Portland, OR
Portland SEO Consultant
Strategic advisory, audits, and coaching
Hey, I’m Chris. 20 years in SEO, branding, and digital marketing, and you work directly with me — not a packaged agency tier with a junior account team in the middle.
Book a consult
How I consult
Strategy reviews
A senior set of eyes on the SEO program you already have. I sit down with your keyword strategy, content roadmap, link profile, and reporting, and I ask the question your agency probably won’t: does any of this actually move the business? Then I tell you what to keep, what to kill, and what to do first.
Technical audits
Crawl, indexation, site architecture, schema, Core Web Vitals, internal linking, AI Search readiness. I dig in and hand back a prioritized punch list your team (or your current agency) can actually ship. No 90-page PDF that sits in a Drive folder.
Team coaching & training
Workshops, working sessions, and ongoing advisory for in-house marketing teams. I help your people get sharper on SEO fundamentals, GEO, structured data, and content strategy. Honestly? A big chunk of this work is teaching marketers how to manage vendors without getting taken for a ride.
Why work with a consultant instead of an agency?
Agencies are great when you genuinely need a team to run the whole program for you and you don’t have the in-house horsepower to ship the work. (I built one of those for a decade. I’m not anti-agency.) But a lot of companies don’t actually need that. They need a senior brain in the room. Another vendor to manage is the last thing on the list.
That’s where a consultant earns their keep:
- A senior strategist on every call. Not a junior account manager reading off a slide they made an hour ago
- Vendor-neutral advice. I have no packaged deliverables to upsell, so I’ll tell you when the answer is "do less"
- Flexible scope. Book me for one audit, a quarter of advisory, or ongoing fractional support
- Faster decisions. No producers, planners, and approvers stacked between you and the recommendation
- Knowledge transfer is the whole point. I want your team smarter when we wrap, not more dependent on me
If the work eventually needs execution hands, I can spin up a fractional team from my network. But you’re hiring me first. Not a roster.
About your consultant
I’m Chris Bolton. I’ve been doing digital marketing, branding, and SEO for 20 years. I started Diviner Agency in 2024 after a decade as an executive at Portland branding agency Murmur Creative, where my brother Andrew and I grew the team to 26 people. (After 20 years of this, I’ve sat through most of the pitches and seen most of the games.)
I also host The Creative Agency Podcast and run the Grow Your Agency Slack community of nearly 2,000 agency owners, freelancers, and fractional marketers. Practically, that means I have a deep bench of vetted specialists to pull from when an engagement needs execution support.
I’ve worked with hundreds of brands, from small local businesses to Fortune 500s. Consulting is the spot where I make the biggest dent. Senior strategy, applied to the specific business actually sitting in front of me.
How engagements work
Hourly advisory
Book time as you need it. Second opinions, working sessions, vendor reviews, strategy gut-checks. This works best when you already have a senior in-house marketer and they just need somebody to argue with once in a while.
Project-based
Fixed scope. A technical audit. A content strategy build. A migration plan. A competitive gap analysis. We agree on the deliverable, the timeline, and the price up front, and that’s the deal.
Fractional retainer
Ongoing strategic advisory, usually a few hours a week or a fixed monthly bucket. Companies pick this when they want senior SEO leadership in the room and don’t want to pay for a full-time hire or a packaged agency tier.
Every engagement starts with a free consult so we can scope what you actually need. No minimum retainer. No packaged tiers.
When consulting is the right call
A few of the situations that usually land in my inbox:
- Your agency contract is up for renewal and you want a vendor-neutral second opinion before you sign
- You’re hiring an in-house SEO and want help writing the role, screening candidates, or coaching them once they start
- A migration, redesign, or rebrand is on the roadmap and you want an experienced SEO at the table from day one (instead of cleaning up rankings after launch)
- AI Search and GEO are eating your traffic and nobody on your team has a clear point of view yet
- Leadership wants an SEO strategy tied to revenue, not a tactic list dressed up in a deck
What clients say
“Our traffic is up over 20% year-over-year and we’re consistently showing up in AI answers, ChatGPT, and other AI search engines. We couldn’t be happier with this partnership. Chris is easy to work with and we can tell he really cares about our success.”
“Diviner has taken my fitness brand to the next level. It still blows my mind that clients just keep finding me online. Chris is easy to work with and a veritable wealth of branding, SEO, and AI expertise.”
“I love working with Diviner. I feel like I learn new ways of moving my business forward each time we meet. Chris has a wealth of SEO and AI Search knowledge. I feel super lucky to work with him.”
Frequently asked questions
What does an SEO consultant do that an agency doesn’t?
A consultant gives you senior strategic thinking and stays vendor-neutral. Agencies sell packaged deliverables, usually executed by a junior account team, and they’re incentivized to keep selling you more of those deliverables every quarter. A consultant tells you what to do, helps you figure out who should do it, and is genuinely fine if the answer is "your in-house team" or "a different specialist vendor." That’s the job.
How is consulting priced vs agency retainers?
Agency retainers are usually fixed monthly packages that bundle strategy and execution into one number. Consulting prices the strategic work itself: hourly, by project, or as a smaller fractional retainer that covers advisory hours instead of deliverables. Most clients spend less on consulting because they’re not paying for an account management layer or for execution hours they may not actually need.
Do you work with in-house SEO teams?
Yes, and it’s one of my most common engagements. I act as a senior sparring partner for in-house SEOs and marketing leaders. I run training and working sessions, review the roadmap, and provide air cover with executives when the strategy needs defending. I want to make your in-house team better, not replace them.
What’s the difference between this and your SEO services page?
The SEO services page is for full-service engagements where Diviner runs the program end-to-end: strategy plus execution across technical, content, and reporting. This page is for companies who want me personally as a consultant. Strategic advisory, audits, coaching, second opinions, without buying a full execution retainer. Plenty of clients start here and expand into services later once we know what the work actually needs.
Are you available for project-based engagements or just ongoing retainers?
Both. A lot of consulting is project-based: a technical audit, a migration plan, a content strategy build, a competitive analysis, a vendor review. Others prefer an ongoing fractional retainer for steady advisory hours. We scope it to fit the work. No required minimum commitment beyond the project at hand.
Do I work directly with you, or do you hand engagements off?
You work directly with me. The strategy, the audits, the calls, the recommendations: those are mine. When an engagement expands into execution that needs specialist hands (development, content production, digital PR), I pull from my vetted network of nearly 2,000 fractional marketers in the Grow Your Agency community and stay on as the strategic lead. You always know who owns the thinking.
Need a senior SEO in the room?
A one-time audit, a second opinion before you renew an agency contract, ongoing fractional advisory. Whatever it is, let’s get on a call and figure out what you actually need.
Book a consultFree consultation
Tell me a bit about your business and where you’re trying to go. I’ll point you toward the highest-impact next move — no pitch.
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