If you’ve looked into SEO for your business, you’ve probably come across SEO consultants, agencies, specialists and freelancers, often offering slightly different versions of the same thing.
So what does an SEO consultant actually do?
The short answer is that they help you understand how your business can get more value from organic search, identify what’s getting in the way and decide what is worth prioritising.
That can involve keywords, technical fixes and content, but the job shouldn’t start with a checklist. It should start with understanding what you’re trying to achieve.
What Does an SEO Consultant Look At?
The exact work will depend on your website and where you’re starting from, but there are a few areas an SEO consultant is likely to investigate.
What Your Customers Are Searching For
Keyword research isn’t just about finding phrases with the highest search volume.
A consultant should look at how your potential customers search, which searches are relevant to the services or products you want to sell and how well your website currently meets that intent.
There isn’t much value in increasing traffic if you’re attracting people who are unlikely to become customers.
Your Website Structure and Content
Your website needs to make sense to the people using it as well as search engines.
An SEO consultant might look at whether your important services have suitable pages, how those pages are organised, whether useful information is missing and whether several pages are competing for the same searches.
Sometimes the answer is new content. Sometimes it’s improving what you already have. And sometimes it’s removing or combining pages that no longer have a clear purpose.
Technical SEO
Technical problems can make it harder for search engines to crawl, understand or index a website properly.
Depending on the site, this could mean looking at things such as indexing, redirects, canonical tags, internal links, page speed, mobile usability and structured data.
The aim isn’t to produce the longest possible technical audit. It’s to identify problems that are actually worth fixing and put them in a sensible order.
Your Local Visibility
If you serve customers in a particular area, local search may form part of the work too.
That could include your Google Business Profile, reviews, location information on your website and how well you’re appearing for relevant searches in the places you actually serve.
For a national or ecommerce business, those priorities could look completely different.
What Your Competitors Are Doing
Competitor research can help identify opportunities, but it shouldn’t become a game of copying whatever ranks above you.
A consultant might look at which competitors appear for searches that matter to your business, how their websites are structured, the content they’ve created and where they’ve built stronger authority.
The useful question is then what can we learn from that?, rather than simply trying to reproduce it.
Whether SEO Is Actually Contributing to the Business
Rankings are useful for understanding visibility, but they aren’t the end goal.
I’d also want to know what happens after somebody reaches the website.
Are organic visitors making enquiries, calling, buying something or taking another meaningful action?
If visibility is improving but it isn’t contributing to the business, that’s something worth investigating.
Does an SEO Consultant Do the Work Too?
Sometimes.
SEO consultancy can range from advice and strategy through to hands-on implementation.
One consultant might audit your website and work with your developer or internal marketing team to implement the recommendations. Another might make content changes, carry out keyword research, improve internal linking and manage the SEO work on an ongoing basis.
That’s why it’s worth establishing what’s included before you appoint someone.
If you need somebody to both identify what needs doing and help get it done, make sure that’s the service you’re actually buying.
SEO Consultant vs SEO Agency
Neither model is automatically better.
With an independent consultant, you’ll usually work directly with the person analysing your website and making recommendations.
An agency may give you access to a wider team of specialists, which can be useful if your project needs several different areas of expertise or a larger amount of delivery.
What matters is knowing who will work on your account, what they’re responsible for and how involved they’ll be.
What Should You Ask an SEO Consultant Before Hiring Them?
You don’t need to understand SEO well enough to interrogate somebody about canonical tags or crawl budgets.
I’d be more interested in how they think.
Ask how they’ll decide what to prioritise, what they’ll use to measure progress and what they’ll need from you.
It’s also worth asking:
- Who will actually work on my website?
- What work is included?
- How will you report on what’s happening?
- What happens if you find that SEO isn’t my biggest marketing priority?
That last question matters.
SEO isn’t automatically the right answer just because somebody wants more enquiries.
Do You Actually Need an SEO Consultant?
Possibly, but I’d work out what problem you’re trying to solve first.
If you’re barely appearing in search for services that matter to your business, SEO may deserve attention.
But sometimes the problem is elsewhere. You might already have traffic but very few people are enquiring. Your website may need more fundamental work. You may need results more quickly than SEO is likely to provide. Or another marketing channel may simply make more sense for what you’re trying to achieve.
A consultant should be able to tell you when SEO is worth pursuing, not just find more SEO work to sell you.
How I Approach SEO Consultancy
My starting point is what you want the business to achieve and where search fits into that.
From there, I look at your existing visibility, website, competitors and data to work out where the useful opportunities are and what should take priority.
You can read more about my approach, what’s included and how I work on my SEO Services page.
If you’re not sure whether SEO is the problem in the first place, you can also book a free 30-minute Seed Session. We’ll look at what you’re currently doing and where I think it’s worth focusing next.
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