Antonetta Donnelly asked 5 วัน ago
How to vet an SEO consultant before a migration Because the downside of a botched migration is severe, vetting matters more than usual. The right questions separate genuine practitioners from those who talk a good game but have never carried a site through a platform change without traffic loss.
It varies by scope and seniority. A one-off audit is the lowest-commitment option, project work sits in the middle, and ongoing retainers cost more but deliver continuous strategy. Price should reflect the competitiveness of your market, not a fixed package applied to everyone.
Traditional SEO focuses on ranking in the classic list of search results, while AI search optimisation (often called GEO) aims to make your content the source that AI systems quote in answers. They overlap but require different structuring, strong entity signals, and clean, extractable statements a language model can lift.
Red Flags, Questions, and Pricing Models Once you understand the discipline, vetting becomes easier. The goal of an interview isn’t to test trivia – it’s to see whether the person thinks like a diagnostician or a salesperson. A good seo professional asks about your business before quoting a price. A weak one leads with a package.
What an SEO Consultant Actually Does Strip away the jargon and the job is straightforward to describe: an seo consultant diagnoses why your site does or doesn’t earn visibility in search, then builds a prioritised plan to fix the gaps. That plan usually spans three layers – technical foundations, content and relevance, and authority signals. A competent seo professional moves fluidly between all three rather than obsessing over one.
Some short-term fluctuation is normal as search engines re-crawl and re-index the new structure. With a proper redirect map, preserved content, and intact technical signals, rankings typically stabilize within weeks. Significant, lasting drops usually indicate a planning or execution error rather than an unavoidable outcome.
Common models include monthly retainers, fixed project fees for audits or migrations, and advisory or hourly rates. Focus less on the model and more on whether scope and deliverables are clearly defined.
The freelance route An seo freelance arrangement gives you direct access to the person doing the work – no account managers translating your goals into a brief. This is often the best value for SMBs, because you’re paying for expertise rather than agency overhead. The trade-off is capacity: a solo consultant can’t scale infinitely, and you’re dependent on one calendar. When you find a senior independent operator who has genuinely deep experience, though, the quality of thinking usually outweighs those limits.
For founders and marketing leads, the practical implication is that ranking pages is no longer the whole job. Modern seo consulting is increasingly about making your organization legible to machines as a recognizable entity – a known thing with a defined identity, relationships, and reputation. Google, and now generative systems layered on top of it, want to understand who you are before they decide to surface or reference you.
Consultant vs Agency vs In-House The core difference is simple: with a solo seo consulting engagement, the person you talk to is the person doing the work. With an agency, you talk to an account manager, and the actual execution is handled by a team you rarely meet – sometimes junior staff, sometimes subcontractors. Neither model is inherently better; they suit different needs.
Reporting evolves alongside this shift. Beyond rankings and organic traffic, you now want to track citation and mention visibility in AI answers, branded search growth, and how often your entity is surfaced for the topics you care about. If you’re evaluating outside help, it’s worth reviewing the frameworks discussed at Stanislav Peev to understand how ROI is measured when clicks are no longer the only currency.
This article breaks down the real differences between a solo SEO consultant and a full-service agency, aimed squarely at founders and marketing leads who are weighing outside help for the first time. No hype, no inflated promises – just the practical trade-offs you should understand before signing anything.
The in-house route Building the capability internally makes sense if migrations and major site changes are frequent. For a one-off rebuild, though, hiring full-time is rarely economical, and the knowledge walks out the door once the project ends. Many companies use a hybrid: an internal owner coordinating with an external seo consultant who provides the specialist depth.
For business owners, the practical takeaway is that visibility can no longer be measured only in ranking positions. Being the cited source in an AI answer is becoming its own form of prime real estate, and it rewards the same fundamentals: clarity, structure, authority and genuine expertise.
From there, the work splits into a few core disciplines. Technical SEO audits uncover crawl waste, indexation problems, slow templates, and broken internal linking. Content strategy identifies the topics and search intents worth pursuing. Off-page work builds authority and relevance signals. And increasingly, an SEO expert has to account for how AI systems interpret and surface your content, not just how Google’s classic blue links rank.