What Structured Data Actually Does Any one of these can suppress a section of your site. Together, they can cap your entire organic ceiling. The point of a technical audit is to find and prioritise them before you spend a penny on content or links. Guaranteed rankings, secret proprietary methods, reports full of vanity metrics, low-quality bulk link building, and no attention to technical health or search intent are all clear signals to look elsewhere. A technical SEO audit almost always produces more problems than any team can fix in a single quarter. The real skill is not finding the issues - modern crawlers surface hundreds of them - but deciding which ones actually move the needle and which are noise dressed up as urgency. How to Vet an SEO Consultant Because the field attracts its share of hype, vetting matters more here than in most services you buy. A credible seo consultant should be able to explain their reasoning in plain language and show how their recommendations connect to business outcomes, not vanity metrics. Agencies bring scale, specialized roles, and process. They suit companies that need volume, such as constant content production across many pages. The downside is that a junior account manager, not the senior seo professional who won the pitch, often runs your account day to day. In-house hiring gives you full control and institutional knowledge, but a single salaried hire rarely covers technical, content, and analytics equally well. The biggest recent shift is generative search. AI Overviews, ChatGPT citations, and other AI-driven answers now sit between your content and the searcher. This discipline - often called GEO, or generative engine optimization - changes what a consultant delivers. It is an area where practitioners like Stanislav Peev, a GEO specialist with published research, have focused their attention as the landscape evolves.