I’m Simon McCullagh, an SEO consultant based in Newry, Northern Ireland. I’ve spent 12 years working in SEO across agency, in-house and freelance roles, and I now work directly with businesses across Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK to grow their organic search visibility.

This page is the hub for everything I do: technical SEO, SEO audits, local SEO, ecommerce SEO and AI search optimisation. Each service has its own dedicated page with more detail — this page gives you the overview so you can decide where to start.

If you want a specialist who handles the work personally rather than passing it to a junior account team, you’re in the right place.

Why work with an SEO consultant rather than an agency

When you hire an SEO agency, you often brief an account manager who then relays your instructions to the people actually doing the work. With me, there’s no middle layer. You tell me what you need, I do it, and I report back — directly.

That has real practical benefits: faster turnaround on questions, no information getting lost between meetings, and consistent knowledge of your site and market because the same person has handled it from day one.

It’s worth being honest about fit, too. If you need a large team covering PPC, social and design alongside SEO, or you want multiple specialists working in parallel on a very large site, a full-service agency might suit you better. If you want an experienced SEO specialist who takes ownership of the organic search strategy and is accountable for it, that’s what I offer.

My SEO services

I cover the core disciplines that make up a complete organic search strategy. Each one is explained in more depth on its own page.

Technical SEO — crawlability, indexation, site speed, structured data and Core Web Vitals. I’ve handled full site migrations, DNS updates and post-migration recovery for client accounts, so I know what breaks when a site changes platform or domain. Read more about my technical SEO services.

SEO audit — a structured review of a site’s technical health, content and backlink profile, prioritised by impact rather than a generic checklist. See my SEO audit services for what’s included.

Local SEO — Google Business Profile optimisation, local citations and location-specific content for businesses that rely on customers finding them nearby, whether that’s one town or a service area stretching from Newry to Belfast and beyond. Details are on the local SEO in Northern Ireland page.

Ecommerce SEO — product and category page optimisation, technical fixes for large catalogues, and marketplace listing work. I’ve managed SEO and product data across catalogues of thousands of SKUs, including Amazon, eBay and Etsy listings. More on my ecommerce SEO services.

AI search optimisation — making sure your content is structured to be found and cited by AI-powered search tools, not just traditional organic rankings. I’ve built AI SEO pipelines and a suite of tools covering topical authority mapping, content gaps and LLM mention tracking. Find out more about AI SEO and LLM SEO.

How I work

My process follows four stages: audit, plan, implement, report.

I start with an audit of your site’s technical health, content and current organic rankings, using Google Search Console, Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights to understand what’s holding back performance. From there I put together a plan that ranks each fix and content piece by expected impact versus effort.

Implementation is where the agency-vs-consultant difference matters most: I make the changes myself, or work directly with your developer, rather than briefing a separate delivery team.

For reporting, I build Looker Studio dashboards combining Google Analytics 4, Search Console and, where relevant, CRM data, alongside Google Tag Manager conversion tracking. The goal is to report on enquiries and revenue, not just keyword positions, so you can see what organic search activity is actually contributing to the business.

What I’ve delivered

These results come from 12 years across agency, in-house and freelance roles, not all of them as an independent consultant. Some of the outcomes I’ve delivered include:

A 27% rebound in organic traffic after a Google core update, through targeted technical and content fixes.
Cornerstone content that generated more than 300,000 additional monthly organic users across US, UK, Canadian and Australian markets.
Top-3 Google rankings for over 100 commercial keywords for SME clients.
Full site migrations and post-migration recovery, including DNS updates and crawl-structure changes, without losing organic rankings.
Core Web Vitals improvements led through Search Console, Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights data.
AI SEO pipelines, built with Claude Code and n8n, that cut content-brief turnaround from 3 hours to 30 minutes across more than 500 SKUs a week.

I don’t guarantee specific rankings or traffic figures for new clients, because nobody honestly can, but this is the track record I bring to a new project.

What SEO costs

SEO pricing depends on the size of your site, how competitive your market is, and which services you need — a technical audit and fix-up is a different scope to ongoing content and local SEO work.

Rather than repeat that detail here, I’ve set out my approach to pricing, along with typical packages, on the SEO pricing page.

SEO consultant FAQs

What does an SEO consultant do?

An SEO consultant audits a website’s technical health, content and backlink profile, then plans and implements changes to improve its visibility in organic search results. That can include technical fixes, content creation, local SEO, and, increasingly, optimising for AI-powered search tools. Unlike an in-house hire, you get experience drawn from a range of industries and site types.

Should I hire an SEO consultant or an SEO agency?

In short: an agency if you need several marketing disciplines or a large team at once; a consultant if you want direct access to the person doing the work. I’ve set out the trade-offs in more detail above.

How long does SEO take to work?

Most sites start seeing measurable movement in organic rankings and traffic within three to six months, though this varies with your site’s starting position, the competitiveness of your market, and how quickly changes can be implemented. Technical fixes can show results faster than content-led growth, which tends to build over a longer period. I won’t promise a fixed timescale before I’ve seen your site.

How much does an SEO consultant cost in Northern Ireland?

It varies by scope. A one-off audit costs less than an ongoing monthly retainer covering content, technical SEO and reporting. I cover typical pricing ranges and what’s included at each level on my SEO packages page.

Get started

If you want a clear view of where your site currently stands in organic search, start with my free SEO website report. It flags the technical and content issues worth prioritising, based on the same checks I use in a full audit.

If you’d rather talk through your situation first, get in touch directly — you’ll be speaking to me, not a salesperson. You can also read more about me and my background before you do.