Small Business SEO Consultant
SEO & AI Search Visibility Consulting
Getting found isn't luck. It's architecture. And there's a lot more of it behind a search result than most people ever see.
See Your Options ↓Before we get into it
Every ordinary desk has a lot going on underneath it.
Most of what actually determines whether a business gets found — by a person searching, or by an AI system deciding what to cite — happens somewhere nobody thinks to look. Structural decisions. Technical signals. Hundreds of small, specific factors that either work together or quietly fight each other.
Here’s the part nobody shows you, and what that picture actually looks like.
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Everything that has to work together
This is what most people never see
Click any point of light.
- Vector Embeddings: The mathematical way AI systems represent meaning, used to decide what's actually relevant to a question.
- Knowledge Graph Presence: Whether AI systems know who you are as a distinct, connected entity, not just a name on a page.
- Canonicalization (Canonical Tags): One clear signal for which version of a page is the "real" one, so duplicates don't compete with each other.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Readiness: Whether your content is structured cleanly enough for an AI system to pull from it accurately when generating an answer.
- E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust): Google's framework for deciding whether content came from someone who actually knows the subject.
- Named Entity Recognition: How AI systems identify specific people, places, and things, and connect them to what's already known.
- Passage-Level Indexing: Search engines can now rank a single paragraph, not just a whole page.
- LLM Citation Patterns: AI models tend to cite clear, confidently-stated answers, not vague or hedged ones
- Content Chunking: Breaking information into self-contained pieces an AI system can extract and quote correctly
- Topic Clustering: Grouping related content so AI systems see real depth on a subject, not scattered pages.
- Semantic Relevance: Matching meaning and context, not just matching keywords word-for-word.
- Prompt-Level Visibility: Whether your business shows up when someone asks an AI system a real question, not just types a search.
- Structured Data for AI Parsing: The same markup that helps search engines also helps AI models understand your content faster.
- AI Overviews / SGE Visibility: Whether your content gets pulled into the AI-generated answer box above the regular results.
- Schema Markup: Machine-readable structure that tells search engines and AI exactly what's on the page.
- Backlink Diversity: Other sites vouching for yours, quality and diversity matter more than raw count.
- Core Web Vitals: .How fast and stable the page feels to load and use.
- Site Architecture: How pages connect to each other so nothing gets lost or buried.
- Mobile-First Indexing: Google mostly judges your site by its mobile version now, not desktop.
- Visual Hierarchy: Whether a visitor's eye naturally goes to what matters most first, or has to hunt for it.
- Mobile Usability: The same site can feel effortless on desktop and frustrating on a phone if it wasn't built mobile-first
- Trust Signal Placement: Where credibility markers sit on the page changes whether they get seen at the moment they're needed.
21+ years in SEO and digital marketing
14 years running Howard SEM Group, my own firm
Built and led a small marketing team for a Chamber-run, grant-funded small business consulting program (2010–2012), one client from that program remains a current client today.
Currently applying the same strategy on a live franchise platform with real structural constraints
Pick the Path That Fits Where You Are
Get a Straight Answer
Technical SEO & AI-Visibility Audit (For when you need clarity before committing to anything.)
From $897 02Ongoing Strategy & Execution
Monthly Consulting Retainer (For businesses ready to act on it, month over month.)
From $1,250/mo 03White-Label Support
Agency Partner Program (For agencies who want this expertise under their own brand.)
Custom QuotePath 01
A Full Technical SEO & AI-Visibility Audit — $897
Before you spend a dollar on ongoing SEO consulting services, you should know exactly what’s actually broken. That’s what this is.
- A full technical crawl and indexation review
- Schema markup audit
- Keyword cannibalization and content overlap analysis
- Core Web Vitals / page speed diagnostic
- AI-visibility check — how citable your content is to AI systems
- A written report with prioritized fixes
- A 30-minute call to walk through it together
Delivered within 7–10 business days (No obligation to continue, some clients stop here, and that's fine.)
Request an AuditPath 02
Ongoing SEO & AI Search Visibility Consulting
SEO isn't a one-time fix. This is for businesses that want someone actively managing strategy month over month.
Foundation
Starting at $1,250/mo
Small businesses getting SEO right for the first time
- Technical SEO foundation
- Local SEO / Google Business Profile
- Foundational AI-visibility (GEO) work
Growth
Starting at $2,500/mo
Ready to compete seriously in organic and AI search
- Everything in Foundation
- Content strategy & optimization
- Structured data / schema build-out
- Ongoing AI-citation tracking
Strategic Partner
Starting at $4,500/mo
Competitive markets needing full strategic ownership
- Everything in Growth
- Multi-site / multi-property strategy — built for businesses managing more than one brand or domain, not just a single site
- Named competitor tracking — a quarterly deep-dive on who you're actually losing ground to, not abstract industry benchmarks
- Dedicated monthly strategy call, plus priority email/Slack response — direct access to me, not a support queue
- A seat in your bigger business planning conversations — not just SEO execution, but part of the discussions SEO strategy actually feeds into
A note on link building: I don't run in-house mass link outreach. When a strategy calls for link acquisition or digital PR, I bring in vetted partners rather than diluting quality for volume.
Start With a ConversationPath 03
White-Label SEO & AI-Visibility Support for Agencies
If you run a Marketing, P.R. or Web Design Agency and need real SEO and GEO expertise without hiring in-house, this is built for that. I work under your brand — your client never sees my name unless you want them to.
Need Something Narrower? — $200/hr
Need a second opinion, a specific technical fix, or a strategy session to point your in-house team in the right direction? No minimum commitment.
Book a SessionWhat Generative Engine Optimization Actually Means
Search isn’t just Google’s ten blue links anymore. AI systems — ChatGPT, Gemini, Google’s AI Overviews — are answering questions directly, and they decide what to cite based on different signals than traditional rankings alone.
Generative engine optimization is the practice of structuring a site so those systems can actually find, trust, and quote it. That overlaps with traditional SEO in places, but it’s not the same discipline. A page can rank well in classic search and still be invisible to an AI system that can’t cleanly extract what it’s about.
LLM optimization (Large Language Model – a type of artificial intelligence trained on massive amounts of text) is the more technical piece underneath that: making sure your content is chunked, labeled, and marked up in a way large language models can parse and pull from accurately, instead of skipping over because the structure is too messy to trust.
That’s the actual work behind everything you just saw in that vortex above — it’s not one trick, it’s a lot of small structural decisions working together.
Common Questions
An agency usually means multiple people touching your account. With a consultant, you're working directly with the person doing the strategic thinking, every time.
Not required, but recommended if you don't already have a clear picture of what's broken.
It's how well your business shows up when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google's AI Overviews a question instead of typing a search query.
The Foundation retainer tier and the one-time audit are both built with smaller budgets in mind.
No, and anyone who does is not being straight with you. What I can guarantee is a technically sound foundation, clear reporting, and strategy grounded in how search actually works today.
Fair question, and a common one — the industry has a real reputation problem. The difference is specificity: everything on this page is a real deliverable with a real price, not a vague retainer with vague promises. Ask me anything before you sign up.
Let's Figure Out Where You Actually Stand
Whether that's a straight technical audit, ongoing strategy, or agency support — the first step is the same conversation.
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