Every SEO Strategy engagement follows the same structured methodology — whether you’re a healthcare IT company targeting enterprise buyers, a criminal defence firm competing in London, or a SaaS platform positioning for AI visibility. The steps scale to your situation, but the process is consistent because consistency is what produces compounding results.
This page explains exactly how we work: what happens at each stage, what you’ll receive, how long it takes, and what role you play. No vague promises, no generic “discovery phase” language. Specifics.
The Operating Principle: Systems, Not Campaigns
Most SEO agencies sell campaigns — bursts of activity with start and end dates. We build visibility systems. The distinction matters because campaigns decay the moment they stop. Systems compound. Each month’s work builds on the previous month’s foundation: entity authority strengthens, content depth increases, structured data coverage expands, and AI citation frequency grows.
This is why our longest client relationships span a decade. Not because they’re locked into contracts — because stopping would mean abandoning a system that’s generating measurable, attributable pipeline value every month.
Phase 1: Discovery Audit
Every engagement starts with a comprehensive audit. Not a template. Not an automated crawl report with a cover page. A genuine, senior-level analysis of your current visibility — where you rank, where AI systems cite you (or don’t), what your competitors are doing better, and where the highest-value opportunities are.
What We Assess
Technical foundation — crawlability, indexation health, Core Web Vitals, mobile-first compliance, XML sitemap accuracy, robots.txt configuration, canonical management, and rendering integrity. We run a full Screaming Frog crawl cross-referenced with Google Search Console data to identify issues that automated tools miss.
Entity authority — how clearly do Google and AI systems understand who you are? We test your brand’s entity recognition across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. We audit your structured data graph for completeness, accuracy and conflicts. We check your sameAs links, Wikidata presence, and cross-platform consistency.
Content citability — can AI systems extract, understand and cite your content? We evaluate your top 20 pages for declarative openings, heading hierarchy, extractable definitions, FAQ structure, and content architecture. Pages that read well to humans but are structurally opaque to AI get flagged.
Competitive positioning — who is being cited where you should be? We run your priority queries across AI platforms and document which competitors appear, what they’re doing right, and where the gaps are that you can exploit.
What You Receive
A detailed audit document with prioritised findings, not a 200-page data dump. Every finding includes what the issue is, why it matters commercially, and exactly how to fix it. The audit concludes with a strategic roadmap — a sequenced plan of action ranked by impact and effort, designed to deliver measurable results within the first 90 days.
Typical turnaround: 7–10 working days for a comprehensive SEO and AI visibility audit.
Phase 2: Entity Foundation
Before we touch content or chase rankings, we build the entity layer that everything else depends on. This is the step most agencies skip entirely — and it’s the reason their clients struggle to appear in AI-generated answers regardless of how much content they publish.
Entity SEO establishes your brand as a known, verifiable entity in the systems that matter: Google’s Knowledge Graph, Wikidata, large language models, and AI retrieval systems. The work includes comprehensive Organisation and Person JSON-LD schema with knowsAbout properties, sameAs links, and @id graph connections. It includes cross-platform consistency checks and fixes — ensuring your business name, description, services and contact details are identical across LinkedIn, Wikidata, Companies House, industry directories and your own site.
This phase typically takes 2–4 weeks and produces the machine-readable identity layer that AI systems need before they’ll cite you with confidence.
View full diagram (PDF) — the entity architecture we build for every client engagement.
Phase 3: Content Architecture
With the entity foundation in place, we restructure your content for both human readers and AI extraction. This is not “write more blog posts.” It’s an architectural discipline.
We audit your existing content against your target queries and identify gaps — topics where you should be the authority but have no content, or where your content exists but isn’t structured for AI extraction. We build topic clusters with clear parent-child page hierarchies, internal link strategies that reinforce topical authority, and heading structures that map to the questions AI systems decompose from complex queries.
Every page we create or restructure follows the same principles: declarative opening within 120 words, clear standalone definitions in each section, FAQ pairs for question-intent queries, and content depth that exceeds anything a competitor has published on the same topic. This is the content architecture that AI delivery systems reward.
Phase 4: Schema Implementation
Structured data is the machine-readable clarity layer that transforms good content into citable content. We implement JSON-LD schema at the theme level — compiled from defined fields, validated automatically, de-duplicated with SEO plugin output, and connected via @id references into a coherent knowledge graph.
The schema stack covers Organisation (entity identity), Person (author authority), Service (commercial offerings), FAQPage (extractable Q&A pairs), HowTo (procedural content), Article (content provenance), BreadcrumbList (site hierarchy), and SpeakableSpecification (AI voice delivery). Each type serves a specific function in making your content parseable, verifiable and citable across Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI agents.
We validate everything through Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator before deployment. Zero errors, zero warnings. The speakable article on this site, for instance, deployed with four validated schema types: HowTo, BreadcrumbList, Article and FAQPage — an article about schema that implements schema.
Phase 5: AI Visibility Monitoring
You can’t optimise what you don’t measure. AI visibility tracking is fundamentally different from traditional rank tracking because AI systems don’t produce stable, repeatable results the way Google organic does. The same query asked to ChatGPT twice may produce different citations. Perplexity may cite you today and a competitor tomorrow.
We run monthly AI citation audits across your priority queries, tracking which platforms cite you, how accurately they represent your brand, which competitors appear instead, and how your citation frequency changes over time. This produces a trend line — not a snapshot — that shows whether your LLM visibility is improving, plateauing or declining.
We also monitor for brand narrative accuracy — what AI systems say about you when your brand is mentioned. Incorrect claims, outdated information and competitor confusion are flagged and addressed through content updates and entity signal strengthening.
Phase 6: Ongoing Optimisation
Visibility systems compound. Each month’s work builds on the previous month’s foundation. Ongoing optimisation includes new content development within your topic clusters, technical SEO maintenance as your site evolves, schema expansion as new pages are published, AI citation monitoring and response to platform changes, competitive analysis updates, and strategic adjustments based on what the data shows.
Most retainer engagements run 2–3 days per month. Some enterprise clients require more. The work is always prioritised by impact — we focus on whatever will produce the most measurable improvement in the current month while building the foundation for the next.
What Makes This Different
Three things separate this from how agencies typically operate.
Senior-led, every engagement. You work directly with the consultant who has 20+ years of experience and deep expertise in your sector. Not a junior account manager, not a rotating team, not a white-labelled subcontractor. The person who conducts your audit is the person who implements the strategy and monitors the results. This eliminates the translation loss that occurs when strategy and execution are separated.
We implement, not just recommend. Unlike consultancies that produce strategy documents and hand them to your development team, we build the solutions ourselves. Custom WordPress development, schema markup, interactive tools, technical implementations — all built in-house using our AI-assisted development methodology. When we identify an issue in the audit, we fix it. When the strategy calls for a new page, we create it. When schema needs implementing, we write and deploy the JSON-LD. No handoff, no waiting for your dev queue.
Entity-first, not keyword-first. Traditional SEO starts with keywords and works backwards. We start with your entity — who you are, what you’re authoritative for, how machines verify your identity — and build outward. This produces results that work across search engines and AI platforms simultaneously, rather than optimising for one channel at a time.
Who This Is For (and Who It Isn’t)
Our engagement model works best for businesses that operate in competitive B2B or professional services markets where the cost of a new client justifies proper investment in visibility. Healthcare IT companies, law firms, SaaS platforms, enterprise software vendors, professional services consultancies — these are the sectors where we’ve built genuine depth of expertise and where our methodology produces the strongest results.
This is probably not the right fit if you’re looking for a low-cost monthly SEO package, if you need someone to manage your social media alongside SEO, if your budget is under £1,200 per month, or if you want quick wins without building long-term infrastructure. We’re selective about who we work with because every client gets direct senior attention, and we’d rather be honest about fit than take on work we can’t deliver excellence on.
If this sounds like what you need, book a free 30-minute consultation. We’ll discuss your current visibility, the opportunities available to you, and whether we’re the right fit. No hard sell, no generic proposals.
