Answers to the questions that come up most often – about pricing, results, timelines, press, and what it's like to work with me. Jump to a topic or scroll through.
The big-picture questions most people ask before reaching out.
You'll see early movement in 60-90 days – usually new keyword rankings and traffic to specific pages I optimize first. Real compounding growth happens between months 4 and 9 as content builds topical authority. SEO isn't a 30-day sprint, but it's also not the 18-month timeline most agencies sell. If a strategy is working, you'll see signs within the first quarter.
It depends on the scope, but my engagements are month-to-month with no contracts and priced significantly lower than a typical agency retainer – because there's no overhead, no junior team, and no account managers. You pay for the work, not the org chart. The free audit is the easiest way to get a real number for your specific situation.
Most agencies pitch you the senior strategist, then hand the actual work to a junior with a checklist. You get me – every audit, every strategy, every published page. I work with a small roster of clients on purpose so I can do real work instead of managing accounts. If you want a 50-person agency with quarterly reviews, I'm the wrong call. If you want one person who actually knows your site, I'm a good fit.
No, and you should be skeptical of anyone who does. Google controls rankings, not me. What I can guarantee is the work – the strategy, the technical fixes, the content, the link building. Across active client accounts, the same playbook drives 10K+ ranking keywords today. Your results depend on your starting point, your competition, and how well we execute together.
I'm based in Tampa, but I work with clients nationally. Many of my industry pages – jewelers, wealth managers, doctors, lawyers – target a national audience. The local SEO playbook works for any city, and the broader SEO strategy doesn't care where your office is. If your business serves customers online, geography doesn't matter.
SEO works best for businesses where customers actively search for what you do – service businesses, local providers, B2B companies, ecommerce. It's a poor fit for brand-new product categories nobody is searching for yet, or for one-time-purchase items with zero search intent. The free audit will tell you honestly whether SEO is your best growth channel – if it's not, I'll say so.
Who you're actually working with, and how the practice runs.
The honest answer: I started building websites to teach myself, ended up reverse-engineering why some of them ranked and others didn't, and realized SEO was the most leverage-per-hour skill in marketing. Most channels stop working when you stop paying. SEO compounds. Five years later, that compounding is what I sell – for clients and for connorcedro.com itself, which is the proving ground for every technique before it touches a client account.
For most businesses under a few hundred employees, the math favors a solo consultant. Agencies route accounts through junior staff and account managers; you pay the senior rate and get the junior output. With me, you get the same person doing the strategy, the writing, the technical work, and answering your texts. The trade-off: I can't scale to twenty accounts at once. That's why the client list is intentionally small and the engagement cadence is direct.
Anyone looking for a 90-day miracle, anyone whose intake or operations can't absorb more leads, and anyone in a category where the right move is paid ads (e.g., very seasonal businesses, brand-new sites with no domain authority, or commoditized products where margins won't support content investment). Saying no to those engagements early saves both of us time. The right fit is established or near-established businesses with real margins, decent operations, and a willingness to invest for 9-12 months.
Yes, but not the way most people mean. AI helps with research, outlining, and first-pass drafts. It does not write the final published version. Every piece of content that goes on a client site gets human-edited for accuracy, tone, and the specific market context the AI doesn't have. Pure AI-generated content is recognizable, ranks poorly for competitive terms, and is exactly the kind of thing Google's quality systems are trained to filter. Used well, AI is a productivity multiplier. Used badly, it produces the same generic content thousands of other sites are publishing.
Week one is the SEMrush audit and competitive analysis. Week two is the action plan and the kickoff call where we agree on keyword priorities and content topics. From there, monthly cadence: I deliver content, technical fixes, and link work; you review the published assets and approve next month's plan. A 30-minute strategy call once a month for ongoing direction. Direct text or email access in between for anything urgent. No layered approval chains, no waiting on account managers – you ask, I answer, the work moves.
What the engagements include, what they cost, and how they work.
Most clients see meaningful ranking movement within 3 to 6 months. Traffic and lead volume typically follow 1 to 2 months after rankings improve. Competitive markets like personal injury law or Tampa real estate take longer, plan for 6 to 12 months for significant gains. The results compound over time.
No. Every engagement is month-to-month. You stay because the work is producing results, not because you're locked in. That said, SEO takes time to compound, clients who see the strongest outcomes are those who commit to a consistent strategy for at least 6 months.
You work directly with Connor, not an account manager who relays information to a team you never meet. Strategy, execution, and reporting are handled by one person who understands your business. No junior teams, no handoffs, no templated approaches.
A 30-minute call where I pull your actual SEMrush data live, current rankings, keyword gaps, technical issues, and what your top competitors are doing that you aren't. You leave with a clear picture of where you stand and what a realistic path to page one looks like.
If, after 90 days of consistent work, the data doesn't show meaningful ranking improvement on target keywords and traffic isn't trending up, we have an honest conversation about why. Sometimes the issue is the strategy, in which case we adjust. Sometimes the issue is the market or competitive landscape. Either way, there's no contract, you stop paying when the work isn't producing.
The $1,250 Starter plan is foundational SEO for businesses just starting to invest seriously, 8 blog posts a month, 3 keyword clusters, on-page optimization. The $4,000 Authority plan is for businesses ready to dominate their vertical, 20 blog posts, 8 keyword clusters, full internal linking systems, advanced strategy work.
What to expect, how long it takes, and what's guaranteed.
Most clients see meaningful movement in rankings within 3 to 6 months. Traffic and lead volume typically follow 1 to 2 months after rankings improve. Competitive industries like law and real estate take longer – 6 to 12 months for significant gains. The results shown here reflect 12 to 24 month engagements where compounding had time to work.
The primary industries are law firms, medical practices, jewelry stores, real estate agents, wealth managers, interior designers, insurance agencies, and personal trainers. Most client work is concentrated in the Tampa Bay area, with some national clients in competitive verticals like e-commerce and SaaS.
No. Any SEO consultant who guarantees specific rankings is either misleading you or targeting keywords so low in competition that ranking for them provides no business value. What is guaranteed is transparent reporting, honest assessment, and a strategy built around keywords that actually convert – not vanity metrics designed to make the work look better than it is.
Every engagement starts with a technical audit and keyword strategy session. Month one focuses on technical fixes and on-page optimization. Months two through four build out content clusters and internal linking. From month five onward, the focus shifts to link building and content expansion. Monthly reporting covers rankings, traffic, and lead volume – not just activity metrics.
Earned coverage, why it matters for SEO, and collaboration requests.
Mostly inbound. Most publications and platforms listed on this page reached out for a quote, a contributor piece, or to reference my work in something they were already writing. A smaller number came from collaboration introductions – other consultants, agency owners, and SaaS founders connecting me with editors looking for sources. Zero of these came from a PR agency, paid placement service, or HARO-style spray-and-pray outreach. The signal value of earned mentions is the entire point; bought mentions defeat the purpose.
Two reasons. First, the obvious one: backlinks from high-authority domains pass ranking signal. A link from a DA 70+ site does more for your site than dozens of links from low-authority directories. Second, the less obvious one: earned media coverage is the strongest E-E-A-T signal Google can read about an individual author. When you're cited as an expert by independent publications, Google's quality systems weight your content more heavily across every page you've authored. For YMYL verticals like finance and medical, this matters disproportionately.
Yes – selectively. Topics I'll engage on at depth: technical SEO, local SEO and Google Business Profile strategy, AI search visibility (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude), content cluster architecture, and SEO for specific verticals where I have real client experience (jewelry, finance, medical, legal). Topics I'll decline: anything that requires faking expertise outside those domains, anything tied to a product I haven't actually used, and anything where the editorial angle is misleading. The bar is genuine knowledge of the topic – if I don't have it, I'll say so rather than wing it.
No. Not on connorcedro.com, not on any client site I manage. Paid links violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines and put domains at real penalty risk. The press mentions on this page are unpaid editorial coverage – the only kind of link that does what backlinks are supposed to do over the long term. The short-term cost of paid links is more attractive than the long-term cost of recovering from a manual action against the domain.
Every reference on this page either links directly to the publication or links to an archived version of the original mention. Authority scores can be independently verified by running connorcedro.com through Semrush, Ahrefs, or Majestic – the referring domain data is part of every standard backlink audit. If a specific reference looks broken or you want context on a specific feature, reach out directly through the contact page and I'll send the citation details.
How the free audit works and what happens when we start.
No catch. The audit is free, the action plan is free, and there's no obligation to hire me afterwards. Most Tampa businesses don't know what's actually wrong with their SEO, and the audit gives me a chance to show I know what I'm doing. Some people implement the recommendations themselves, which is fine. The audit isn't a sales funnel that ends in a contract.
SEMrush and Ahrefs site audit tools run a crawl, surface technical issues, and give you a numerical score. They're great for spotting big technical problems but they fall short on interpretation. They'll tell you that you have 47 issues but not which 3 actually matter, or how your situation compares to your specific Tampa competitors, or what the realistic timeline is to fix things. That interpretation is what you're getting with this audit.
48 hours from when you submit your URL is the typical turnaround. Sometimes faster if I'm not deep in client work. The audit isn't an automated process. I'm reviewing your site, running competitor comparisons in SEMrush, and writing the action plan myself, so it takes real hours of my time.
Just your website URL and a couple of sentences about what your business does. If you have specific competitors in mind or specific keywords you want to rank for, that helps me prioritize. Read-only access to Google Search Console is useful if you have it, but not required.
No. The action plan is yours to execute however you want, whether in-house, with another agency, or with me. I'd rather give you a useful audit and have you remember me when you're ready to engage than try to convert you on the call. The audit conversion isn't the business model; consulting work is.
It's built for Tampa businesses because that's where I focus, and the competitive analysis is most useful when I know the local market. For businesses in nearby Florida markets (St. Pete, Clearwater, Sarasota, Brandon, Wesley Chapel) the audit is just as valuable. For businesses far outside Florida, the technical and on-page findings still apply, but the local competitive analysis won't be as sharp.
For brand new sites, the audit shifts to a foundation review covering technical setup, keyword targeting strategy, content cluster planning, and competitive analysis to scope realistic ranking timelines. Less about diagnosing existing problems, more about setting up the foundation correctly the first time.
Still have a question? Book a free audit – no obligation.