Ten years of not compromising.

Alizée Baudez Consulting, since 2016

A decade of international SEO, built on deliberate choices, strong partnerships, and without cutting corners on the work or the people.

The story

It started with two strangers who needed their CVs redone. €150. A Company ID. A business.

In early 2016, I flew to California to figure out what I wanted to do with my life (yes, it’s cliché, I know). I came back with a direction. Within weeks, I had invoiced my first two clients : a couple who needed their résumés rewritten, I created a company to be able to invoice them, and landed a role managing the SEO-heavy website of a Parisian business school. Not quite a grand plan. More like a series of good decisions made quickly.

For two years I held both: the employment and the side business. I was learning on the job, taking on digital marketing missions, copywriting, multilingual work, and increasingly, SEO. The hot topic at the time was mobile-first indexing. It feels like a lifetime ago. By the time I left, the side business was already generating 15% of my income on a couple of evenings a week. The maths made sense. I went full-time.

“Working without layers between strategy and delivery isn’t a preference. It’s what makes the work better.”

What followed was two years of working from home offices across Europe (Bologna, Gdańsk, Vilnius, Budapest, the Canary Islands) building a consulting practice from wherever I happened to be. Doing international SEO while actually living it. Investing in the craft: attending BrightonSEO twice a year, earning certifications, reading obsessively, learning from peers who were further ahead.

• 2016. First invoice. First company ID. First job. Three things in the same week, none of them planned together. The business was live.
• 2016–2018. Two years employed, two businesses running in parallel. Growing an international SEO specialisation from inside a real organisation, then taking it independent.
• 2018–2020. Full-time. Fully nomadic. Home offices across Bologna, Gdańsk, Vilnius, Budapest, the Canary Islands, etc. The business grew every year. The investment in the craft paid off.
• 2020–2024. Strasbourg. A home. A pandemic. An industry that transformed more than once. Steady growth through it all. Mobile-first gave way to Core Web Vitals, then E-E-A-T, then AI-driven search. Still here. Still curious.
• 2025. Took a deliberate pause. Built a family. The business waited. So did the clients worth keeping.
• 2026. Year ten. Back fully. Formalising a decade of pattern recognition into a framework. The work is sharper than it has ever been.

Over ten years, the work has taken me across industries as varied as fintech, higher education, SaaS, automotive, food and beverage, tourism, professional training, e-commerce, and media, across markets including the UK, Germany, the US, Canada, Australia, the UAE, and more. The through-line was always the same: helping businesses show up correctly in markets that aren’t their home turf.

Markets I’ve worked across, 2016 to 2026

None of this happened alone. My partner has shared an office with me for eight of those ten years. Friends celebrated the wins and steadied the harder moments. The businesses I worked with became long-term partners and collaborators, people I’m genuinely glad I met. That web of people is part of what made this possible and part of what makes the work good.

This anniversary isn’t a lookback. It’s a marker for where I’m going next.

What ten years means for the work: independence isn’t just a lifestyle choice. It’s a structural advantage.

1. No hierarchy between you and the thinking. No account manager filtering the strategy before it reaches you. What you get is the actual analysis, directly.
2. No incentive to recommend what’s billable. Independent consultants are paid to give the right answer, not the answer that extends the engagement.
3. Ten years of pattern recognition. From mobile-first to AI-driven search. Across markets, languages, and business models. That depth shapes every recommendation.
4. Full accountability to the outcome. One consultant. Fully responsible for the work. No junior team running your account while the senior sells the next one.

The businesses I work with are navigating real complexity: multi-market expansion, misaligned SEO structures, visibility that needs to travel across languages and cultures. That’s not a job for a generic audit. It’s a job for someone who has spent a decade thinking about exactly this.