SEO consultant: advice on what to change, and the work that follows it

What is an SEO consultant?

You have a site that should bring in more work from search, and nobody on your side can say what to change first. An SEO consultant is the person who works that out: they look at the site, the searches your buyers make and the competitors who show up for them, and turn what they find into a list of changes ranked by what each is worth.

O*NET OnLine, the US Department of Labor’s database of occupations, files the role under search marketing strategists, and its job titles for that occupation include SEO consultant and SEO strategist. It describes the work as studying how people search, working out what they mean by what they type, and using that to make a business’s content, products or services more visible, then measuring the outcome and adjusting.

An SEO consultant can work alone, inside an agency or on a company’s staff, and the job is much the same in each.

What does an SEO consultant do?

Day to day, the work is research, advice and checking. The occupation’s task list in the same database covers most of it:

• Research: keyword research combined with other data to profile what buyers want, plus research on search trends and on how competitors perform.
• Work with developers: changes to the site’s structure, its server setup and how its pages are built.
• Content plans: which pages and articles the site needs, and what each should cover.
• Measurement: the numbers that show what’s working, such as visits, time on the site and how many visitors become leads.
• Reporting: choosing the measures that matter and reporting them to the people who run marketing.

Google’s page on hiring an SEO adds one more service: training, so your own people can handle part of the work. What a consultant doesn’t do, unless hired to, is carry out the advice. Someone still has to make the changes, write the pages and earn the links.

Is an SEO expert the same as an SEO specialist?

Mostly. Expert, specialist, consultant and strategist are names for people doing the same kind of work, and the Department of Labor’s job titles for the occupation include SEO consultant, SEO strategist and internet marketing specialist. Where people draw a line, a specialist tends to sit on a company’s staff and do the work day to day, while a consultant comes in from outside to advise.

None of the titles is a qualification, so the title alone tells you little. Judge the person by the work they can show, by whether their advice cites Google’s own documentation, and by the questions they ask about your business.

How is an SEO consultant different from an SEO agency?

The difference is who does the work. A consultant’s product is the advice: what to change, in what order, and why. An agency usually sells the advice and the work together, with writers, developers and people who handle outreach on the team.

Google’s page on hiring an SEO doesn’t separate them. It names SEOs, agencies and consultants together as offering useful services, and writes its advice for hiring “a company or person” to do SEO. It warns about any company that won’t clearly explain what it intends to do, and reminds you that you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire.

Choose a consultant when you have people to carry out the advice: a developer, a writer, a marketing team. Choose an agency when you don’t, or when you’d rather the advice and the work came from one place. With us they do: the advice comes inside our monthly SEO work.

Who are SEO consulting services for?

SEO consulting services fit an established business whose site should be winning more from search than it does. We work with three kinds:

• Established local businesses: the advice centers on the searches buyers make with a town or “near me” in them, and on the reviews Google says can help a local ranking.
• Multi-location and regional businesses: each location’s page has to earn its place, because Google’s spam policies list sets of region or city pages that all funnel users toward one page as doorway abuse.
• National businesses: the advice has to hold across many pages and arrive in a form an in-house marketing team can act on.

The market’s range for each level is in the pricing section on this page, and SEO pricing sets out which businesses fit each level and what moves the price inside it. For the other kinds of SEO work, see our SEO services page.

When do you need an SEO consultant, and when don’t you?

Bring one in when the questions outgrow your own time or knowledge:

• Before a redesign or a new site: Google calls a redesign a great time to hire an SEO, the earlier the better, and names the launch of a new site too.
• After a drop: calls or traffic fell and nobody can say why. Our page on SEO audit services covers that kind of review.
• Before you grow into new places: a new location or a wider service area changes which searches matter.
• When changes are guesses: people are editing the site without knowing which changes help.

You may not need one at all. Google’s advice to a local business run by its owner is that much of the work can probably be done in-house, starting with its SEO starter guide. And if nobody searches for what you sell, advice about search won’t change much.

How do you hire an SEO consultant?

1. Write down what you want from search: more calls from one area, a new service found, a drop explained. A consultant can only be judged against a goal.
2. Talk to two or three: notice whether they ask about your business, your competitors and how your customers find you. Google’s advice is that if an SEO isn’t interested in your business, you should find one who is.
3. Check past work and references: ask for examples, then ask a past client whether the work helped and the consultant was easy to work with.
4. Start with read-only access: if they offer an audit, give read access to Search Console and hold back write access at that stage. A good audit gives realistic estimates of improvement and of the work involved.
5. Get the scope in writing: what they’ll do, what they need from you, how they’ll report and what it costs.

What questions should you ask an SEO consultant?

Google’s interview questions cover past work, its guidelines, expected results and timing, and experience in your industry and your country or city. Add these, which test whether the advice will hold up:

• What would you change first on my site, and why? Someone who has looked at the site answers with specifics.
• Which Google documentation backs that? Google suggests checking whether an SEO’s recommendations cite its official documentation.
• What tools do you use? Google says it doesn’t evaluate or endorse third-party SEO tools, and that those tools have no access to its internal ranking data. Advice built only on a tool’s score deserves a second look.
• Who makes the changes? You, your developer or the consultant, and what each change needs from your side.
• What won’t you do? A good answer includes paying for links and promising rankings.
• What will the report show first? Leads, ideally: the calls and enquiries search brought in.

What should an SEO consultant never promise?

A ranking. Google puts it in one line: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” The rest of the list follows from Google’s own pages:

• Links by the count: a number of links each month, or a scheme to trade them. Google’s spam policies treat links made mainly to manipulate rankings as link spam, including links exchanged for money, excessive link swaps and links made by automated programs.
• A link back to the consultant: Google says you should never have to link to an SEO.
• Mass submission: sending your site to thousands of search engines, which Google says is typically a useless exercise.

The cost of breaking the rules falls on your site. Google says sites that break its spam policies may rank lower or not appear in results at all. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission takes complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices, and Google points anyone misled by an SEO there.

Which SEO advice is out of date?

Some advice outlived the search engine it was written for. Google’s SEO starter guide lists things it believes you shouldn’t focus on:

• Meta keywords: the keywords meta tag plays no part in Google Search.
• Keyword stuffing: repeating keywords excessively breaks Google’s spam policies.
• Word counts: Google says length alone doesn’t matter for ranking, and there’s no magic word count to hit.
• Heading order: the order of a page’s headings doesn’t matter for Search, and there’s no ideal number of them.
• E-E-A-T as a ranking factor: Google says plainly that it isn’t one.
• Duplicate content penalties: the same content at more than one address on your own site is inefficient, but it doesn’t bring a manual action. Copying other sites’ content is a different matter.

A consultant still selling these is working from old notes.

How will you know the advice is working?

Set targets before the work starts, and read the results against them. Google’s starter guide is candid about timing: a change can show in a few hours or take several months, so give each one a few weeks before deciding whether it helped.

Search Console shows which searches bring people to the site and where its pages appear, and analytics shows what visitors do once they arrive. The number that matters most is leads: the calls and enquiries that came from search. Our monthly report puts leads first and reads every result against the targets agreed at the start.

Our page on SEO pricing answers how long SEO takes and whether it’s worth the money.

How does SEO consulting work with us?

It starts with a 15-minute call. If SEO is worth doing for you, the proposal names the work, how it runs and the cost, and you approve it before anything changes on your site. If we’re not the right fit, we say so on the call.

With us, the advice and the work come together: each month we make the changes we recommend, then report what they did. If we didn’t build your site, we rebuild it in our own system first, with its old addresses redirected, so the changes we advise are ones we can make.

What we don’t do: promise rankings, sell link counts, pay for links or manage paid ads. When the right answer is to do the work yourself, we’ll say that too.

We advise businesses across the US, remotely, from our office in Valencia, California. For a second opinion on how your site does in search, book a 15-minute call.