No one gets out of bed in the morning wanting to be an SEO consultant Martin Hayman. People sort of trip into it, often after salvaging a trainwreck of a website for a friend and suddenly finding you’re weirdly good at predicting algorithmic whims. The author comes later.
Or sometimes first.
It doesn’t actually matter much. What matters is the battle on the battlefield between the two. Consulting is dirty, grimy work. Google sends your client’s site to the dust heap Tuesday and you spend your day staring at the Search Console, trying to reverse engineer the overnight change from nothing but scars and gut instinct.
There’s no playbook in consulting; you infer what you can from patterns, history, and years of painful experience.
It’s less science, more crime scene investigation with a hard deadline. Writing is a different beast. It slows down the process.
You can’t blame Google when your paragraphs don’t work; when an entire chapter fallsflat, well, the fault lies squarely with your own shortcomings – something you recognize with humiliating clarity when you’re rereading it at 1 am with a growing dread that it might actually have been written by a poorlyprogrammedbot The two discipline, consulting and writing, pull at each other from opposite directions creating something more comprehensive than could be accomplished by either alone Consulting keeps you in touch with reality. If you’ve recently watched keywords get stuffed onto a page for no good reason to have your clients traffic plummet, you wouldn’t call content king in your writing, not without qualifiersWritingkeeps youfromslOPPin the’realworld’. A consultant who must articulatetheir reasonin from a document rather than in a meeting where agreement is thepathofleastresistance, leaves room to be poked, pushed back on and ultimately strengthens both their own conviction in their methods and clarifies their explanation to their client.