SEO Expert: What the Title Should Mean

None formally, which is the honest and slightly uncomfortable answer. There is no licensing body and no exam that means anything to Google. Certifications exist but most are vendor marketing. Judge on demonstrated reasoning instead: ask someone to explain a past decision and why it worked.

Ask them what they would not do for your site and why. Genuine expertise shows up as ruling things out. Someone who says every service they offer is right for you has not looked at your situation. Ask them to explain one recommendation from first principles as well, because rehearsed advice falls apart quickly under a follow-up question.

Mostly framing. Consultant describes the commercial arrangement, which is advice instead of delivery. Expert describes a claim about depth. See our consultancy page for how the engagement works.

Specialists are worth it for bounded technical problems: a migration, an indexation collapse, an international rollout. For ongoing growth, a generalist who can move between technical, content and local work usually serves a small business better, because your bottleneck will move.

Senior consultancy in the UK is normally priced by day or by project rather than by monthly retainer, and it costs more per hour than delivery work. The value is in getting the priority order right, which is where most wasted SEO budget goes.

A strategist who sets the plan and reviews the work, and specialists who carry out the technical, content and local pieces. The plan and the review are never delegated. Part of what you are paying for is people who know where their own edge is and say so rather than guessing at the deep end of a discipline.

Diagnose. Crawl the site, review Search Console, look at what is ranking for your commercial terms, and produce a prioritised list. Anyone publishing content in week one has not looked at anything first.

The credible ones do not, because the ranking system is not theirs to control. What can reasonably be committed to is the work itself, the reporting, and an honest read on whether the target is realistic before you spend.

Ask for two references you can speak to directly, and ask those clients what the reporting looked like instead of whether they were happy. Screenshots of ranking graphs prove very little on their own.

In-house wins on business knowledge and availability. External wins on breadth of pattern recognition, because they see many sites and you see one. Plenty of companies use both, with the external doing strategy and audit and the internal team executing.

Yes. Traffic drops, migrations, indexation failures and penalty diagnosis are all bounded pieces of work with no retainer attached.

Run the free audit so we are both looking at the same evidence, then book a call. It is a better use of half an hour than a discovery call with nothing in front of either of us.