Sydney SEO consultant, not a content factory
Why hire a consultant, not a bigger agency
Most Sydney SEO agencies hide the consultant behind a sales team and an account manager. You get a good pitch on the discovery call, then you get handed off to someone you have never met. The strategy stays at the senior level. The execution drops to a junior. The reporting gets prettier as the rankings get worse.
Darnell Media is built around the opposite. Garehn Kalloghlian runs every audit, every strategy doc, every monthly call. Junior support exists for execution tasks (data pulls, citation submissions, basic content briefs) but the consultant is the consultant on every retainer, every month.
That is also why we cap at 12 retainer clients. Past 12, you cannot do the work personally. Past 12, you become an agency.
Where I am most useful
- Sydney service businesses with 10 to 100 employees and a real service area
- Tradies and home services that want to rank locally and have not figured out GBP and on-page well enough yet
- Established businesses that have been on a retainer with another agency for 6+ months and are seeing nothing
- Businesses that have not started SEO at all and want to do it right rather than get sold a generic package
- Existing in-house marketing teams that want a senior SEO brain on retainer for strategy and review
Where I am not the right hire
- National brands needing a 10-person team to run multi-market SEO at scale
- E-commerce sites with 10,000+ SKUs needing dedicated technical SEO and feed management
- SaaS or B2B brands needing content at very high volume (multiple posts a week)
- Anything where a regulator has flagged the category (gambling, vape, payday)
The "why we exist" version
I started Darnell Media in 2025 after watching one too many tradies pay $4,000 a month for a Wix template and four blog posts a year. The breaking point was a Belrose plumber friend who paid an agency $30,000 over 18 months and ranked for nothing. Darnell Media is the agency I wished he could have hired instead.
Frequently asked
Is hiring a consultant different from hiring an agency?
Practically, yes. With us specifically, no. Darnell Media is an agency in legal structure but a consultancy in practice: same person on the discovery call, the audit, the strategy, and the monthly call. We do not hand you off to a junior account manager. We also cap the number of retainer clients at 12 for exactly this reason.
Are you taking new clients?
Usually yes, but we cap at 12 retainer clients at a time. If we are full when you enquire, we will tell you and put you on a short waitlist. We try not to take on more than we can do properly.
Will you work with my existing marketing team or agency?
Often. SEO consulting alongside an in-house team or a separate paid-media agency is one of the most common shapes our retainers take. Roles get defined upfront: we own SEO strategy and execution; you (or the other agency) own design, paid, creative, brand. We do not poach scope.