SEO Consultancy: Are You Buying the Plan, or the Work?

Consultancy, agency, and company get used almost interchangeably on the websites you are reading, and underneath them sit two genuinely different purchases. One is advice: somebody examines your site and hands you a plan. The other is execution: somebody examines your site and then changes it. A consultancy is built around the first. Whether it also does the second is worth settling before you agree to anything, because a plan pays off only once somebody carries it out. We sell the second kind, so where that line falls is something we have had to think hard about.

The question that settles it, and it is one sentence

After you pay, who edits the page. Not who recommends the edit, who makes it. Ask it exactly like that, and listen for which of three answers comes back. We do, and here is what a month of that looks like. You do, and here is the plan and the support while you carry it out. Or a third party does, and here is how that is arranged. All three are legitimate purchases. Only one of them leaves the work done without you doing it, and the price should differ between them. A provider who answers this cleanly has thought about it. A provider who answers with a methodology has answered a different question.

What is SEO consultancy?

It is the advice half of search work, sold on its own. A consultant reads your site, your market, and your results, works out what is holding the site back and what the opportunity is, and hands you a plan: what to change, in what order, and why. The output is a document and a conversation. Good consultancy is genuinely valuable, and it is most valuable at the moments when a wrong turn is expensive, which is the same point Google's own guidance makes about timing. Its advice on hiring an SEO says a good time to bring someone in is when you are considering a site redesign or planning to launch a new site, the earlier the better, so that the site is built to be search engine friendly from the start.

Advice and execution are two purchases

They use different skills, they carry different risks, and they end differently. Advice ends when the plan is delivered, and its quality is judged on the reasoning. Execution ends when the change is live, and its quality is judged on the record of what was changed and what happened next. A consultancy can sell both, and a good one will tell you which of the two a given line on the invoice is. The confusion is worth avoiding because it produces a specific disappointment: six months after a thorough and correct plan, nothing has moved, and the reason is that the plan was the product and the implementation was yours from the start.

What a plan is worth if nobody implements it

Less than it cost, and the arithmetic is not complicated. A plan has value when it is carried out, and carrying it out takes hours from somebody who can edit pages, week after week, against a schedule. If those hours do not exist in your business, the plan is a description of work that will not happen. The honest version of this conversation happens before you buy: ask what the plan will take to implement, in hours and in skills, and who in your business will hold it. If the answer is nobody, you are looking for execution rather than advice, which is a different shape of engagement and is the one our guide to ongoing SEO describes week by week.

How much does an SEO consultant cost?

Advice is priced by time or by project: an hourly or daily rate, or a fixed fee for a review with a written set of recommendations. Execution is priced monthly, because the work continues. That is why the published ranges for this search are so wide, and why comparing a consultant's day rate with an agency's monthly fee tells you very little. What makes any figure readable is asking what you will receive and whether anything on your site will be different at the end of it. Our own figure sits on our pricing page rather than behind a call, with what it covers and what it does not.

What does an SEO company do, then?

Underneath all the labels the work is a short repeating list. Decide what each page is for. Write the page titles, headings, and descriptions that decide how the page reads in the results. Stop two of your pages competing for one search. Keep the internal links and image text sensible. Watch how fast the pages load, clear the links that go nowhere, and make sure Google can reach and read everything you want listed. Then measure what changed and what happened after. A consultancy tells you which of those to do and in what order. An execution arrangement does them. Google's own list of services a provider might offer covers both sides, including review of your site content or structure, technical advice, content development, keyword research, and training.

Is this company real, and who is the consultant?

On a consultancy this question is narrower than it looks, because what you are buying is a particular person's judgment. So the thing to establish is who that person is and whether they will be doing your work. Ask for the name of the consultant assigned to you, ask what else they are working on, and ask whether the person in the meeting is the person who writes the plan. Google's own hiring guidance points the same way: it suggests asking to see examples of previous work, checking business references with past clients, and asking how you will communicate and whether the provider will share all the changes they make along with the reasoning. It also says that if a provider is secretive or will not clearly explain what they intend to do, be careful, and that you are ultimately responsible for the actions of any company you hire.

When consultancy is the right purchase

When you have someone who can do the work and needs to know what to do. When you are about to spend money on a rebuild and want the decisions checked before they are expensive to reverse. When you are choosing between two directions and need a reasoned opinion. In those cases the plan is the thing you were short of, and paying for advice is exactly right. When what you are short of is hours, a plan adds to the pile rather than reducing it, and the purchase you want is the one where somebody else edits the page.

Where we sit, and what we do not sell

We are an execution arrangement: we make the changes ourselves, after we have listened to what you sell and what you want more of. One website, one published price, a fixed number of optimizations to your site each week, cancel any time, no contract, and a written record of what changed with what it was before and why. We cover the website half of search work: the business profile and local listings, new pages, redesigns, custom development, off page link building, and the other marketing channels are on our not included list, in writing. If you want the questions that sort a consultancy and an agency apart whatever they call themselves, how to choose an SEO agency is the fuller set.

Ask it before the proposal arrives

After you pay, who edits the page. It is a short, fair question, and anyone who has thought about how their own service works can answer it in a sentence. Our answer is that we do, every week, and we write down what we changed. Ask it of every name on your list, and the proposals that arrive afterwards will all be describing the same thing, which is what makes them possible to compare.

We sell the work rather than the plan: one website, one published price, a fixed number of optimizations to your site each week, cancel any time, no contract. What that covers and what is on the not included list is set out line by line on our pricing page, so you can hold it against a consultancy's day rate and see what each one leaves you with.

And if you are holding a consultancy proposal and want a second read on what it leaves you to implement, book a free SEO consultation. You will speak to the person who does the work.

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.