SEO Consultant
A consultant is a person, not a department. You get someone who looks at your site, tells you what is actually wrong with it, and is still the same person you speak to in month nine. We name the consultant on your account and give you their direct line, which sounds small until you have spent a year talking to an account manager who relays your questions to someone you never meet.
A £1,000 deposit, then 11 monthly payments, or £5,500 for the year. That buys up to five target keywords, a named consultant, and a monthly roadmap you can read in ten minutes.
See all three packagesWhere this fits in your campaign
People searching for a consultant rather than an agency are usually one of two things: a business that has been burned by an agency and wants a straight answer, or an in-house marketer who needs experience rather than delivery. Both want candour more than a pitch, so that is what this page is.
You get the person, not the pitch team
In most agencies the person on the sales call is not the person doing the work. Ask any agency you are considering whether that is true of them. The pause before they answer tells you everything.
Independent means able to say no
A consultant who tells you this quarter’s budget is better spent on paid search, or that your site is not ready for SEO yet, saves you more than one who bills you regardless.
Consultant or agency: which do you actually need?
The words get used interchangeably and they should not be. The difference is who does the work and who decides what the work is.
An agency gives you delivery: a team that writes the content, builds the pages, does the outreach and sends the report. You are buying execution at volume. The trade-off is that you are usually several steps removed from whoever makes the decisions, and the person who sold it to you is rarely the person doing it.
A consultant gives you judgement: what to do, in what order, and what to stop doing. You or your team may do the executing. You are buying someone’s experience of having watched this go wrong before, so you do not have to.
Most small businesses need both, which is why we do both: a named consultant who makes the calls, with delivery behind them. What to avoid is paying agency prices and getting neither, meaning a rota of junior staff working through a plan nobody senior has looked at since the pitch.
When to hire an SEO consultant
Four situations where a consultant is clearly the right thing to buy:
- 01
You have an agency and you are not sure it is working
The commonest one. An independent review of what is actually being done (not what the report says is being done) costs a fraction of a month’s retainer and often pays for itself the same week. We will tell you if your current agency is fine, and sometimes they are.
- 02
You have an in-house marketer who needs backup
A capable generalist can run SEO well with someone experienced checking the plan and answering the hard questions. It costs far less than a full retainer and often works better, because they already know the business.
- 03
You are about to rebuild or migrate the site
The cheapest hour anyone will ever spend on SEO is the one before a migration. Rankings lost in a botched replatform take months to come back and sometimes never fully do. We rebuilt this site off a four-year-old WordPress install with 288 pages and 174 redirect rules. The redirect map was frozen before a single template was written, and that is the whole trick.
- 04
You need a straight answer about whether to bother
Some businesses should not buy SEO. If you need enquiries this month, if your site cannot convert the traffic it already gets, or if your market has no real search volume, a consultant should say so and save you the money. We wrote about the four situations where you should not buy it.
How to judge an SEO consultant before you hire them
There is no barrier to entry in this market, and results are slow enough that a bad consultant can look fine for six months. These questions sort it out faster than a portfolio will.
If you would rather start by seeing who is worth listening to at all, we keep a list of the best SEO consultants in the world to follow, and a companion list of the AEO experts working on AI search. Neither is a directory of people who paid to be on it.
- 01
"How many hours a month, and who is doing them?"
Two consultants quoting £800 can be doing twelve hours at £65 or four at £200. Both are honest answers, only one is right for you, and you cannot tell which without asking.
- 02
"What would make you tell me not to do this?"
Anyone who cannot name a situation where SEO is the wrong purchase has not thought about it, or does not plan to tell you.
- 03
"Show me an account you took over that was already broken."
Anyone can show a good result on a clean site. The work that tells you something is the recovery.
- 04
"What do I keep if I leave?"
The pages, the content, the Google Business Profile access, the analytics. All of it should be in your accounts, in your name, and they should be able to say so without checking.
- 05
"What will you not do?"
A consultant with no boundaries is a consultant who buys links when the quarter looks bad, and you are the one who wears the penalty.
What consultancy costs in the UK
Day rates for an experienced UK SEO consultant generally run £500 to £1,200, with the top end reflecting specialism rather than seniority alone. Hourly work is usually £75 to £200. A one-off audit with a written roadmap typically lands between £750 and £2,500, depending on the size of the site.
Retained consultancy (the arrangement most small businesses actually want) is normally priced monthly. Ours starts at £497 a month plus VAT after a £1,000 deposit, and that includes the consultancy and the delivery rather than charging for each. Here is the whole UK market by band, including the levels we do not compete at and why.
One thing worth knowing: a percentage-of-spend model is common in paid search and rare in SEO, for a good reason. It pays the consultant to grow your budget rather than your results. We do not use it in our PPC work either.
Working with us
David Johnson is the named consultant on most accounts: nine years running campaigns for UK small businesses, and his direct line rather than a ticketing system. On a Local campaign that means one person who knows your business properly, which is worth a great deal more than a rota of people who each half know it.
We are based in Sheffield and work across South Yorkshire and nationally. Most of it happens over calls and shared reporting, and we come to you where that helps. Sixty-two Google reviews at 4.9, and we publish the number rather than saying "5-star" and hoping you do not check.
Four steps, then round again
SEO never finishes. The work runs on a loop, and you see the report every time round, good month or bad.
- Step 1Keyword research
We start with the terms that show buying intent, not the ones with the biggest numbers. Alongside those, lower-competition terms that rank sooner and bring early results.
- Step 2Competitor analysis
Then we look at who outranks you and why. Once we know what they are doing, we know what it takes to beat it.
- Step 3Implementation
The team does the work: on-page fixes, new content, links and local signals. Every item is listed in your monthly report, not buried in a dashboard.
- Step 4Reporting & revision
Each month you see what was done and what it moved. When something is not working, we change it rather than wait for it to come good.
Three packages. Prices included.
Pick the one that matches where your customers are. Pay for the year, or a deposit and eleven monthly payments. Either way, the number on this page is the number on the invoice.
- Up to 5 keywords per campaign
- Up to 5 URLs included
- GMB post every 14 days
- 1+ new landing page or article
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
- Up to 10 keywords per campaign
- Up to 10 URLs included
- GMB post every 7 days
- 2+ new landing pages or articles
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
- Up to 20 keywords per campaign
- Up to 10 URLs included
- GMB post every 4 days
- 5+ new landing pages or articles
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
Every package includes keyword analysis, heading tags and meta description optimisation, image alt tag analysis, duplicate content checks, sitemap creation, mobile responsiveness reporting, citations, load time testing and search engine reports. All prices are subject to change. Budgeting for the website too? Here iswhat a website should actually cost.
Need something fixed this week?
Unexpected deadline, site down, or let down by another agency? Call and we will tell you straight away whether we can help.
Straight answers to the usual questions
What does an SEO consultant actually do?
An SEO consultant works out what is stopping your site ranking and what to do about it, in what order. In practice that means auditing the site technically and editorially, researching what your customers actually search for, analysing who is beating you and why, and producing a roadmap someone can act on. A retained consultant then keeps making those calls monthly as the picture changes, rather than handing over a document and disappearing.
Is a consultant cheaper than an agency?
Usually yes for advice, and no for delivery. A consultant charging £900 for an audit and roadmap is cheaper than a £1,000-a-month retainer, but you or your team then have to do the work. If nobody in your business has the time, an advice-only arrangement tends to produce a well-researched document that nothing happens to. Be honest about who will execute before you choose.
Can you review what my current agency is doing?
Yes, and it is one of the most common things we are asked. We compare what has actually been delivered with what has been reported, check whether the work is sound, and judge whether the results are reasonable for the spend and the time. Sometimes the answer is that your agency is doing a decent job and the expectations were wrong. We will say that too.
Do you work with in-house marketing teams?
Yes, regularly. A capable in-house marketer plus experienced oversight is often better value than a full retainer, because they know the business in ways no agency will. Typically that looks like a monthly call, a shared roadmap, and being on the end of the phone when something needs a decision rather than a report.
What makes a good SEO consultant?
A good SEO consultant is willing to tell you something you do not want to hear, and has a track record on sites that were already broken rather than only on clean ones. Beyond that, they should be able to say how many hours a month they spend and on what, name a situation in which they would advise against hiring them, and confirm in writing that you own everything if you leave.
Do I need a local consultant?
For understanding your market, a local consultant helps: knowing that Rotherham and Sheffield are different search markets is local knowledge. For the technical work it makes no difference at all, and most of it happens over calls anyway. We are in Sheffield and work nationally, and we would not pick a consultant on postcode alone.
The other services we run
- Local SEO ServicesGoogle Business Profile, completed properly · Map pack rankings · Citation building and clean-up
- National SEOBusinesses selling UK-wide · B2B and professional services · Manufacturers and wholesalers
- Link Audits & Link BuildingBacklink audits and risk reviews · Disavow files, done carefully · Recovering from bought links
- Digital PRData and survey campaigns · Expert comment and reactive PR · Founder and spokesperson profiles
- Content MarketingBuying guides and comparisons · Service and landing page copy · Blog and editorial programmes
- Conversion Rate OptimisationEnquiry and quote forms · Landing pages for paid traffic · Checkout and basket flows
Ready when you are
Tell us what you are trying to rank for and we will look at the site and the search results before we reply. You get a straight answer, including if SEO is not the right spend for you yet.