I am the strategist and the person who does the work.
Most SEO engagements involve one person who understands your problem and a different person who implements the solution. Everything gets lost in that handover. I kept my practice small specifically so that gap does not exist.
- Experience
- Five years, agency and freelance
- Worked with
- US, Philippine and worldwide clients
- Based
- Remote, United States clients
- Industries
- More than forty, from local trade to SaaS
- Status
- Taking on a limited number of clients
Numbers I can put my name against.
These come from work I did personally, in roles where the result was measured rather than estimated. Where a figure belongs to a team I led rather than to me alone, I have said so.
Five years, three very different rooms.
I did not start as a consultant. The judgment I sell now came from being inside teams where the constraints were real: limited developer time, competing priorities and clients who needed an answer that week.
Learning what actually moves
Freelance and early client workI started where most people do: small sites, tight budgets and no safety net. It teaches you quickly which recommendations survive contact with a real business and which ones only work in a case study.
- Technical foundations
- Local search
- Client communication
SEO inside a fifty-person consultancy
ProDev Consults, PhilippinesWorking within a large consultancy meant SEO was never the only priority in the room. I learned to argue for technical work against competing demands, and to write recommendations developers would actually schedule.
- Cross-team delivery
- Prioritization
- Stakeholder reporting
SEO Manager for a US agency
JP Marketing, DallasManaging more than twenty webmasters, content managers and copywriters changed how I work. You cannot personally check every page, so you build systems, standards and templates that hold quality when you are not looking.
- Team leadership
- Process design
- Multi-account strategy
Independent consultant
Toufiq SEO, working worldwideI went independent because the part I am best at, diagnosing why a site is stuck and sequencing the fix, kept getting diluted by the layers around it. Small roster, direct contact, and the person who audits your site is the person who does the work.
- Technical SEO
- Content strategy
- AI search
Four things I will not compromise on.
These are not values on a wall. They are the specific decisions that make an engagement work, and the reasons I turn some work down.
Diagnosis before prescription
I will not recommend work before I can evidence why it matters on your site specifically. If that means telling you the problem is not what you were sold, I will say it.
EvidenceYou get the reasoning, not just the task
Every recommendation comes with why it matters, what it costs and what happens if you skip it. You should be able to argue with me, and occasionally win.
TransparencyNothing that needs cleaning up later
No bought links, no thin location pages, no tactics that work until the next update. If a shortcut would embarrass either of us in two years, it is not on the table.
DurabilitySmall roster, on purpose
I take a limited number of clients because depth is the product. When capacity is full I will tell you rather than stretch and deliver something thinner.
CapacityWhat you get, and what you will not.
What working together looks like
- ✓Direct contact with me from the first call to delivery
- ✓Findings evidenced with crawl data, logs or Search Console
- ✓Work sequenced by commercial impact, not tool severity
- ✓Reporting tied to inquiries and revenue, in plain English
- ✓An honest answer when a different service fits better
What I will not do
- −Guarantee rankings, because that decision is not mine to make
- −Buy links from networks or private blog networks
- −Generate fake reviews or listings
- −Lock you into a long contract you cannot leave
- −Take work I do not have the capacity to do properly
Ten disciplines, one accountable person.
Every layer of modern search, treated as one system. Most engagements begin with an audit and narrow from there.
Why I work the way I do
People usually want to know two things about a consultant before they hire one: whether the experience is real, and whether they will be dealing with that person or with someone junior once the contract is signed. Both are fair questions, and both deserve a direct answer rather than a page of adjectives.
Where the experience comes from
Five years across three quite different environments: independent client work where budgets were small and mistakes were expensive, a fifty-person consultancy in the Philippines where SEO competed for attention with every other discipline, and an SEO Manager role for a Dallas agency where I was responsible for more than twenty webmasters, content managers and copywriters. That last role in particular changed how I work, because at that scale you cannot personally verify every page. You build standards and templates that hold when nobody is watching, or quality quietly drifts.
Why independent, and why the roster stays small
The part of this work I am genuinely good at is diagnosis: reading a site, its data and its market, and identifying which few changes will actually shift the outcome. Inside larger structures that judgment kept getting diluted, translated and reassigned until what reached the client was a task list nobody could defend. Working independently removes those layers. Keeping the client list short is what makes it possible to work at the depth the diagnosis requires, which is why I would rather tell you I am full than stretch and deliver something thinner.
How I think about SEO
Most SEO problems are not really SEO problems. They are decisions about architecture, priorities and resourcing that were made before anyone thought about search, and they surface later as a ranking issue. That is why my first question is rarely about keywords. It is about which pages make you money, what your platform can realistically change, and who will do the work. Without those answers, any recommendation is a guess wearing a confident tone.
What I expect from clients
Candour, mostly. Tell me what has already been tried, what went badly and where the internal resistance sits. I would rather know that your developers have two days a month than design a roadmap that assumes twenty. The engagements that work best are the ones where I am treated as a colleague who happens to be external, rather than a supplier handing over documents. If that sounds like the way you want to work, the fastest next step is a short call, or start with an SEO audit if you already know something is wrong but not what.
Tell me what is not working.
Send your URL and what you have already tried. You will get an honest read on whether I am the right person to help, including when the answer is no.
Prefer email? toufiqseopro@gmail.comWhat happens next
- You send the URLPlus anything already tried, so I do not repeat it.
- I review it firstBefore we speak, so the call is about your site specifically.
- Twenty honest minutesIncluding telling you if someone else is a better fit.