What is an SEO consultant?

Short answer

An SEO consultant is an experienced specialist who diagnoses what is stopping a site from ranking and decides what should be done about it, usually leaving most of the doing to your team. You are buying judgement rather than hours: which of fifteen plausible priorities actually matters this quarter, and which to ignore.

The title gets used loosely. Some people calling themselves consultants are freelancers who do the same work as an agency, just alone. Others are advisers who never touch your site. Both are legitimate. It helps to know which one you are talking to.

What a consultant actually does

At its core, SEO consulting is diagnosis and direction. A good consultant looks at your site, your data and your competitors, works out what is actually holding you back, and tells you what to do about it in priority order. Then they review the work as your team does it, answer questions as they come up, and adjust the priorities when the evidence changes.

Prioritisation. A ranked view of what to do next and, more usefully, what to stop doing. Most roadmaps are too long, not too short.
Review before you commit. Templates, briefs, site structure and big changes, looked at before they go live rather than diagnosed afterwards.
A second opinion. On agency proposals, tool purchases and confident-sounding advice that would be expensive if wrong.
Upskilling. Every recommendation comes with the reasoning, so your team needs the consultant less over time.

How it differs from an agency

An agency mostly sells execution: content written, links built, technical fixes made, reports sent. It has a team, processes and capacity, and charges for the work done. A consultant mostly sells judgement: knowing which work is worth doing. The Ahrefs pricing survey of 439 providers reflects that difference in price: consultants averaged $171.18 an hour against $98.90 for agencies. You pay more per hour and usually need far fewer hours.

The two are not exclusive. I often work alongside a client’s existing agency: I diagnose and prioritise, they execute. That works well when everyone is clear about roles.

Who needs a consultant rather than an agency

Teams who can execute but keep pointing at the wrong thing. If you have writers, developers and a marketing lead, you probably do not need more hands. You need someone who has seen enough sites to tell you which of your plausible priorities is the real one.

Businesses about to make a decision that is expensive to get wrong, such as a site rebuild, a change of platform, a new site structure or a large content investment.

In-house SEOs who are capable but stretched, or early in their careers and out of their depth on the hard calls.

And anyone who has paid an agency for a year and cannot tell whether it worked.

Who does not

If there is nobody to act on the advice, a consultant is the wrong purchase. Advice that nobody implements is worth nothing. You need someone to do the work, which is a different engagement.

If you want a monthly report to show a stakeholder, consulting will frustrate you. The output is better decisions, and those do not always produce a document.

What makes a good one

Experience across many sites, so they recognise patterns quickly. Willingness to say “this is not your problem” and “do less”. Recommendations specific enough to act on. And honesty about limits. Google’s own advice on hiring SEO help is to ask what results they expect, in what timeframe, and how they measure success, and to walk away from anyone who guarantees a first-place ranking.

A good consultant should also be trying to make themselves less necessary. If they are still essential after a year, ask why your team has not learned what they know.

How I work

I have been doing this for about fifteen years, mostly diagnosing why sites that should rank do not. Consulting with me usually starts with an audit, so the advice is grounded in your site rather than general principles. Then a standing call, async access between calls, a short live priority list, and review of work before it ships. Month to month. If a quarter goes by where I am not earning it, you should say so and we stop.

What a typical month looks like

A call every week or two with whoever needs to be on it, often the marketing lead and a developer. Between calls, questions answered by message: “should this page be noindexed”, “is this agency proposal reasonable”, “which of these two headings”. A short list of the three to five things that matter most right now, revised as results come in. And a review of anything significant before it goes live, which is where most of the value hides, because the cheapest SEO fix is the mistake that never ships. No blocks of hours, because selling hours makes people ration questions, and the small questions are often the ones that save the most money.

If your team can execute and needs direction, my SEO consulting starts from $500 a month. If you need execution rather than direction, I’ll tell you that on the first call.