SEO consultant for B2B companies

Is SEO still worth paying for now that AI answers the question?

For most B2B companies, yes, as long as the searches you’re paying to win can help you win business. AI has changed which searches send clicks. A lot of simple informational questions now get answered on the results page or inside ChatGPT before anyone visits a site. The searches buyers make while they work out a problem, set requirements or compare suppliers still matter, and a lot of the same work helps you show up in AI answers too.

So the test for every SEO dollar is whether it has a credible business purpose. An SEO consultant’s job is to apply that test, keyword by keyword, and keep your budget where it passes.

What does an SEO consultant actually do?

Three things, mostly. Diagnose what’s going on with your search visibility and why. Decide what’s worth going after, given your buyers and your budget. And judge the work, whoever is doing it, against what it was supposed to achieve.

I learned this from the practitioner side first. Before I had a company of my own, I stood up an agency’s SEO practice from nothing. Since then I’ve run SEO through my own agency for years. These days most of my SEO work is on the owner’s side of the table: reading what an agency is reporting, deciding where the next dollar goes, and spotting when the activity has drifted away from the business.

The diagnosis starts with the business before any tool. Which products matter most, which customers are profitable, and what sales is trying to grow. That’s what the search work should be aimed at, and it changes which keywords look attractive.

A good consultant also tells you when SEO isn’t the right next move. If your site can’t convert the visitors it already gets, more traffic is an expensive way to find that out.

What I look at first

When someone asks me to look at their SEO, the first few hours tend to go the same way.

Search Console before anything else. Which searches you show up for, which ones get clicked, and how that’s moved over the last year. It’s Google’s reported impressions and clicks for your site, the closest thing you have to Google’s own view. It leaves some searches out, so I read it alongside analytics and your CRM. Tools like Ahrefs are great for research, but I wouldn’t use one as the final word on whether you rank.

Which pages produce conversations. Usually a handful of pages do most of the work, and they’re rarely the ones the content calendar was built around. If your CRM records where leads came from, this part goes much faster.

The results pages for the searches that matter. I read them the way a buyer would: who ranks, what kind of page wins, whether there’s an AI answer or a map pack pushing everything down. That tells you what Google thinks the searcher wants, which beats any volume number.

What your competitors’ pages actually say. I read their content more closely than their domain ratings. In a lot of B2B categories the pages ranking are thin and generic, which is good news if you have real expertise to put on the page.

The technical side. Whether Google can crawl the site and index the pages that matter, how the site is structured and linked internally, whether several pages compete for the same search, whether pages load reasonably fast, and whether a past redesign left broken redirects behind. I check these early because a technical problem can undermine the rest of the work. When a site needs a deeper technical audit than a review, I bring in a specialist from my bench.

What AI tools say about you. I ask ChatGPT and Gemini the kinds of questions your buyers would ask, without naming you, and look at which sources they cite. It’s a quick read on whether the search work is reaching the places AI now pulls from.

Out of that comes a short list: what’s working and should get more, what’s wasted and should stop, and the two or three things worth doing next. Each item gets an owner and a way to measure it. That list is usually more valuable than another month of activity.

500 searches a month, and none of them are your buyers

A while back I was doing keyword research for a B2B technology client and found a term they should absolutely own, on paper. Good volume, about five hundred searches a month, squarely in their category, and the competitors ranking for it weren’t strong.

Then I read the search results. Google is smart enough now that the results page basically tells you what the searcher wants, and these results pointed to a different need from the one the client served. It would have been a lovely ranking and a worthless one.

That’s why I do this research almost keyword by keyword. It’s slower and harder than pulling a list from a tool and sorting by volume, and it keeps budget off searches that are unlikely to bring the right buyers. The TDI work on this page is the fuller example: every product and application page was mapped to a commercial search before the site was built, and the case study reports that when algorithm updates went through the industry, those commercial terms held steady. That was one period for one client, and no plan protects a site from every update. It does show what the mapping is for.

What AI search changes, and why traffic can fall while leads hold

The old model of content marketing was to publish articles that answered every question near your topic, rank for them, and collect the traffic. Plenty of companies built their whole program on that. Those articles now compete with an AI answer that sits above them, and the traffic they used to earn is shrinking.

I’m still completely behind content marketing. It just needs to be done for different purposes, and with more nuance. Research content still earns its place when it helps a buyer understand a problem or set requirements before they ever talk to sales, as long as someone can say what it’s for. The content worth making now answers the questions your buyers need resolved, backs the answers with experience, and gives both people and AI tools something specific to quote.

That’s also why something I hear a lot right now is some version of “traffic is down, sometimes a lot, and leads are flat.” Before anyone panics, I’d ask whether the traffic you lost was ever driving business. Flat leads alone don’t answer that. A longer sales cycle, another channel picking up the slack, or a change in how leads are tracked can all produce the same picture. So I check which pages lost visits, whether qualified opportunities changed, and how long those visitors usually take to become customers. Then we decide whether recovering that traffic deserves the money, or whether the budget is better spent on the pages that do produce conversations. When leads are falling along with traffic, that’s a different problem, and usually worth a proper diagnosis before anyone writes another article.

A lot of the work helps both kinds of search: clear pages about what you do, proof that you’ve done it, a site that’s technically sound, your name showing up in trusted places next to the problems you solve. There are also questions specific to AI, like how assistants describe you and which sources they cite, and those have their own page on answer engine optimization. Here the focus is organic search and what it contributes to the business. The two overlap more than the page names suggest.

If you want the mechanics of how search engines and AI tools decide what a brand is, I wrote about it in how to build a brand that both humans and AI trust.

Signs you need an SEO consultant

• Your agency reports rankings and traffic and never mentions pipeline.
• Traffic or leads have moved and nobody can tell you why.
• You’re about to redesign the site. Even a good redesign can cause some ranking volatility, because Google sees the whole site change and needs time to sort it out. It’s easier to plan for than to recover from.
• Competitors outrank you on the searches your buyers use, and you suspect your own expertise would make a better page if someone pointed the effort.
• You’re spending on SEO and can’t say what you’d lose if you stopped.

SEO consultant vs SEO agency

The labels matter less than which job you need covered: advice on direction, someone to run the search program, the work itself (technical fixes, content, links, reporting), or a combination. Good agencies diagnose and set direction too, and I sometimes do the work myself. What matters is that someone on your side of the table is accountable for aiming it and judging it.

A common version once SEO matters to your pipeline is an in-house marketer who owns it day to day, with a consultant checking the direction every month. That tends to suit companies with a steady content need and someone on staff who’s curious about search. Which setup fits depends on your volume of work and who you already have.

I founded Connective Web Design, which does SEO, and I still lead it. It’s one option when you need execution, alongside your own team and specialists I trust.

How do you find a good SEO consultant?

Ask what they’d look at first, and listen for your business in the answer. Someone who only talks about tools and tactics is selling you activity.

A few things that should make you careful:

• Guaranteed rankings or lead numbers by a date. Nobody controls Google’s results. What a consultant controls is the craftsmanship, the timing, how it’s measured, and when you’ll review the data together.
• Tactics that sound too clever. Gray-hat and black-hat link schemes can put your entire domain at risk of being penalized or dropped by Google. I’d never recommend them, however good the short-term chart looks.
• No talk of cost per outcome. That “free” organic traffic isn’t free once you count content and people, which I break down in the post on customer acquisition cost.

And ask how long before you should see results, then ask them to break the answer into parts. The diagnosis should have a delivery date you agree up front. Implementation depends on how much there is to do and who’s doing it. After that, the signals arrive in order: impressions and rankings for the target searches first, then clicks, then qualified conversations. Organic is a long-term play. I’ve seen companies climb fast in competitive spaces, and I’ve seen others take much longer. A good consultant tells you which one you’re likely to be and why, and sets a date to check.

What it costs

The fee covers my time. Agency and specialist work is scoped and approved separately. What you need from me depends on whether it’s a one-off diagnosis, ongoing advice, or someone to run the search program, and the three levels are in the FAQs below and on Work With Me.

I’m based in Houston and work with companies across the U.S. If your site is due for a rebuild at the same time, the website consultant page covers how I approach that, because the two decisions are best made together.

Related: I do a lot of keyword work in plain spreadsheets, because they make it easy to sort and argue about a few hundred keywords one row at a time. The formulas I use are in the complete guide to Google Sheet formulas for SEO.