an SEO consultant’s or specialist’s expertise, they can ask which tools they use and which SEO tools they pay for. Of course, this is only a small part of the picture, and references and results are always a more important indicator. Here is a list of the SEO tools I use in my own work. My two clear favourites are Google Search Console and Ahrefs.
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- Collabim
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Marketing Miner
Definition: What is SEO?
SEO is a strategy and a set of techniques (tactics) that support organic, unpaid search, which mainly means traffic from Google, Seznam (Czech search engine), Bing or YouTube. The field is changing, though, and SEO has moved from geeks and web consultants to more well-rounded marketing specialists. It is an abbreviation of search engine optimisation. The main goals of SEO are to identify keywords, topics and queries, increase traffic to relevant pages and, for commercial projects in general, increase revenue from organic search. SEO is about creating and structuring content that suits both search engines and people. Read more about what SEO is and how it works here.
Whether you are a client or an SEO specialist, feel free to create something like a maturity model. Look at which stage you are at in each pillar. On larger projects in particular, the marketing manager can then present this status to management and explain how certain steps make sense and can move everything forward. For example, in technical SEO, a well-developed filtering system that is fully indexable and covers hundreds of relevant keywords would help us significantly. On some projects you simply get on with it, but on others it remains a forgotten task somewhere. An SEO consultant also has to fight for their priorities and not let them die.
Patrik Pilous
When a freelance SEO consultant is the right choice
Working with me as a freelance SEO consultant suits companies that need senior SEO experience but do not need, or cannot yet justify, a full-time in-house role. My clients are usually company owners and marketing leaders who want one person responsible for organic search, from priorities to changes on the website.
- Your website already generates sales or leads, and you want organic search to contribute more to revenue.
- You have a marketing team, but nobody on it has deep SEO experience.
- You are an international company in the Czech Republic and need someone who understands local search, including Seznam.
- Your previous SEO work produced reports but little visible progress.
Common mistakes when hiring an SEO expert
- Comparing hourly rates only. What matters more is how much of the paid time turns into real changes on your website.
- Expecting results within weeks. SEO builds up gradually, so you should judge the work by progress on agreed priorities, not by short-term fluctuations.
- Hiring someone without giving them access. If your SEO expert cannot get changes approved or implemented, even good recommendations stay unused.
- Trusting guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls search engines or AI models, so be careful with anyone who promises specific positions.
- Leaving decisions unclear. Agree at the start who approves content, technical changes and budget for link building.
How SEO consulting with me starts
- We talk about your business, your goals and where organic search fits into your marketing.
- I get access to Google Search Console, analytics and, ideally, the website itself, and I review the current state of the project.
- I prepare a short list of priorities for the first months, with an explanation of why each one matters for your business.
- I start working on the priorities straight away, and we meet regularly to review progress and adjust the plan.
This way you see from the start what I am working on and why, without waiting for a long document.
Frequently asked questions about working with an SEO consultant
What does an SEO consultant do?
An SEO consultant finds the opportunities in organic search that matter for your business and helps you act on them. In my case, that means setting priorities, working on content, technical SEO and link building, and tracking the results. I also work with the other people and channels on your project.
Is a freelance SEO consultant better than an agency?
It depends on your project. With a freelance SEO consultant, you work directly with the person who does the work, which often means faster decisions and continuity. An agency can offer more capacity for very large projects, so it is worth considering what your project really needs.
How long does it take for SEO consulting to show results?
SEO usually shows results over months rather than weeks, and the pace depends on your website, competition and how quickly changes can be implemented. I cannot promise specific timelines, but I agree with you at the start which indicators we will track, so you can see progress along the way.
What should I prepare before hiring an SEO expert?
It helps to know your business goals, your main products or services and who on your side will approve changes. Access to Google Search Console, analytics and your website will also speed up the start. If you have previous audits or reports, share them too.
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