SEO services & consulting
Rankings are a means, not the objective. The work is to get the right searches in front of the right pages, remove whatever is stopping those pages from being found, and turn that visibility into enquiries or sales you can count.
I'm Vijay Bhabhor, an independent SEO consultant with 17+ years in digital marketing. I cover technical SEO, search strategy, on-page work, content architecture, and local and international visibility — and you deal with me directly rather than with an account manager relaying decisions made by someone you never meet.
Five things that stop pages ranking
These six situations look similar in a traffic graph and need entirely different interventions. Publishing more content is the standard response to all of them, and it is the right response to roughly one.
If more than one of these describes your site, they are probably connected. My digital marketing diagnostics work through the common chains in more detail.
| Service | What it covers | Business value |
|---|---|---|
| SEO audit | Technical, content, indexing, internal linking, search intent and competitive gaps | Identifies what is limiting growth before anyone starts implementing |
| Technical SEO | Crawling, indexation, canonicalisation, redirects, XML sitemaps, architecture and performance | Lets search engines discover, interpret and index the pages that matter |
| Keyword research & search strategy | Search demand, intent, commercial terms, topic mapping and page targeting | Connects valuable searches to the right pages |
| On-page SEO | Titles, headings, content structure, internal links, entities and intent alignment | Makes important pages more relevant and more useful for their target searches |
| Content & topical SEO | Topic clusters, supporting content, information architecture and content gaps | Builds real coverage of the subjects the business depends on |
| Local SEO | Local visibility, location relevance and Google Business Profile strategy | Reaches nearby customers for location-dependent businesses |
| International SEO | Country targeting, international architecture, localisation and hreflang where appropriate | Supports visibility across several markets without them competing |
| Authority & link building | Relevant external mentions, digital PR and quality link opportunities | Strengthens external authority and discoverability |
No engagement uses all eight equally. A site with indexation problems needs the second row resolved before the fifth is worth funding; a site with clean technical foundations and thin coverage needs the opposite. Deciding that order is what the first row is for.
Seven decisions in sequence, not seven deliverables. The difference matters: an agency retainer that promises four blog posts and ten links a month has decided the answer before looking at the question.
01
The business model, who the customers are, what they actually search for, the site's current visibility, its technical condition and who else is competing for the same attention.
02
Connect search intent and keyword opportunities to the specific pages that should satisfy them. This surfaces both gaps and duplicates — searches with no suitable page, and several pages competing for one term.
03
Rank opportunities by business value, search potential, difficulty, technical dependency and effort. Some high-volume terms are not worth pursuing; some low-volume ones are the whole point.
04
Resolve the technical and on-page issues preventing important pages from performing. This comes before building because publishing onto a site that cannot be crawled properly wastes the content.
05
Develop the content, topical coverage, internal connections and external authority the map identified as missing — in the order priority established, not in the order it is easiest to produce.
06
Search Console, analytics and your own business data, read together. Impressions and clicks show visibility; enquiries and revenue show whether that visibility was worth having.
07
Refine priorities using what the evidence shows, rather than making changes to demonstrate monthly activity. Real query data usually contradicts part of the original plan, and that is useful.
Most SEO tactics work in the right circumstances. What separates outcomes is knowing which constraint is currently binding — and doing that one first, even when a different one would be easier to show progress on.
Eight areas of work. Most engagements draw on three or four of them at a time, in a sequence the audit determines.
A structured diagnosis of technical health, content, indexing, internal linking, search intent alignment and competitive position — producing a prioritised view of what is limiting organic growth rather than a list of everything that could theoretically be improved. If you want to understand the method first, I've written a website SEO audit guide.
Crawling, indexation, canonical signals, site architecture, redirects, sitemaps and performance. This is the layer that determines whether anything else can work, and it is usually where the fastest wins sit on sites that have been through a redesign or migration. More detail in my technical SEO guide.
Identifying search demand that is commercially meaningful, then mapping queries to pages according to what the searcher actually wants. Volume is the least useful number in a keyword tool; intent and commercial relevance decide what is worth targeting. My keyword research guide covers the process.
Improving page relevance through titles, headings, content structure, internal links and intent alignment — making a page unambiguously about the thing it should rank for, for both readers and crawlers. See the on-page SEO optimization guide, and semantic HTML for the markup side of it.
Building genuine coverage of the subjects your customers research — the questions they ask before buying, the comparisons they make, the problems that lead them to you. Depth on subjects you can speak to with authority beats breadth across everything adjacent.
Visibility for businesses whose customers search by location — location relevance, Google Business Profile strategy and location-specific pages that are genuinely distinct rather than the same page with a city name swapped in. Background in my local SEO guide.
Planning visibility across countries and languages: whether separate URLs per market are warranted at all, how the architecture should be structured, and hreflang where it applies. Done carelessly this creates markets competing against each other, which is worse than not doing it.
Earning relevant external authority through assets worth referencing, relationships and digital PR — not volume for its own sake. A small number of links from places your customers and competitors actually read is worth more than a monthly quota from places nobody does.
The same techniques produce different plans depending on how the business makes money and how its customers decide.
Commercial service pages that hold up against local or national demand, trust signals that answer the questions a buyer has before enquiring, and a clear path from research to contact.
Long buying cycles mean the first visit is rarely the decisive one. Problem-led searches, solution pages, industry topics and comparison research all need covering, often for several people in one buying committee.
Buyers search in specification language rather than marketing language. Getting product terminology, technical detail and international visibility right matters more than volume of content.
Location relevance, Google Business Profile and genuinely distinct location pages. Proximity does a lot of the work here, which changes what is worth competing for.
Most demand arrives as a described problem rather than a product name. That means problem-led content, honest comparisons, and technical documentation that also serves as an acquisition channel.
Catalogue-driven sites generate pages from templates rather than by hand, which makes architecture and indexation control the dominant concerns. Covered separately — see below.
The practical difference is not effort or care — plenty of agencies have both. It is who makes the decisions and who you can ask about them.
In an agency the strategist, the implementer and the account manager are usually three people, and questions travel between them. Here they do not, which mostly shows up as faster answers and fewer things lost in translation.
Each recommendation says what to change, who needs to do it, and what it should affect. That matters because a recommendation you cannot evaluate is one you have to take on trust — and because you should be able to drop items on cost grounds understanding the trade-off.
Which customers are profitable, which services you want more of, what the sales process looks like. Without that, keyword prioritisation defaults to search volume, which is how businesses end up ranking well for terms that bring the wrong enquiries.
I cannot promise a position, a traffic figure or a date, because those depend on competitors, algorithm changes and implementation speed on your side. What I can commit to is a defensible priority order and honest reporting on whether it worked.
Ecommerce SEO is a different discipline, not a variation on this one. On a service site the page count is finite and every page is written by a person. On a store, pages are generated from catalogue data by templates, which creates problems that simply do not arise elsewhere: large-scale duplication, deciding which page type should answer which query, and product states like out of stock and discontinued.
Category and product pages carry most of the commercially valuable demand in a store, and both are governed by architecture and indexation control more than by copy. That work needs its own treatment rather than a section here, so it has a dedicated page covering catalogue architecture, product data and the technical constraints specific to online retail.
AI-generated answers have changed how results are presented more than they have changed what gets selected. The work that makes a page a good candidate for citation is largely the work that already made it rank — done more carefully.
A page that cannot be crawled and indexed cannot be retrieved, summarised or cited. Nothing about AI search relaxes this, and it remains the most common reason a page is invisible.
Descriptive headings, sensible structure, explicit entity names instead of vague pronouns, and explanations that hold up when a paragraph is read on its own. Retrieval systems extract passages, so passages need to make sense out of context.
Answer the actual question, near the start of the section that addresses it, then explain. Content written around a keyword rather than around a question tends to answer nothing precisely enough to be quoted.
First-hand experience, worked examples, original analysis and credible references distinguish a page from the dozen restating the same summary. This is also the part that is hardest for a competitor to copy.
No consultant can honestly promise that a page will be cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google's AI features. There is no submission process and no ranking factor to optimise. What is achievable is making a page a strong candidate: findable, clearly structured, genuinely useful and credible. Anyone selling guaranteed AI citations is selling something they cannot control.
Individual engagements, with enough context to judge them. These are single outcomes from particular starting points — not averages, and not what any other site should expect.
[Business type · industry · market]
[Headline metric]
[Measure and timeframe]
Problem: [what was wrong at the start]
What changed: [the specific work done]
Measured outcome: [figure, source and period]
Limitation: [why this result was easier or harder than typical]
[Business type · industry · market]
[Headline metric]
[Measure and timeframe]
Problem: [what was wrong at the start]
What changed: [the specific work done]
Measured outcome: [figure, source and period]
Limitation: [why this result was easier or harder than typical]
[Business type · industry · market]
[Headline metric]
[Measure and timeframe]
Problem: [what was wrong at the start]
What changed: [the specific work done]
Measured outcome: [figure, source and period]
Limitation: [why this result was easier or harder than typical]
The measures worth reporting are organic clicks and impressions from Search Console, indexed page counts where discovery was the constraint, qualified enquiries, and revenue where it can be attributed — not ranking screenshots for terms nobody searches.
SEO compounds slowly and rewards sites with something to build on. It is not the right first investment for everyone, and it is worth knowing which situation you are in before committing a budget to it.
| Your situation | SEO fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| People already search for your products or services | Strong | The demand exists; the work is capturing it rather than creating it |
| Customers research before buying | Strong | Long consideration means several opportunities to be found and remembered |
| Good products or services, weak visibility | Strong | The hard part is already done; the constraint is discovery |
| Major technical or indexing problems | Strong — foundation first | Often the fastest improvement available, but nothing else works until it is resolved |
| Almost no existing search demand | Needs evaluation | Search captures demand efficiently and creates it poorly; a demand-creation channel may fit better |
| You need enquiries this month | Alongside paid | Paid search buys immediate visibility while SEO builds; the two work well in parallel |
The last row is not a hedge. Where demand exists but the site cannot yet compete organically, running Google Ads in parallel is usually the sensible answer — it buys visibility now and produces query data that improves the SEO plan.
Nothing is committed until scope is agreed, and the first two steps happen before any of it.
01
A conversation about the business model, audience, market, current organic performance and what you actually want more of. This shapes everything after it.
02
An initial look at the site and its Search Console data to identify the highest-value opportunities and any obvious constraints, before either of us commits to anything.
03
Separate urgent technical problems from medium-term structural work and long-term content and authority building, so the sequence is clear rather than everything being "important".
04
What is being done, who does which parts, what gets measured and how often you hear about it — written down before implementation rather than assumed.
05
Execute the agreed plan, report against the measures we set, and adjust priorities as real performance data replaces the assumptions the plan started with.
Sometimes the review at step two shows the constraint is the offer, the market or the website's ability to convert. I would rather say so at that point than take on work I do not expect to produce a return.
One price cannot fit every website, and any quote given before seeing a site is a guess dressed up as a package. What determines cost is site size, market competitiveness, technical condition, and how much implementation sits with me rather than your team.
Foundation
From ₹22,000 / month
For sites with technical or structural problems holding back pages that should already perform. Audit, technical fixes, keyword mapping and on-page work on the commercially important pages, with your team implementing.
Growth
From ₹40,000 / month
For sites with sound foundations that need topical coverage, internal linking and content built out against a mapped plan — plus ongoing technical maintenance and measurement.
Competitive growth
From ₹70,000 / month
For larger sites, multiple markets or competitive categories where authority building and sustained content production are the constraint rather than technical health.
Indicative starting points rather than quotations, and deliberately not defined by a number of articles or links per month — quotas describe activity, not strategy. Standalone audits are scoped separately.
If organic search matters to your business but you are not sure whether the constraint is technical, strategic, content-related or commercial, start with a structured assessment rather than guessing. Send me the site and what you are trying to achieve.