Six disciplines, and what's actually under each

01 — Technical SEO and crawl architecture

The layer that decides whether anything else you do gets counted. If Google can't crawl a page cleanly, can't resolve which version is canonical, or spends its budget on 4,000 faceted URLs, no amount of content fixes it.

• Crawl and indexation — crawl budget allocation, indexation gaps, soft 404s, noindex and robots conflicts, sitemap accuracy against what's actually indexed.
• URL and canonical logic — duplication, parameter handling, faceted navigation, pagination, redirect chains and loops.
• Rendering — JavaScript-dependent content, hydration gaps, what the crawler sees versus what the user does.
• Performance — Core Web Vitals as an actual field-data problem, not a Lighthouse score screenshot.
• Internal linking — the link graph that tells Google which of your pages you think matter, modelled rather than guessed.
• Internationalisation — hreflang, market targeting and the duplicate-content problems that come with en-US / en-GB pairs.

Diagnosed against Google Search Console, a full Screaming Frog crawl and, where available, server logs. Not against a plugin's traffic-light score.

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02 — Local SEO and Google Business Profile

For a business with a service radius, the map pack is often the whole game — an organic position 4 below three local results is a rounding error.

• Google Business Profile — primary and secondary category strategy, services and attributes, description, photo cadence, Q&A, and the posts that actually affect anything.
• Proximity, prominence, relevance — working each of the three ranking factors deliberately instead of hoping.
• NAP and citations — consistency auditing across the aggregators and directories that feed the local graph.
• Reviews — velocity, recency, response, and keyword presence in review text.
• Service-area architecture — how to structure coverage for a business that serves 40 towns from one address without generating 40 near-duplicate pages.
• Location pages — genuinely differentiated: local proof, real service specifics, local landmarks and constraints. Not a find-and-replace on the city name.

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03 — Entity SEO and topical authority

Search stopped being about strings a long time ago. The question a modern engine asks is "what is this thing, and how does it relate to the other things I know about" — and a site that can't answer that clearly loses to one that can, regardless of word count.

• Topical maps — the full set of subtopics and attributes that define competence in a subject, mapped against what the site actually covers.
• Structured data — Schema.org graphs cross-referenced by @id so Person, Organization, WebSite and WebPage resolve as one connected entity. Most sites emit four unlinked blobs and get nothing for it.
• Disambiguation — sameAs pointing at profiles that actually exist, plus corroboration from third-party sources the engines already trust.
• Content gap and depth gap — what competitors cover that you don't, and where you cover the same subject more shallowly.
• Cannibalisation — finding the pages competing with each other for the same intent and deciding which one wins.

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04 — Generative and answer engine optimisation

Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini increasingly answer the question outright. Being in that answer is a different job from ranking, and it needs different measurement.

• Entity clarity first — a model can only cite you confidently if it knows unambiguously what you are. This is why GEO and entity SEO are the same work.
• Answer-shaped content — a direct, extractable answer in the first two sentences, then the supporting detail. Written to be quoted, not to hit a word count.
• Query fan-out — generative systems decompose one prompt into many sub-queries. Enumerating that fan-out is the only way to know what you're actually competing on.
• Citable corroboration — the third-party sources these systems read, and getting represented in them accurately.
• Measurement — citation and mention share across answer engines, tracked over time, reported as its own metric rather than folded into "traffic".

GEO is not a separate product. It's SEO done properly, with the measurement changed. Be sceptical of anyone selling it as a new line item.

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05 — Programmatic and location-page SEO

Building 60 pages for 60 towns is easy. Building 60 pages that get indexed, rank, and don't read as spam is the actual work.

• Data and template design — what genuinely varies per page, and whether there's enough of it to justify the page existing.
• Differentiation logic — the threshold below which a page shouldn't ship at all.
• Internal link distribution — so authority reaches the long tail instead of pooling on the hub.
• Indexation monitoring — checking what's actually in the index rather than what was submitted. This is the step almost everyone skips and it's where programmatic builds quietly fail.
• Pruning — removing what didn't earn its place, on a schedule.

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06 — Measurement and diagnostics

Reporting that answers "did this work", including when the honest answer is "we can't cleanly tell yet".

• Source of truth — Google Search Console and GA4. Ahrefs, Semrush and DataForSEO are used constantly, and labelled as estimates every time. A Domain Rating is a vendor's opinion, not a fact about Google.
• Click gap — queries with impressions and no clicks, and why.
• Position bands — movement within bands, because an average position hides everything that matters.
• Cannibalisation tracking — URLs swapping for the same query over time.
• Dashboards — Looker Studio, built once and left running, rather than a monthly hand-assembled PDF.

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What I don't do

Worth being explicit, because it saves us both a call:

• Paid media — Google Ads, Meta Ads, LSA management.
• Brand strategy, positioning workshops, full-funnel consulting.
• Web design as a standalone service. I'll spec and build what search requires; I'm not your design studio.
• Link buying, PBNs, or anything sold as "guaranteed rankings". If someone guarantees you a position, they're guaranteeing something they don't control.