SEO for Consultants: Ranking #1 on Google and Winning Client Enquiries from ChatGPT
Learn how we helped Rachel Hughes FCILT, founder of Surbon Consulting, turn her website into a client-generating asset, through SEO, content strategy, and website improvements that reflect the calibre of her work.
#1
Google organic rankings for core target keywords
+100%
Year-over-year growth in organic traffic
+800%
Year-over-year growth in organic impressions
+150%
Growth in email subscriber list in 6 months
Client Portrait
Rachel Hughes FCILT, Founder of Surbon Consulting
Rachel Hughes
Director & founder of Surbon Consulting
Rachel runs a specialist transport consultancy helping operators and organisations win government contracts, navigate bid requirements, and implement sustainability and social value frameworks in their transport bids.
🌐 surbonconsulting.com
🎯 Focus: SEO & Website
The Challenge
Where Rachel’s Website Was Underperforming
Rachel is an established transport consultant with a successful business. Her website had already brought her clients directly, and she could see the potential to grow that channel further. The question was how.
By the time Rachel reached out, she had been trying to move things forward for months. Updates to her website were slow to ship and SEO improvements were not progressing. She had also done her own research, getting three separate quotes from agencies and being told three different things. One of them recommended scrapping the existing website and rebuilding it from scratch for £10,000, which, as our audit would later confirm, was not necessary.
Rachel was introduced to us through her business coach, Melisa Liberman. She knew she needed expert support but did not have the time, internal resources, or technical knowledge to take this on herself. What she was looking for was someone who could plan the work, run the process, and keep things moving.
“I could never get my web developer to do any updates. They took months, and when I asked for SEO updates I couldn’t get anything done. It was very frustrating. I had won 2 new clients from my website in the past and I knew there was untapped potential — but I was unable to take this forward and grow my business.”
— Rachel Hughes, Surbon Consulting
What our SEO audit found
When we audited the site, the issues fell into three areas, all of them fixable.
The website had built up a lot of lower-value posts and company updates over the years, which was diluting the overall quality of the site in Google’s eyes. Core pages, the homepage, services, and about page, were not written in a way that made it clear who Rachel helps and what she offers. And the technical SEO foundation needed work: metadata was thin, there were indexing problems, page speed was slow, and the site structure was not making it easy for search engines to understand the consultancy.
The bigger gap, though, was content. Rachel’s ideal clients were already searching Google for the questions she answers every day. None of that content existed on her site.
Our Approach
How We Did SEO for an Independent Transport Consultancy
SEO for consultants is not the same as SEO for e-commerce or SaaS. When you are selling expertise, in a high-ticket, relationship-driven industry, the goal is not mass traffic. It is being found by the right person at the right point in their decision-making.
Our approach for Rachel combined a technical foundation, a content strategy mapped to how her clients actually search, and conversion improvements to turn visitors into enquiries.
Phase 1: Improving the technical foundation and restructuring the website
For a consulting website, the technical foundation is not glamorous, but it sets the ceiling for everything else. No amount of great content will perform if Google cannot crawl the site properly, if pages take too long to load, or if the site structure is sending the wrong signals about who you are and what you do. Before we wrote a single new word for Rachel, we made sure the foundation could carry the strategy we had in mind.
A clean technical base
We started with a full technical audit, then fixed the underlying issues: pages that were not being indexed correctly, URLs that needed consolidating, metadata that was not earning clicks, and hosting that was slowing the whole site down. The principle here is simple. Your website should make it as easy as possible for both readers and search engines to understand what you do. We left Rachel’s site with a clean, fast, properly indexed foundation to build on.
A site structure that signals quality
Consulting websites often accumulate years of company updates, old posts, and one-off pages that no longer reflect the business. Each of those low-value pages dilutes the overall quality of the site in Google’s eyes. We consolidated this older content into a dedicated area and reduced the overall page count, sharpening the signal that the site is a focused expert resource. Less, but better.
Core pages that reflect the business today
We rewrote and relaunched the homepage, services page, about page, and blog. Each one was rebuilt to communicate clearly who Rachel helps, what she offers, and why she is the right choice. We also created dedicated service sub-pages for the specific areas her clients search for, including transport bid writing and sustainability frameworks.
Speed as a quiet SEO factor
Page speed rarely makes headlines, but for a consulting website it has a compounding effect: faster sites get crawled more often, rank better, and convert visitors more reliably. We moved Rachel’s site to faster hosting and configured caching and a CDN properly. The result was a site that loads quickly enough to keep search engines and visitors engaged.
Phase 2: Building a content strategy that maps to how consultants are actually found
Once the technical foundation was in place, the work shifted to content. Content is where SEO for consultants is won or lost, because it is the only part of your website that can show up in search for the questions your future clients are actually asking.
We mapped the full journey of Rachel’s audience, transport operators and procurement professionals bidding for UK government contracts, and built a content plan that met them at every stage.
Over six months we helped Rachel produce 12 articles alongside the core page relaunches. We did not just hand Rachel a list of topics. We gave her well-researched, fully structured outlines with instructions, so she could put her expertise into each piece without wasting time on research. Bi-weekly check-ins kept things moving and made the project feel like a shared goal rather than a hand-off.
“You were genuinely interested and created an achievable plan with fortnightly check-ins to keep me on progress to produce content. It feels like a shared goal, which is great.”
— Rachel Hughes, Surbon Consulting
Phase 3: Improving conversions and earning visibility in Google and ChatGPT
By this point Rachel had a fast, well-structured website with a growing library of content. The next step was making sure that work translated into visibility across the channels her ideal clients actually use, including the newer ones.
Commercial website optimization
We tightened the call-to-action flow across the site, set up a clear path from the blog to the contact page, and helped Rachel build a lead magnet that connected to her email list.
Earning visibility in AI search
A growing share of consulting buyers now start their search in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, not just the traditional results page. We made sure Rachel’s site was set up to be cited and recommended in those answers. As a result, Surbon Consulting now appears in ChatGPT recommendations for relevant transport bid queries, and the AI Overview features her content for several core terms.
Outcomes
The Results: Rankings, Leads & Real Growth
#1
Google organic rankings for primary target keywords (UK & US)
+100%
Year-over-year growth in organic clicks (Q4 comparison)
+800%
Year-over-year growth in organic impressions
+150%
Email subscriber list growth in 6 months
+12
New SEO-optimized articles published in 6 months
3×
Visibility channels: organic, video pack, AI Overviews
+5
High-value enquiries from Google and ChatGPT recommendations
“I have received 5 inquiries of work from this in the past year. My website actually reflects what I offer. I liked my website design before — I know I am biased — but now it has improved immeasurably. It is far more comprehensive with a lot more content and SEO optimised.”
— Rachel Hughes, Surbon Consulting
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