E-Commerce SEODIYBlinds
Before
523
top-3 keywords
→
After
1,162
top-3 keywords
More than 2x high-intent keyword visibility after a staged eCommerce redesign. Rankings did not dip after launch. They accelerated.
Senior SEO Consultant, Melbourne
SEO Consultant Melbourne
SEO & AI Search Consulting
Tharindu Gunawardana is a Melbourne SEO consultant with more than 17 years of experience across technical SEO, e-commerce SEO, content and entity strategy, website migrations and AI SEO. Businesses work directly with him for SEO analysis, strategy and prioritisation, with SearchMinistry's SEO, content and development resources available when implementation support is required.
17+ Years | Agency + Client-Side | Google + AI Search | Direct Senior Access
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Speak With a Senior SEO Consultant
Tell us what you need to solve and we’ll recommend the right consulting format.
Speak With a Senior SEO Consultant
Tell us what you need to solve and we’ll recommend the right consulting format.
Trusted by forward-thinking brands
Work Directly With a Senior SEO Consultant in Melbourne
Tharindu Gunawardana is a Melbourne SEO consultant with more than 17 years of experience across agency, client-side and consulting roles. His experience spans technical SEO, e-commerce SEO, content and semantic strategy, website migrations, organic growth and AI SEO.
Businesses work directly with Tharindu for SEO analysis, strategy and prioritisation rather than having the work passed down to a junior team. He works with internal marketing, content and development teams to turn search opportunities into practical priorities that can realistically be implemented.
When implementation support is required, SearchMinistry's SEO, content and development resources can support execution. This combines direct access to a senior SEO consultant with the delivery capability of a broader team, rather than leaving your internal team with a strategy document alone.
17+
years across SEO roles
Google + AI
unified search strategy
Direct
access to senior expertise
Results That Speak for Themselves
E-Commerce SEO
Digital PR43+
high-authority media coverages
Features in recognised Australian and industry publications, building external authority and brand signals.
SEO MigrationZero rankings lost
During a full domain and platform migration, organic visibility was protected throughout the transition.
Healthcare SEO31%
year-on-year organic traffic growth
Sustained organic growth delivered through technical SEO, content and authority building in a competitive healthcare vertical.
What Does an SEO Consultant Do?
An SEO consultant helps businesses understand why they are or are not performing in organic search, identifies the highest-impact opportunities, and develops a strategy to improve visibility, traffic and commercial outcomes.
The role goes beyond keyword rankings. An experienced SEO consultant looks at how technical performance, website architecture, content, internal linking, authority, user intent and search engine understanding work together across the website.
Consulting can include
- Technical SEO analysis and troubleshooting
- Keyword and search demand analysis
- Website and information architecture
- Content and semantic SEO strategy
- E-commerce category and product optimisation
- Internal linking strategy
- Website migration planning
- Competitor and market analysis
- SEO measurement and forecasting
- AI search visibility and AI SEO strategy
Modern search needs a wider view
Modern SEO consulting also considers how businesses are discovered across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and conversational AI search platforms. That means understanding not only whether a page can rank, but whether a brand and its content can be understood, retrieved and selected when AI systems generate an answer.
Explore AI SEO servicesStrategic Guidance for Complex Search Challenges
SearchMinistry provides SEO consulting across technical, content, e-commerce and strategic search challenges. Engagements can focus on a specific problem or form part of a broader organic growth strategy.
SEO Strategy & Roadmaps
A practical roadmap that explains what to do, why it matters and what to prioritise first. Recommendations are scored against potential impact, effort, dependencies and business value.
- Organic performance analysis
- Search demand and competitor research
- Prioritised actions for internal teams
- Ongoing strategic guidance
Technical SEO Consulting
Technical analysis that separates genuine performance blockers from low-impact errors, so your development team knows which fixes deserve attention.
- Crawlability and indexation
- JavaScript rendering and canonicals
- URL and site architecture
- Structured data and Core Web Vitals
- Migrations, faceted navigation and Search Console
Content & Semantic SEO
Build a website that search engines can understand as a connected set of entities, relationships and useful topics, rather than a collection of isolated keywords.
- Keyword and intent mapping
- Entity and attribute analysis
- Topical architecture and consolidation
- Cannibalisation and internal semantic linking
- Information gain, evidence and page structure
E-Commerce SEO Consulting
Connect customer search behaviour with the way products and categories are organised across your online store.
- Product listing and detail page strategy
- Category architecture and product taxonomy
- Faceted navigation and internal linking
- Product schema and structured data
- E-commerce migrations and demand mapping
SEO Migration Consulting
Bring SEO into redesigns, platform moves, domain changes and major restructures before launch, when search requirements are still easy to influence.
- Pre-migration benchmarking
- URL mapping and redirect strategy
- Content preservation
- Staging-site testing
- Launch monitoring and post-migration validation
AI SEO Consultant for Google and AI Search
An AI SEO consultant helps businesses improve how their brand, products, services and content are discovered, understood and represented across AI-powered search experiences.
Traditional SEO remains an important foundation, but search is expanding beyond conventional blue-link rankings. Businesses now need to consider Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI-assisted search environments.
The visibility journey
Discovery → Understanding → Retrieval → Selection → Citation → Mention → Recommendation
The objective is not simply to insert more mentions of a brand into content. It is to strengthen the information, relationships, authority and evidence that help search and AI systems understand when the business is relevant.
AI Search Visibility Strategy
Assess commercial queries and prompts, brand mentions, citations, competitors, rankings, entity associations, content gaps and the sources being selected by AI systems.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
Strengthen entity clarity, semantic relationships, claim-level evidence, source quality, third-party corroboration, information completeness and citation opportunities.
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
Make important information easier to identify and extract with direct definitions, question-and-answer relationships, clear headings, supporting evidence and concise answer sections.
Entity & Citation Analysis
Understand what your business is, what it provides and how it relates to the topics users ask about, then identify where competitors are being cited instead.
Brand → provides → Service
Make the relationship between your organisation and its services unambiguous.
Expert → specialises in → Topic
Connect expertise, evidence and subject areas across your website and citations.
Service → solves → Problem
Explain the customer problem your service addresses in language systems can retrieve.
SEO Consultant vs AI SEO Consultant
An SEO consultant traditionally focuses on improving visibility across organic search engines, while an AI SEO consultant also considers how a business is discovered and represented within AI-generated search experiences. There is significant overlap between the two.
SEO Consultant
AI SEO Consultant
Organic search visibility
Organic and AI search visibility
Rankings and search demand
Mentions, citations and recommendations
Crawlability and indexation
Discovery and retrievability
Keywords and search intent
Queries, prompts and entities
Technical SEO
Technical SEO plus AI-search accessibility
Content optimisation
Semantic clarity and extractability
Backlinks and authority
Authority, evidence and third-party corroboration
For most businesses, these should not become two separate strategies. Technical accessibility, relevant content, clear entities, authority and evidence remain important across both traditional and AI-powered search. A modern SEO consultant should understand both.
One SEO Strategy for Google and AI Search
Businesses do not need one strategy for Google, another for AI Overviews, another for ChatGPT and another for every new search platform. The stronger approach is to build a search strategy around the underlying information systems these platforms rely on.
Traditional SEO remains fundamental because search engines still need to crawl, index, understand and evaluate your website. AI SEO extends that thinking by considering whether information can also be confidently retrieved, supported and incorporated into generated answers.
SearchMinistry brings these areas together within one search strategy rather than treating SEO, GEO and AEO as unrelated disciplines.
1Technical accessibility
2Content understanding
3Entity relationships
4Topical relevance
5Authority and evidence
6Retrieval
7Selection
When Should You Hire an SEO Consultant?
Consulting can make sense when your business needs experienced strategic direction but does not necessarily need to outsource every SEO task.
You already have an internal marketing team
Your team can execute recommendations but needs specialist guidance around technical SEO, content architecture or prioritisation.
You already work with an SEO agency
Get an independent view of strategy, priorities, technical recommendations, reporting or performance without immediately replacing your existing agency.
Your organic traffic has declined
Identify whether the change came from algorithm updates, technical issues, content changes, migrations, competitors or shifts in search behaviour.
You are rebuilding or migrating a website
Bring search requirements into architecture, content, URLs, redirects and technical implementation before launch.
You want to improve AI search visibility
Identify the content, entity, authority and retrieval gaps that allow competitors to appear more frequently in AI-generated experiences.
Your roadmap has too many priorities
Turn a long list of recommendations into a clear sequence of changes most likely to produce meaningful results.
SEO Consultant vs SEO Agency
Consultants and agencies can both improve organic search performance, but they often serve different requirements. The right option depends on whether your business primarily needs expertise, execution or both.
SEO Consultant
- Senior strategic direction
- Direct specialist access
- Audits and roadmaps
- Independent reviews
- Internal-team guidance
- Specialist project advice
SEO Agency
- Broader ongoing execution
- Multi-disciplinary delivery team
- Implementation across workstreams
- Campaign management
- Additional execution capacity
- Ongoing managed SEO
Consultant-Led Strategy With Agency Support
SearchMinistry combines the two models. You work directly with a senior SEO strategist on analysis, strategy and priorities. When implementation is required, SearchMinistry's SEO, content and development resources can support delivery.
SEO Consulting for Businesses and Marketing Teams
Our model suits businesses with internal capability that need specialist search expertise, as well as organisations that need strategic guidance supported by implementation resources.
Marketing Managers
Specialist SEO input when organic search forms part of a broader digital marketing strategy.
Heads of Digital and CMOs
A clearer view of organic growth opportunities, investment priorities, risks and expected outcomes.
In-House SEO Teams
Additional expertise for complex technical SEO, migrations, semantic SEO, e-commerce or AI search projects.
E-Commerce Businesses
Stronger category, product and content architecture around how customers search and purchase.
Agencies
Specialist consulting for technical, strategic, migration or AI-search requirements where additional expertise is needed.
Development and Website Teams
SEO requirements integrated into architecture, redesigns, platform changes and migrations before decisions become expensive to reverse.
From Search Problem to Measurable Action
Every engagement is different, but our consulting process moves from identifying the problem to establishing clear priorities and measurable actions.
01
Understand the Search Problem
We start with the business, website, commercial objectives, competitors and the specific search challenge that needs to be solved.
02
Audit & Opportunity Analysis
Depending on the engagement, we analyse technical SEO, content, search demand, architecture, competitors, authority, entity relationships and AI-search visibility.
03
Strategy & Prioritisation
Findings become a practical roadmap prioritised around business impact, SEO value, implementation effort and dependencies.
04
Consulting & Implementation Support
We work directly with marketing, content, design and development teams to guide implementation. SearchMinistry can also provide additional execution capacity where required.
05
Measurement & Iteration
Performance is reviewed against the engagement objectives and priorities are adjusted as search behaviour, competitors and AI-search environments evolve.
Measuring SEO and AI Search Performance
SEO consulting should connect search activity with measurable business outcomes. The exact measurement framework depends on the objectives of the engagement.
Traditional SEO performance
- Organic clicks and impressions
- Search rankings and non-brand visibility
- Landing-page performance
- Organic conversions, leads or revenue
- Crawlability, indexation and technical health
- Category or topic-level visibility
AI search visibility
- Brand mentions and citation frequency
- Prompt and query coverage
- Sources being cited
- Competitor share of visibility
- AI referral traffic where identifiable
- Landing pages appearing within AI search journeys
AI-search measurement is still developing, but useful indicators can be measured alongside traditional search performance rather than reported as isolated vanity metrics.
Consulting Built Around the Problem You Need to Solve
Not every business needs the same type of SEO engagement. We can structure consulting around the problem and the level of ongoing support required.
Option 1
SEO Strategy & Advisory
Ongoing access to senior SEO guidance for businesses with internal teams responsible for execution.
Option 2
SEO Audit & Roadmap
A deeper analysis of existing search performance followed by a prioritised roadmap showing what should be addressed and why.
Option 3
Project-Based SEO Consulting
Specialist support for a defined project such as a website migration, redesign, e-commerce restructuring, technical SEO, AI SEO strategy or organic traffic recovery.
Option 4
Ongoing SEO Consulting
Continuous strategic support for businesses that need senior SEO expertise without hiring a full-time internal specialist.
Option 5
Consulting + Implementation
Direct senior consulting combined with SEO, content and development support for businesses that need both strategy and execution.
SEO Consultant Based in Melbourne, Working Across Australia
SearchMinistry is a Melbourne-based SEO consultancy and agency, working with businesses in Melbourne, across Victoria and throughout Australia.
Melbourne businesses can work with us locally, while consulting engagements can also be delivered remotely to marketing, development and leadership teams across Australia. The strategy is built around your market, customers, competitors and search environment, whether you operate locally, nationally or across multiple markets.
SEO and AI SEO Consulting FAQs
Clear answers to common questions about working with a senior SEO consultant in Melbourne.
An SEO consultant analyses a website's organic search performance, identifies problems and growth opportunities, and provides strategic guidance across technical SEO, content, website architecture, authority and measurement. Consultants can also work with internal marketing and development teams to guide implementation.
An AI SEO consultant helps businesses improve their visibility across AI-powered search experiences as well as traditional search. This can include entity optimisation, semantic content strategy, AI citation analysis, GEO, AEO and understanding how brands and content are retrieved and represented within generated answers.
Traditional SEO focuses primarily on organic visibility within search engines. AI SEO extends this to how businesses are discovered, understood, retrieved, cited and mentioned across AI-powered search experiences. The two areas overlap significantly and should usually form part of the same broader search strategy.
Not necessarily. A modern SEO consultant should understand how traditional search and AI-powered search increasingly connect. SearchMinistry combines conventional SEO, semantic SEO and AI SEO within the same consulting approach rather than treating them as completely separate disciplines.
An SEO consultant usually provides specialist strategic direction, analysis and guidance, while an SEO agency generally provides a broader range of ongoing implementation resources. SearchMinistry combines both models by providing direct access to senior SEO strategy with additional implementation support when required.
Yes. SEO consulting can complement an existing internal team, agency or development partner. We can provide specialist analysis, strategic direction and quality assurance while your existing resources continue to handle implementation.
Yes. An independent review can assess your current SEO strategy, recommendations, priorities and performance without requiring you to immediately change providers. The objective is to identify whether the current approach aligns with your business and search opportunities.
Yes. GEO and AEO are considered as part of the broader AI SEO and search visibility strategy where relevant. They should generally complement technical SEO, semantic optimisation, content quality, authority and entity development rather than becoming isolated workstreams.
SEO consulting costs depend on the scope and complexity of the engagement. A one-off strategic review or audit requires a different level of work from ongoing consulting, a major website migration or an enterprise SEO project. We scope engagements based on the problem that needs to be solved and the level of support required.
Yes. SearchMinistry is based in Melbourne but works with businesses throughout Australia. SEO consulting can be delivered remotely to marketing, content, development and leadership teams regardless of location.
Talk to a Senior SEO Consultant
If you need clearer direction on organic search performance, AI search visibility or what your team should prioritise next, speak directly with a senior SEO strategist.
We can review where you are now, identify the most important opportunities and determine whether you need strategic consulting, implementation support or a combination of both.
Request an SEO Strategy Review