A consultant is one person whose time you are buying directly. That is a narrower offer than an agency and, for a lot of businesses, a better-matched one. Here is when it is and when it is not.
Businesses that want the experienced person rather than the agency around them — and businesses who have bought an agency retainer before and found the senior name on the pitch never appeared again. It is a poor fit if you need volume output: fifty pages a month is an agency job, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Target keyword: "seo consultant" — 2,900 searches/month, difficulty 42/100. Advertisers bid £6.77–£24.99 for a top-of-page click on it — see where that figure comes from.
Diagnoses why a site is not earning the search traffic it should, puts the causes in priority order, and either fixes them or hands your team a plan precise enough to implement. In practice that is technical auditing, keyword and intent mapping, on-page work, and advising on content and links — plus a lot of telling people which of those they do not need.
Per hour, rarely. Per outcome, often. There is no account management layer, no new-business overhead and no junior learning on your budget, so a smaller number of hours goes further. Where an agency genuinely wins is sustained volume.
Day rates and monthly arrangements vary enormously with experience and market. We quote per piece of work after looking at the site rather than from a rate card, because the same monthly figure buys wildly different amounts depending on what the site needs. What drives the number is set out in the pricing guide.
Usually nothing but the company name. A consultancy may be two people or twenty. If the distinction matters to you, the question to ask is not what the business is called but how many people would touch your account and which of them you would ever speak to.
For diagnosis and strategy, yes — large technical audits are exactly the work that suits one experienced person. For execution at volume, no, and that is the honest limit. On big sites the usual arrangement is consultant plus your in-house team or your developer doing the implementing.
Ask what they would check first on your site and why. A vague answer is the answer. Then run the free audit yourself and compare: anyone whose diagnosis does not match what an automated tool can see in sixty seconds has not looked.
Both. The work itself is remote, and most clients never need anything else. Where on-site genuinely helps is training days and workshops with a team in a room, which is a different thing from the consulting itself.
Yes, and for a good number of businesses it is the better purchase. The training exists precisely because SEO is learnable and a permanent retainer is not the only answer to it.
An audit and a written priority list. That is a bounded, quotable piece of work with an end, and you are free to take the findings to your own developer. A lot of engagements end there deliberately, because the fixes are implementable in-house.
No. Two clients chasing the same terms in the same market means one of them is paying to be held back, and no arrangement makes that honest.
Yes, and it is a common arrangement. An independent second opinion on whether the work being billed is the work the site needs is a cheap thing to buy relative to a year of retainer.
Technical fixes can move things in weeks. Competitive commercial terms realistically take six to twelve months, and anything promising faster is either chasing keywords with no demand or cutting corners you would not agree to if asked.
Everything on this page is teachable. A full day in a class of three or four is £499, or £999 with the work implemented on your own site while you watch. If you can give it an hour or two a day afterwards, that is usually the cheaper route.
Ask me anything about SEO, or about the tools, the training or what we do.
If your problem is one you can fix yourself with the free tools, I will say so.
Where I am not certain, I will say so rather than guess, and Imran will follow it up.
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