The SEO & AI Search Consultant Who Gives a Sh*t About Growing Your Business

Typical market rates for SEO consulting run $100–$250/hour, $3,000–$15,000/month for retainers, and $5,000–$50,000 for fixed-scope projects.

But most consultants won’t publish a number.

Optimist offers one-time strategy and roadmap engagements from $7,500, ongoing AEO/SEO advisory retainers from $3,000/month for teams that execute in-house, and full-service engagements from $4,000/month covering strategy through execution and publishing.

All retainers are month-to-month.

Hire a consultant when you have execution capacity (writers, developers, someone who owns the channel) and need expertise to guide the strategy and prioritize action.

Hire an agency (or a full-service engagement) when nobody inside the company will actually ship.

Avoid paying agency prices for strategy your team then executes anyway or buying a brilliant strategy nobody has hands to implement.

Optimist runs both models and will help you decide which option is better for your needs if you’re unsure.

For our advisory and consulting services, Optimist provides guidance and direction but not actual execution. Technical specs your developers can ship without translation, content briefs your writers can run with, and prioritization that matches your team’s real capacity.

If you want implementation done for you, that’s the full-service SEO track (from $4,000/month), and moving between the two is straightforward since both run on the same roadmap.

The Optimist CORE Roadmap includes your full topic universe mapped and prioritized by business impact, an AI visibility benchmark across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, a page-level content audit, a technical assessment, a measurement baseline, and a sequenced long-term roadmap prioritized by revenue impact.

Optimist benchmarks a library of buyer prompts across five AI surfaces — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — and tracks brand mention and recommendation rate (how often models name and recommend you) and AI citation rate (how often they cite your pages as sources).

We measure visibility every week and analyze the trends to understand what’s happening, what actions to take, and how to drive the next phase of growth.

SEO and AEO investments drive measurable results in 1–3 months and compound over 6–12.

Technical fixes and optimization of pages already ranking in striking distance tend to move first; net-new content and authority building compound over subsequent quarters.

Because the roadmap is sequenced by impact and sized to your team’s capacity, the early months are front-loaded with the work most likely to move revenue-relevant metrics fast.

You may need developer support, but probably less than you’d think. Technical recommendations arrive as prioritized, sized specs, and a meaningful share of the roadmap typically runs through content and on-page work your marketing team controls directly.

Where developer time is scarce, we sequence around it so your team can spend its cycles where the return is.

Like a fractional SEO lead, Optimist offers senior ownership of strategy on a part-time retainer, embedded in your tools and meetings.

Unlike most fractional arrangements, the engagement includes a set velocity of briefs and specs per month, a clear measurement process, published pricing, month-to-month terms — so you’re buying defined output, not hours on a timesheet.

Yes, Optimist works with your existing teams and partners plus embeds in your Slack and project tools rather than working around them.

Common configurations: We set strategy and your in-house team executes; we drive strategy and an existing content agency executes; or we guide and manage the execution of a “traditional” SEO person or agency.

There are two options if your team isn’t able to keep up with the defined scope.

First, velocity is the retainer’s only variable — drop from 8 briefs a month to 4 rather than paying for output that sits in a queue.

Second, if execution is an ongoing bottleneck, the engagement can convert to full-service, where Optimist runs production and publishing — and the roadmap carries over as-is. No re-onboarding, no starting over.

Optimist primarily works with B2B tech and SaaS companies ranging from Series A startups to publicly-traded businesses. You’ll find SEO case studies on SaaS, fintech, HR tech, and many adjacent categories on our website.