It’s a fact that most business owners know they “need SEO. Much fewer people are familiar with what it means in real life or what a consultant should be spending their time on, and your money on. This is precisely what is SEO consulting can help you with.
This guide explains what SEO consulting is, the various services that fall under that umbrella, and how to determine when you have a consultant that’s worth hiring vs one that will simply drain your marketing budget.
What Is SEO Consulting?
When it comes to SEO consulting, it’s a consultancy service where a specialist will review your website to pinpoint any areas that are stalling your organic search performance, and create a course of action to correct it. The consultant may not do all the work; many come up with an action plan that your team in-house, your developers or content writers will carry out.
That distinction matters. An SEO consultant will not be the same as an SEO agency that performs a campaign from start to finish. Consulting is more of a strategic advisory service, which requires diagnosis, prioritization and a plan in some cases, the consultant remains engaged to provide guidance on execution and results monitoring.
A good consultant should review the following things:
- Content: Does it meet the intent of the users searching for it and is it good enough to rank?
- Do any technical issues prevent search engines from easily crawling, rendering, and indexing your site?
- Keyword targeting do you know if they are going after terms your business can actually hope to go after and convert?
- Backlink profile: What is the authority of your site and where is it coming from?
- What are competitors doing that are successful, and where are there opportunities?
What Does an SEO Consultant Do Day to Day?
The truth is that it’s more of research, analysis, and prioritization than anything else, because when it comes to link building, it’s just grunt work and writing hundreds of blogs.
It is a consultant’s primary task to determine why a site doesn’t perform well in search and then come up with a prioritized list of fixes. This typically involves conducting an SEO audit, keyword and search-intent research, competitor analysis and technical performance analysis.
The goal of the end is not to have them rank. If you’re on page one for a term no one is looking for, or the wrong audience is looking for, then you have no hope of improving your revenue. The only way to measure the success of good SEO consulting is if they drive traffic that is likely to convert to customers, sign-ups, or some other action that is important to the business.
There are several primary sorts of SEO consulting services.There are a number of main types of SEO consulting services.
Not all engagements include all of the following work — most consultants limit work to what a site is seeking.
General SEO Consulting
A comprehensive review and recommendations on content, technical setup, keywords, links and competitors with a prioritized action list ranked by the level of impact.
SEO Strategy Consulting
This isn’t about a list of one-off fixes, but it’s a longer-term roadmap that includes some target keywords, some content gaps to fill, some technical work, some link-building goals, and how success will be defined, built around the business’ actual audience and objectives, not generic best practices.
Technical SEO Consulting
This is a discussion on whether search engines can even crawl, render and understand the site. This includes page speed, mobile usability, site architecture, redirects, canonical tags, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, broken links and indexing errors. Without a search engine being able to access a page properly, little else of the strategy is of great significance.
On-Page SEO Consulting
Optimization produced at the individual page level – title tags, headings, page structure, keyword usage, internal linking, image alt text and meta descriptions – that is done in a manner that is relevant to the searcher’s intent but does not compromise the page’s readability to real users.
Off-Page SEO Consulting
Centers on authority signals outside of the site itself, in particular backlinks. A consultant reviews and assesses the current backlink set in terms of quality and relevance, and suggests achievable steps to build links from reputable and relevant websites.
Local SEO Consulting
For businesses that cater to a specific geographic market – such as service providers, restaurants, clinics, or retail stores that are in a specific location. This includes ensuring business listing accuracy, location-based keyword targeting, local citations, and review management, which all work to ensure your business is more visible for “near me” and location-specific search.
Enterprise SEO Consulting
Designed for large sites containing thousands or millions of pages, multiple departments and multiple layers of content approval. What becomes the focus is the scalable system: governance structures, template technical solutions, internal linking and team-based processes.
Most engagements begin with an SEO audit.Starting point of most engagements is an SEO audit.
An SEO audit captures a website’s current condition; consultants typically deliver it first in any engagement, and they base all future work on it.
A detailed analysis reveals technical issues, missing content, indexing issues, duplicate content, poor internal linking and missing metadata. However, it is not about the volume. A helpful audit isn’t simply a list of all the problems it identifies — it’s also a list of which problems are important and what to tackle first.
Why Data-Driven Analysis Matters?
Intuition-based SEO efforts are often time-consuming and cost a lot of money. A consultant should be accessing real numbers – organic traffic trends, keyword ranking, landing page performance, the search query report, technical crawl data and conversion metrics.
This is not one and done either. An ongoing analysis of how a site and its visitors changes over time is what enables a strategy to remain fresh rather than becoming stale six months in.
Keyword Research and Analysis
When you do keyword research, you’ll find the exact words and phrases that your prospects type into search engines. A knowledgeable consultant considers search relevance in conjunction with the level of competition, user intent, and business value — several of these factors can be at odds with one another and if you focus on high search volume alone, you may be getting traffic that doesn’t convert.
We decide on target keywords, then we use analysis to determine how to use them to map them to existing pages or identify gaps that require new content. This includes the terms that are relevant and the larger topic area clusters that search engines group a search with.
Competitor SEO Analysis
When you know what competitors are ranking for and how you will find opportunities that you may not have known about. This involves analyzing keywords, content quality, backlinks, website architecture, and search engine visibility.
Website Audits Are Not Technical SEO Audits
These two are used interchangeably, but aren’t exactly the same thing:
- The website SEO audit focuses on the website’s optimization, including content optimization, keyword usage, technical optimization, internal linking, and metadata optimization.
- A technical SEO audit focuses specifically on crawlability, indexability, redirects, site architecture, page speed, mobile performance and structured data.
You run them together to provide a comprehensive view of a site’s SEO health—one focuses on the infrastructure supporting the site, and the other focuses on strategy and content.
What Does an SEO Consultant Deliver?
The greatest advantage is the professional prioritization. The majority of businesses understand that SEO is important but don’t have an accurate method for determining which tasks to undertake first. A good consultant is able to determine what will have the most positive impact and help you avoid spending time and budget on changes that won’t impact your business.
It also removes the guesswork from decision-making and turns it into a plan based on real research, so you stop making random changes and hoping something works and instead rely on actual data and a clear strategy.
The relationship can be flexible as well. Others hire a consultant to do one audit. Others are seeking to become a strategic partner, technical troubleshooting for a particular problem, or pieces of advisory support in addition to an in-house marketing team.
Determine the Right SEO Consultant
Search for experiences, ease in communication, analytical skills and practical industry knowledge. A good consultant should be able to translate into layman’s terms any SEO concept and support the recommendations based on sound reasoning, rather than “buzz words.
Before hiring: Some Good Questions to Ask
- What is the success of a project like mine?
- Which tools and data sources do you use?
- What do you consider your number one priority?
A safe bet is if someone says they will get you #1 rankings. There are too many factors involved in search algorithms, including many variables that are beyond anyone’s control to ensure that it is credible.
The Bottom Line
SEO consulting is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach; it’s a structured analysis, planning, and recommendations for a particular website and/or business. It can range from one technical audit to an entire strategic campaign for on page, off page, local and enterprise level optimization.
If done properly, it isn’t only about the rankings. It’s about creating a website that is technically superior, connects with your target audience, and can continue to grow and thrive over time.
Boost your online visibility, attract more qualified traffic, and grow your business with Inceptial Logic’s result-driven Search Engine Optimization service.
