Hiring an SEO Consultant: What One Person Gives You, and What to Ask First

You are thinking about hiring one person to look after your website's search work, rather than a firm. That is a reasonable way to buy SEO, and so is hiring an agency. They buy you different things, and the difference is worth knowing before you sign up for either.

I should say where I stand, because it affects how you read the rest. I work as an SEO consultant, and Capron Media is my agency. So this page is not going to tell you that one arrangement beats the other. It sets out what each one gives you, what each one costs you in ways that are not on the invoice, and the questions that separate a good hire from a bad one whichever way you go.

Consultant or agency: the labels overlap

In practice the words blur. A consultant may bring in help for some jobs, and an agency may be a small team with one senior person making the calls. What you are really choosing between is two things the label does not tell you: who makes the decisions about your site, and what happens to the work when that person is busy, on vacation, or out sick. Ask about both, whatever the provider calls itself.

What one person gives you

The person you talk to is the person who decides, and often the person who does the work. There is no hand-off between the sales call and the first change to your site, so nothing gets lost in a relay. You get judgment applied to your business in particular, and when you ask why something was done, you hear the reasoning from the person who did the reasoning.

The limits come from the same place. One person has one set of hours, so ask how many other clients they carry and what a busy week does to yours. One person also has a particular set of skills. Someone good at page titles and site structure may not write your content, fix code, or build links, and a good consultant will tell you that on the first call rather than discover it on your site.

What an agency gives you

At its best, an agency's strength is its process: the work is written down as steps, more than one person knows your site, and the work does not stop because one person is away. Whether a given agency works that way is one of the things to ask. You can also get several kinds of work from one place, which matters if you want content, development, or advertising alongside search.

The limit is distance. The person who sold you the service may not be the person who does it, and your site may be handled by whoever has room that week. Ask the agency to name who will work on your site and whether you can talk to them directly. If the answer is an account manager who passes messages along, you now know how long a question will take to answer.

Which one fits your situation

Start with what you actually want done. Google's own advice to business owners is plain about the first case: "If you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself." If that is you, and what you want is someone to review your site, point you at what matters, and show you how to keep it up, a consultant engaged for a review and some training is a sensible purchase.

If you want that kind of look at your own site before you decide anything, a free SEO consultation with me includes a review of your site's current search performance and a teardown of one page, with the changes I would make.

If you want the work done every week and you do not want to manage it, the question stops being consultant or agency. It becomes whether there is a defined process behind the person, so the weekly work happens the same way whether or not anyone is chasing it. That can be one person with a written method, or it can be a firm. What that recurring work consists of is set out in our guide to ongoing SEO.

And if you are about to redesign or rebuild your site, Google names that as "a great time to hire", adding "the earlier, the better", so that "your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up." Google adds, just as plainly: "However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site."

How much does it cost to hire an SEO consultant?

I won't give you a going rate for consultants that I can't stand behind, so this section shows you what to compare instead. We publish our own price on our pricing page, so you have at least one number to hold the others against. The quotes you will see take one of four shapes: a one-off audit, a one-off project with a fixed scope, an hourly rate or monthly retainer where you buy time, and a flat monthly subscription with a stated scope. You can be quoted any of the four by a consultant or by an agency. A fee that runs every month is the one to look at hardest, because it keeps running.

Because a consultant and an agency can charge the same way for very different amounts of work, compare what each quote buys rather than the number at the bottom. For a project fee, ask what you will hold at the end: a written list of findings and fixes, in order, is something you can act on with or without them. For a monthly fee, ask what will be done this month and what was done last month, page by page. If a monthly quote is the one on your desk, we wrote up what an SEO retainer buys in more detail.

Questions to ask before you hire anyone

Google publishes a list of questions to put to anyone you are thinking of hiring for SEO, and it applies to a consultant and an agency alike. Among them: "Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?" and "What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?" The one worth asking twice is about the working relationship: "Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?"

Two more that you can check the answers to yourself. First, what will you change on my site in the first month, and where will I see it? A changed page title shows in the browser tab, and usually as the headline of your search result, though Google sometimes writes its own. A changed heading is on the page itself. If the answer names nothing you could look at, you will not be able to tell whether it happened. Second, what access do you need? Google's advice on audits is specific: "only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access)."

Google also suggests noticing whether they ask about you: "Your SEO should ask questions about what makes your business unique, who your competitors are, how search results can help, and how your customers find you." A first call that is all about the provider and none about your business is an answer in itself.

If you are searching for a consultant near you, part of that may be trust: wanting to sit across a table from the person. The work on a website itself can be done from anywhere. What someone local may bring is familiarity with your market, which is why Google's list includes "What's your experience in my country/city?" Ask it, and weigh the answer alongside everything else on this page.

Reasons to walk away

Google is blunt here, and its own words are the best version. "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a 'special relationship' with Google, or advertise a 'priority submit' to Google." "Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do." And one that is easy to miss: "You should never have to link to an SEO." In plain terms, nobody you hire should ask you to put a link to their website on yours as part of the deal.

The same page names one more warning sign: "Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that email you out of the blue." None of these tests is specific to consultants or to agencies. Every one of them works on both.

If your site is on Wix

A Wix owner has a narrower version of this question, because the builder decides where each setting lives and, as we have found on our own site, whether a saved setting actually reaches the live page. That is a different search with different answers, and we wrote it up separately: hiring a Wix SEO consultant.

Making the call

Whichever way you go, the test is the same three questions. Can they tell you what they will do? Can you see it when they have done it? Did they ask about your business before they talked about theirs? If you have narrowed it to firms, how to choose an SEO agency goes further into that decision.

For what it is worth, what we sell is a subscription for one website: the five highest-priority optimizations the site needs each week, two checks on every change (one before anything is approved, one after it is live on your site), no account manager between you and the work, and no contract. Google Business Profile work, new pages, redesigns, link building, and the other marketing channels are on our not-included list. The price and both lists are on our pricing page, side by side, so you can hold them against any other quote.

If you are still deciding whether paying anyone is worth it, book a free SEO consultation. You will speak to the person who does the work, for 25 to 30 minutes. Before the call I review your site's current search performance, and on it you get a teardown of one page and an honest read on whether this is worth doing for your business, including if the answer is no.

Written by Spencer Capron at Capron Media, in collaboration with our AI agents. The same way we do the work for clients. Spencer reviews everything published here.