Buyers often ask what a year of working together actually looks like, week to week. The honest answer is that it varies, but the shape is consistent enough to describe. This is what a typical twelve-month senior-led SEO engagement runs like, in roughly the order it tends to unfold.
Month 0: the audit
Before contracts. A proper audit takes me two to three weeks. Technical, content, entity, AI visibility, competitive context. The output is a ranked plan with everything I’d work on, in priority order, with rough effort estimates and an honest read on which problems are actually solvable and which aren’t. About half of intro calls end here — the firm takes the plan, executes it themselves or with another partner, we shake hands.
Months 1–3: foundations
If we proceed, the first quarter is foundations. Technical debt cleanup. Schema markup properly implemented. Author profiles and Person schema for named experts. Practice area or service page restructure if needed. Local SEO setup or remediation. Almost no new content. Almost no public-facing change. This is the boring, compounding work that everything else depends on.
Months 4–6: content and entity
Second quarter shifts to building. Sector-anchored content under named experts, briefed by me and drafted by your team (or by me, depending on what we agreed). Entity work — knowledge graph alignment, sameAs links, Wikipedia/Wikidata where it’s appropriate. First AI search visibility baseline and tactical work.
Months 7–9: AI search and digital PR
By month seven the foundations are paying back — organic traffic on priority pages is moving, the audit’s top-priority items are done. The work shifts to AI search visibility tracking and tactical optimisation, and — where the firm has the right expertise to justify it — modest digital PR to earn editorial citations.
Months 10–12: review and renew
Final quarter is consolidation. What worked, what didn’t, what the next year would focus on. Honest commercial outcomes review against the targets we set in month zero. Most engagements renew here. Some don’t — either the firm has internalised enough to take it from there, or we conclude the work has done what it set out to.
What it doesn’t look like
Weekly status calls. Forty-page reports. “Twelve content pieces this month”. Constant context-switching across tactical bursts. The engagement runs on quarterly commercial targets and monthly check-ins, not on filling billable hours.
If your firm is considering this kind of engagement, the intro call is here.
