What Is the Difference Between an SEO Agency and an SEO Consultant?
There are four ways to get this work done and the words are used loosely. What matters is that you have a situation rather than a preference, so this page describes each model and then organises them by which business each one suits. Two of the four are not us.
Four Ways To Get This Done
An agency, a consultant, a freelancer or somebody employed by you. Those are the options, the words are applied loosely by the people selling them and the practical differences between them are real.
Why the labels are unreliable. Nobody polices them.
A sole trader may call themselves an agency because it sounds more substantial. A freelancer may call themselves a consultant because it commands a higher rate. Neither is deceitful exactly. Both mean the label tells you almost nothing.
What actually distinguishes them. Two questions.
Does this person or firm advise or execute, then are they one individual or several. Those two questions separate the four models cleanly where the job titles do not.
Why this matters more than it appears. The mismatch is expensive.
Most disappointment in this area is not poor work. It is the wrong model for the situation, which produces work that is perfectly competent and aimed at a problem the business does not have.
What the four have in common. None is inherently better.
Each one is the right answer for somebody and the wrong answer for somebody else. Anybody telling you their model is superior in general is describing what they sell rather than what you need.
How this page is arranged. Models first, then situations.
Blocks two to six describe each option. Block seven reorganises them by what kind of business you are, which is the part most people actually need.
What Each One Actually Is
Four short definitions, each including the thing the category would rather you did not dwell on.
An agency. A team, with overheads.
Several people covering different skills, coordinated by somebody. You pay for the coordination and the premises as well as the work, which is why an agency costs more per hour of actual output than an individual does.
A consultant. Advises, usually does not execute.
Somebody who examines the situation and tells you what should happen. The doing is then somebody else's job, which is a distinction that catches businesses out and has its own block below.
A freelancer. Executes, usually alone.
One person doing the work rather than advising on it. Lower cost because there is no coordination layer. The capacity is exactly one person's.
Somebody in-house. An employee.
Your own staff member, whose time is entirely yours and whose salary continues whether or not there is enough work to fill it.
Why the boundaries blur constantly. People do several things.
Plenty of consultants execute, plenty of freelancers advise and small agencies are frequently one person with subcontractors. Treat the four as descriptions of arrangements rather than as categories of people.
Agency Against Freelancer
A good freelancer frequently delivers better work than a mediocre agency at half the price. That is worth saying plainly by an agency, because it is true and because the alternative is to pretend otherwise.
Why a freelancer can win. No layer between you and the work.
The person you speak to is the person doing it. Nothing is translated, nothing is delegated to somebody junior and the money goes to the work rather than to the coordination.
What the real risks are. Four, all about being one person.
Capacity, so a busy month for them is a quiet month for you. Holidays. Illness. And the single point of failure, meaning that if they stop, everything stops immediately with nobody holding any of it.
The risk nobody mentions. Breadth.
The work spans writing, technical ability and analysis. Very few individuals are strong at all three. A freelancer is usually excellent at one or two of them, which is fine if those are the ones you need.
What an agency genuinely buys you. Continuity and range.
Somebody covers when a person is away, the different skills exist within the same firm and the relationship survives an individual leaving. That is what the extra cost purchases rather than better work per hour.
The cost comparison people get wrong. Per hour rather than per month.
An agency costing more per month may cost less per hour of actual output than a freelancer charging a premium rate, else considerably more. Comparing monthly figures tells you nothing until you know roughly how much time each represents.
How to choose between them. Ask what happens if.
Ask a freelancer what happens if they are ill for a fortnight, then ask an agency who specifically does your work. Both answers tell you whether the thing you are worried about is actually covered.
The Consultant Model Is Misunderstood
A consultant tells you what to do. Somebody else then does it. Businesses hire consultants expecting the work to happen and receive a document instead, which is nobody's fault and entirely predictable.
What you actually receive. Direction.
An assessment of where you are, what is wrong and what should be done about it, in priority order. That is genuinely valuable to a business equipped to act on it.
Who that suits. Businesses with their own capacity.
A firm with a marketing person, a developer or an agency already engaged, needing somebody senior to say what matters. The consultant supplies judgement and the existing people supply hands.
Who it does not suit. Everybody else.
A business with nobody to execute buys a document, reads it, agrees with it and does none of it. The money is spent and nothing changes, which is the commonest way this model disappoints.
Why nobody warns you. Two reasons.
Consultants sell the document and it is not their job to talk you out of buying it. Agencies do not sell against consultants because they hope to be the ones executing afterwards.
The hybrid version that does work. Advice plus hands.
Some businesses buy a consultant for direction and a freelancer to carry it out. That is a sensible arrangement and it needs somebody internal to hold the two together, which is the point of block six.
The question to ask yourself first. Who does it.
Before engaging a consultant, name the person who will carry out the recommendations. If you cannot, you are buying reading material.
When In-House Makes Sense
Employing somebody makes sense in two conditions. Enough continuous work to occupy them, plus a business willing to manage a specialism it does not itself understand.
The first condition. Enough work.
A person needs a full week of useful work every week. Businesses employ a specialist, run out of things for them to do and end up with somebody expensive doing general marketing, which neither party wanted.
The second condition. Willingness to manage.
You will be managing somebody whose work you cannot assess directly. That requires either learning enough to judge it or accepting that you are trusting them. Both are harder than they sound.
What you gain. Attention and knowledge of the business.
Somebody who sits in the business learns things no external supplier ever will. Their whole week belongs to you. For a firm with enough work, that is a genuine advantage.
The isolation problem. The part nobody discusses.
A single in-house person has nobody to check their thinking. No colleague to challenge an assumption, nobody who has seen the same problem elsewhere and no exposure to what works on other sites. Good people drift when nothing corrects them. It happens slowly enough that nobody notices.
What it costs beyond salary. Frequently overlooked.
Tools, training, cover when they are away and the management time of somebody who has to supervise a specialism they do not hold. The salary is the visible part rather than the whole figure.
What that implies. They need outside contact.
Which points directly at the arrangement in the next block.
The Hybrid That Usually Works Best
Somebody internal owning the work, with external help for the specialist parts. For a great many growing businesses this is the best arrangement available and it is rarely presented as an option.
How it splits. Ownership inside, specialism outside.
Your person holds the objective, knows the business, produces what only somebody inside can produce and coordinates. The external supplier handles the technical work, the research and the parts needing experience across many sites.
Why it works. It fixes both weaknesses.
The internal person gets the outside contact that solves the isolation problem. The external supplier gets somebody who actually knows the business, which is the thing agencies most often lack.
Why nobody offers it. Structural.
Agencies sell full arrangements because those are larger. Recruiters place employees. Freelancers want the whole brief. Nobody makes money proposing that you buy a smaller amount of external help alongside somebody you employ.
What it costs us to say. A smaller engagement.
We would rather have the full arrangement. This is a page describing why a lesser one frequently suits a business better. That is the trade this whole cluster makes.
How to set it up. Define the split first.
Decide what your person owns and what is bought in before speaking to anybody, otherwise the boundary gets drawn by whoever you hire, in their favour.
Match The Model To The Situation
Four situations. Find yours rather than working through the models, because you have a situation rather than a preference.
A small local business. Freelancer or small agency.
The work is narrow and the budget is real, so the coordination layer of a larger firm is cost without benefit. A capable individual or a small team is usually right. Our budget page covers what is achievable.
A growing business. The hybrid.
Enough activity that somebody should own it internally, not enough to employ a full specialist. Somebody internal holding it with external help for the technical parts fits this stage better than anything else.
A business with an existing marketing team. Consultant or specialist support.
You have hands already and lack specialist judgement. Buying a full agency arrangement duplicates what you have, which is the commonest overspend at this stage.
A large organisation. In-house plus agency.
Enough work to occupy people, plus enough complexity that the internal team needs specialist support and outside perspective. This is where a full agency arrangement genuinely earns its cost.
What none of these four situations is. Fixed.
Businesses move between them. The model that was right two years ago frequently is not now. A firm that grew into having its own marketing person should be buying something different from what it bought before.
What decides it more than size. Whether you have hands.
The question underneath all four is whether anybody in your business can execute. If yes, buy judgement. If no, buy doing. Getting that backwards is the expensive mistake.
What Does Not Change
Whoever does the work, three things should hold. They apply to an agency, a freelancer, a consultant and an employee equally.
You own the website and the work. Always.
The site, the domain and everything produced belongs to you. This is the arrangement that traps businesses when it is not explicit. It applies to a freelancer who built your site as much as to an agency.
You can see what was done. In every model.
A record of the work, in terms you can follow. An employee should be able to tell you what they did this month as readily as an agency should. Inability to produce that is the same warning whoever it comes from.
You are not locked in. Where a contract exists.
No arrangement that is expensive to leave for reasons unrelated to the work. The contract page sets out what a fair agreement looks like and the four things we commit to.
What changes between models. Only how you check.
The standards are identical. What differs is whether you are reading a report, having a conversation or holding a performance review. The full series is on the hiring an SEO agency guide.
Can anybody
in your business
execute?
If yes, you need judgement rather than a full arrangement, so we can work alongside somebody you already have. If no, you need doing. We will say which we think applies to you, including where a freelancer or a smaller engagement would serve you better than we would.
What we commit to in writing:
Our prices are published rather than quoted on request, so you can compare us against anybody else before speaking to us.
Every guide.
One practice.
What an agency is, whether to buy at all, which model suits you, how to vet one, what things cost, what should be in a contract and how to work with them afterwards.
