What Does An SEO Consultant Do? (Full Guide 2024)
How SEO Consultants Help Clients Boost Their Search Results
An SEO consultant’s role is to help an organization improve its search results on Google and other search engines, typically with the goal of generating low-cost, high-quality leads. SEO consultants can provide their clients with various services, including keyword selection and content calendar development, link building, technical SEO, and SEO analytics. Some SEO consultants also help clients with PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, specifically when it comes to behaviorally retargeting leads generated via organic search.
Depending on your organization’s budget, an SEO consultant may help your organization in a variety of ways. For lower-cost, limited engagements, they may simply provide DIY advice. In contrast, for larger enterprises, an SEO consultant may hire an entire team (or even an external agency) to help clients achieve their SEO and lead generation goals.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll review almost everything you need to know when deciding when, if, and what kind of SEO consultant you should hire for your unique business needs.
What To Look For In An SEO Consultant
There are a variety of things to look for in an SEO consultant. Some of these include:
General SEO Experience: What experience does the SEO consultant have? Have they generated traffic and leads for other organizations? Do they have any data, case studies, or reviews that can attest to this?
Industry SEO Experience: While not always necessary, it may be helpful if an SEO consultant has experience in your industry (or a similar one). For instance, an SEO consultant who mainly has medical experience may not be ideal for a real estate company. However, the best SEO consultants can quickly learn about new industries, so this may not be as important as other factors.
Scaling Experience: An SEO consultant who has only worked with small local businesses may not be the best for a large, national SEO campaign, but again, the quality of an SEO consultant's ideas and proposals can sometimes be more important than their specific past experience.
Communication: A great SEO consultant will generally be responsive (within reason), and their ideas and proposals should make sense. When it comes to SEO, simple plans are often better than complex ones.
Price: SEO consultants can be pricey, with top-tier consultants often charging $150-$250/hour, so you’ll need to make sure this makes sense for your business goals. However, you can still get a lot out of an SEO consultant if you get a smaller, advice-based package and do most of the legwork yourself.
Expected ROI: The amount you’re willing to pay for an SEO consultant should be directly proportional to the return on investment you expect to get (especially when compared to other types of marketing). For example, if you believe a $25,000 SEO campaign (including consulting fees) will yield $100,000 in revenue over the next 14 months, this could be a great opportunity (4x ROAS). However, if your paid advertising campaign is expected to return $125,000 in revenue at the same cost (5x ROAS), SEO (at least with the plan in question) may not be right for you.
What To Look For In An SEO Consulting Proposal
When it comes to deciding if and SEO consultant is right for you (or if you’re deciding between multiple consultants), one essential thing to examine is the quality of the consultant’s SEO proposal, which should be relatively detailed.
Competitor Analysis: One of the first stages of a great SEO proposal is competitor analysis. You’ll likely want to see at least 3 site competitors, ideally with a low Domain Authority (DA) presented to you.* These can be used as templates to imitate and improve upon as you and your consultant develop an SEO strategy. Competitor analysis may also show you whether SEO is a worthwhile strategy for your business (sometimes, its not) depending on how high the competition is (higher competition often means higher required budgets and less ROI).
Specific Budget: A great proposal should have a specific budget, including the consultant's fee (whether a flat fee or by the hour), as well as a detailed breakdown of project costs, such as content writing and development, web design, backlinks, and (for some projects) video.
Specific Timeline: A quality SEO proposal should also have a timeline with expected results, in terms of clicks, leads, revenue, and profit. Beware of consultants that tell you that you can expect immediate results. Good SEO can take a while, and results can often take between 3-4 months for established sites, and 6-8 months for newer websites.
Specific Metrics: In addition to budgets and metrics, a good proposal should also clearly defined various key marketing metrics, including projected CPL (cost-per-lead) and ROAS (return on ad spend) which should both go down significantly over time. It should also include projected lead conversion rate, projected revenues, and projected profits.
*For those who may not know, Domain Authority is a metric that measures the reputation of a website, as calculated via the reputations of the sites that link back to it. For example, a site with links from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal would have a higher DA than a website with links only from smaller, lesser-known websites.
What Deliverables Should You Expect From An SEO Consultant?
Competitor Analysis: As previously mentioned, a competitor analysis report will help you get the lay of the land and determine the feasibility of your potential SEO campaign.
Keyword Research Analysis: Keyword research is the first step in developing an organic SEO strategy.
Content Calendar: Despite the rise of AI and massive link-building agencies, content is still king for organic SEO. Therefore, one of the most valuable things an SEO consultant can provide is a detailed content calendar. A detailed content calendar should generally contain a full list of article titles segmented by topic, sample inspiration articles, desired article word counts, and core keywords to include in each article.
SEO Software Plan: There are a variety of effective and powerful SEO tools out there, including AHRefs, SEMRush, Ubersuggest, and SpyFu, just to name a few. If you don’t already have a tool of choice, a good SEO consultant should be able to adapt to it, though they should still check SEO stats through one or more other tools to improve data quality.
Hiring/Work Distribution Plan: Great SEO involves a lot of work, including content writing and editing, web development, and often other tasks, like video production. Depending on how hands-on you want them to be, a good SEO consultant should be able to help you divvy up responsibilities between the existing members of your team, create hiring/role descriptions and daily tasks for new employees and freelancers.
Additional Training Materials: While hiring a long-term SEO consultant may be ideal (if you can afford it), some of the best consultants attempt to make themselves replaceable. This means that they can essentially walk away from the consulting engagement with the knowledge that standard operating procedures (SOPs) have been implemented well enough that the project/campaign will likely succeed with no further intervention on their part. To do this, many SEO consultants create significant documentation and training content that you can use in the future. This could consist of things like documents outlining SEO competitor research methods, SEO content writing procedures, technical SEO tasks, measurement and analytics and other procedures. Often, this can also come in the form of training videos, which, in many cases, can be even more effective than written documentation.
Deep Dive: SEO Consultant Competitor Analysis
We just touched on competitor analysis twice, but it’s worth diving a bit deeper into since, without great competitor analysis skills, your SEO consultant might not be worth their salt. The first stage in a competitor analysis is to search for core product and service keywords related to your business.
In this example, we’ll use home mortgages, as this is an area I have extensive experience in, having consulted for three different companies across 7+ SEO-focused websites.
After searching keywords, your consultant should create a list of sites with relatively low Domain Authorities (ideally less than 25-30) with significant traffic for potentially high-converting keywords in your niche.
SEO is often an imitation game, so if you can take what’s already working and do it better, this is a great recipe for success. At the same time, you shouldn't just copy the entire content calendar of a single site and write slightly longer articles. Instead, you should combine the content of multiple competitor sites to create a unique content strategy for your business.
Below, we show an example of a small, but successful home mortgage website (dashhomeloans.com) with a highly attainable Domain Authority of 24. The lower a site’s Domain Authority, the easier it will be to rank for similar terms that the site is currently ranking for.
Dashhomeloans.com search volume data from Ubersuggest, Apr. 2024 to Feb. 2024.
Dashhomeloans.com keyword search volume data from Ubersuggest, Apr. 2024 to Feb. 2024.
In the situation where all or most of the keywords you want to rank for all show sites with DAs above 40-50, the niche may be so competitive that it may not be worth your time and money to try.
However, there are always exceptions, particularly if the page one content results are thin (very few words) or relatively low quality or the sites have very low topical authority (i.e., they don’t have a variety of articles focused on similar subjects), you may be able to rank quite well.
Of course, suppose you have a very large budget. In that case, this also makes things a bit different, as you can engage a high-quality link-building agency (these often start at $4,000 to $7,000/month with six to eight-month commitments), which can raise your Domain Authority, making it much easier to rank alongside other high DA sites.
So, unless you fit into the exceptions above, if your consultant can’t show you at least 3 low-DA sites with a decent amount of relevant traffic, this could be a red flag that either 1) your consultant isn’t great at competitor research (so you should find another one), or 2) your niche is too competitive to do SEO for a small-to-midsize budget, so you should focus on other marketing techniques, like PPC ads, traditional advertising, or direct sales).
Deep Dive: SEO Business Plans, Profitability, and ROI Metrics
An SEO campaign is a business venture; just like any other venture, it should have an independent business plan. This should be broken down into pieces., including:
Complete Budget: The total cost of the project, including the consulting fee, should be broken down into writing and editing costs, web development costs, technical SEO costs, and any other costs that are likely to arise.
Traffic Estimation: A good SEO business plan should also have a conservative traffic estimation based on historical competitor data. For example, a plan may project that a website may be able to generate 5,000 targeted clicks/month in 8 months, 8,000 targeted clicks/month in 12 months, and 15,000 targeted clicks/month within 16 months.
Click-to-Lead Conversion Rate: The plan should include an estimated click-to-lead conversion rate. For instance, if industry data suggests that it takes 50 targeted clicks to generate one lead, the website would have a 2% click-to-lead conversion rate.
Lead Conversion Rate: The general lead conversion rate is just as important as the click-to-lead conversion rate. For example, if the company’s historical data suggests that it takes 50 medium-to-high quality leads to sell or “close” a product or service, that would be a 2% conversion rate.
Click-to-Close Rate: Multiplying the click-to-lead conversion rate by the lead conversion rate would leave us with a 0.04% conversion rate, indicating that it would take 2,500 clicks on the website to make one sale.
Cost-per-Lead: Cost-per-lead, or CPL, is another one of the most essential metrics in marketing. Fortunately, CPL in SEO (provided the project is successful) goes down significantly over time. For instance, if an SEO project cost $50,000, the first lead generated would cost $50,000. However, if, over 1 year, a website generated 5,000 leads, that would go down to only $10/lead. If, over 2 years, the same campaign (with no extra cost) generated 15,000 total leads, the cost would go down to $3.33/lead.
Cost Per Customer Acquisition: Cost Per Customer Acquisition, or CPAC, is another great metric. This is calculated by multiplying the current cost-per-lead by the number of leads used to close. For instance, if we take the example above and say that, after 1 year, a lead cost $10, and it takes 50 leads to close, the CPAC of the SEO campaign would be $500. Just like CPL, CPAC is a great way to compare and contrast the costs and benefits of SEO with other types of marketing.
Return on Investment: Return on investment (ROI) is the total return of a project over time. This can be calculated by taking the entire project cost and the total profit (revenue minus cost) and plugging it into an IRR calculator. For example, if the example SEO project cost $50,000, but led to $125,000 in profit over 2 years, the IRR would be slightly above 58%. However, this assumes that the profit is not reinvested for more profit, but generally, that’s a bit beyond the scope of basic SEO.
Different Types of SEO Consulting Plans
When choosing an SEO consultant, various service types and ways to pay exist. Some of the most common include:
Limited Research/Consulting Services: The least expensive type of SEO consulting services involves paying a consultant to research your niche, provide relevant data and strategies, and potentially provide one or more coaching calls to set you in the right direction. This may be best for companies with very low budgets or who want to take a full DIY approach but need some guidance to get started.
Limited, Full-Service Engagement: The next step up for SEO consulting often includes a consultant coming on board for several months to help you create and implement a full SEO strategy. Depending on the scope of the engagement and your individual needs, they may help you hire a new team of SEO professionals or train your current staff and employees. Ideally, this type of consultant will make themselves replaceable, meaning that, after a few months, the SEO project should be able to proceed (and succeed) without further guidance.
Long-Term, Full-Service Engagement: In this type of engagement, like an agency relationship, an SEO consultant will provide full-service SEO consulting services for an ongoing period, often a year or longer. Much like a limited, full-service engagement, a consultant may help the client hire new SEO staff, however, in some situations, the consultant will utilize their own staff to execute the SEO campaign. This is ideal for companies that want to spend less time directly working on SEO and are willing to pay more to outsource their campaign.
What Is A Fair Price For An SEO Consultant (And An SEO Campaign)?
We previously mentioned that high-quality SEO consultants can be pricey, often billing at $150-$250/hour. Of course, however, there are exceptions, with some consultants being cheaper than others. In the end, a fair price for a consultant depends on what your project budget is and how much you expect to earn. For example, if you were willing to spend $80,000 on SEO, it could be worth it to spend $15,000 on an experienced consultant to ensure that all your dollars are being spent effectively. It’s easy to waste thousands (or even millions) in ineffective SEO, so just because a consultant is expensive, it doesn’t mean that they’re a good fit, but in general, you’ll get what you pay for.
SEO Consultant vs. SEM Consultant, Explained
SEO consultants can often be confused with SEM (search engine marketing) consultants, and while there are similarities, there are also differences. SEO consultants generally focus on generating clicks (and leads) from organic content, like blog posts and web pages, generating backlinks, and developing other value-add content, like graphics, videos, or how-to guides. In contrast, SEM consultants may focus on organic content, but in general, they tend to focus more on paid search (PPC) ads on search engines like Google.
While paid search can be incredibly value (and, in some cases, may be more appropriate than SEO), they are quite distinct, and, in most situations, PPC simply doesn’t have the long-term ROI of SEO, as cost-per-lead does not go down over time (as it typically does from successful SEO campaigns).
SEO Consultant vs. Fractional CMO: What’s The Difference
Many companies want the benefit of hiring a C-level executive, but without the high cost and commitment. This is how the concept of fractional executives was developed. A fractional executive generally serves as a part-time member of a company’s C-suite, contributing their expertise, but typically limited to a certain number of hours per week. This concept has taken off in the marketing industry, with many companies now hiring fractional CMOs.
But what’s the difference between a fractional CMO and an marketing consultant? In general, there are two main differences: responsibility/authority and scope. In general, a marketing consultant is an external freelancer that provides general advice, training, and project management. They often don’t make core, strategy-level marketing decisions for a company, and don’t have very much control over hiring, firing, and budgets.
In contrast, fractional CMOs are often empowered by the CEO and the rest of the C-suite to make higher-level, long-term decisions about marketing strategy, hiring, and financial matters. Therefore, a fractional CMO can have a significantly higher impact on a company than an external consultant (hopefully a positive one).
In addition, they also often spend much longer with a company than a consultant, with many spending one year or more working with a business, whereas a consultant might only work with a business for 3-6 months.
The other main difference between consultants and fractional CMOs is tactical scope. While a marketing consultant, especially an SEO consultant, may only provide advice in one or two areas, fractional CMOs often provide guidance in almost every area of marketing, from SEO to paid ads to traditional marketing and PR.
Considering high-level SEO consultants and fractional CMOs often charge a similar rate per hour, you may find that you get significantly more value from a fractional CMO, especially if they also have significant SEO experience (like me).
In Conclusion: Hiring The Right SEO Consultant Can Make A Big Difference
Like hiring an accountant, lawyer, or any other important service provider, you should research and learn as much as possible before paying for an SEO consultant. With the relatively high price for quality SEO consultants, you could waste a lot of money with a consultant that isn’t experienced or doesn’t meet your business’s specific needs. In contrast, the right consultants can pay for themselves many times over and could boost your business to an entirely new level of profitability.
