A two-person consultancy with 10 clients: no approvals, no chasing

This is a worked example of a typical first month for a two-person SEO consultancy with ten clients, not a customer story, and every figure in it comes from our own delivery data. The consultancy is a type. The one thing it cannot spare is attention, and this month is about where attention goes when the supplier decides.

The consultancy

Two consultants, ten retained clients, no account managers and no one to delegate to. Both people sell, both deliver, and both answer the phone. Link building has been a recurring gap in the retainer: promised, started, and dropped whenever two clients needed something in the same week.

The fear

Approvals. Every supplier the consultancy has looked at sends a list to approve, a draft to sign off, or a question about an anchor. Each of those is a small task, and small tasks are what a two-person firm drowns in. The second fear is chasing: a publisher who has been paid and has not published, a link that was live in March and gone in July, and nobody with the time to notice.

Week one: ten briefs and nothing else

Each client is registered with the domain, the market and language, the target pages and the words that must never appear in an anchor. A monthly budget is set per client. From here the consultancy has no further input unless it wants to change a budget.

For the arithmetic, take 700 euro per client. At an average paid link of about 210 euro plus a fee averaging 30% with the article included, that is two to three links per client a month, twenty to thirty across the ten. The quotes that come back range from 30 to 1,200 euro, so the live number moves with the topic.

Candidates go through the five checks before anyone is contacted: 2,000 or more monthly visits measured in the client's own country, a spam score that was returned and is under 40, numeric relevance of 40 or more, no operator footprint, no rented links. One in twelve clears all five.

Week two: outreach without a question back

Outreach runs in our name. Publishers are told the topic, the target page and the anchor, and nothing about the consultancy or its clients. The response figures from our campaigns as a whole: 303 publishers contacted, 598 emails, 27.4% replied, 13.5% priced, 4% bounced.

Nothing comes back to the consultancy during this week. Not a list, not a draft, not a question. The decisions that would normally be sent for approval are made here and written down.

Week three: decisions, and the reason is the client story

Every order is decided by us and carries its reason. That reason is written for the consultant to forward, because in a two-person firm the reason on the order is the client update. Three shapes it usually takes:

• An insertion into an article that already ranks for the subject, chosen because a page with history carries the link from the day it goes live.
• A new article, written natively in the client's language and included in the fee, chosen because no existing page on a qualifying site covered the subject.
• A brand anchor rather than the keyword the client asked about, chosen because the profile already leaned on exact-match phrases and the brand was the anchor it was missing.

The consultant does not have to construct that explanation. It arrives with the order. The publisher invoices the consultancy directly for the placement and our fee is a separate line, 25 to 40%, averaging 30%.

Week four: what the weekly check catches

Placements go live as publishers deliver, and each one enters twelve months of weekly checks across nine failure states: the link removed, switched to nofollow, sponsored or UGC, the page deindexed, the page returning 404 or unpublished, the page redirecting elsewhere, the anchor altered, the destination changed, the page moved behind a login or paywall, and the link moved out of the article body.

Suppose one placement in this month goes live and the publisher's editor later marks the link nofollow when tidying the article. The consultancy does not find out from the client. The weekly check trips, the placement is replaced or refunded, and the report at month end says so. The same applies to a page that starts redirecting or an anchor an editor changes. A placement not indexed within 60 days is replaced or refunded as well.

The point is not that links fail often. It is that when they do, the person who notices is not one of the two people running the firm.

The numbers

• Zero approvals asked of the consultancy in the month.
• One candidate in twelve through the five checks.
• About two to three links per 700 euro of budget, at an average paid link of about 210 euro plus a 30% fee.
• Nine failure states checked weekly, for twelve months, on every placement.
• A 60-day indexation remedy on every placement.

What the client saw

A monthly report under the consultancy's name, with the live URL, the anchor, the target page, the publisher's own-locale traffic, and a reason beside each placement that reads as the consultant's reasoning because it is written to be forwarded. If a link was replaced, the report says which one and why. Client domains sit on a suppression list that our prospecting reads in code, so no client of the consultancy receives an outreach email from us.

Where it stands after month one

Ten budgets run again next month. Every link is under weekly monitoring for twelve months, with the consultancy told rather than asked. The two consultants' recurring task is forwarding ten reports, and the client questions those reports raise are answered by the reasons already in them.

The caveat on every worked example: these are real mechanics and real aggregate figures for a typical firm of this type, not a story about a particular client. No outside agency has yet finished a full cycle with us, and we would rather say that plainly than dress up a month that has not happened.