What does an SEO Consultant Do & How much do they charge?

An SEO consultant (usually part of digital marketing, or SEO agency) will analyze your current positioning from an SEO point of view and provide a thorough audit report. The audit report will offer suggestions for improvement or inclusion of SEO.

Following this, the consultant will develop an SEO campaign, based on your market requirements, and this could consist of 10-40+ keywords, local, national or international.

The consultant will usually be part of an SEO team, and the team will start working on a range of SEO tactics to build momentum for your campaign – these can range from technical SEO (such as page speed) or this could be on page SEO for inclusion of keywords.

Prices for SEO services do tend to vary between agencies, but a good quality digital marketing agency should have basic budget-friendly SEO services available for businesses with smaller budgets. The key thing to look out for though is the level of quality you will get for a given service.

If for example, you are going to pay £50 per month for 10 keywords in a competitive market I would seriously consider the quality of the output – the number of person-hours that it takes to work on a quality SEO campaign from an agency perspective can vary between 5-30hours plus a month dependent on the size of your campaign and the competitive nature of your industry. If you are being quoted £50 for 10 keywords, which can easily take 10-15 hours per month to produce, then more than likely some quality or time is being cut to offer 10-15 hours work for £50.

We would also suggest asking the agency if they employ white hat tactics and processes for their SEO efforts. If not we would steer clear of the agency – as link farming (black hat SEO) can get your site removed from search directories and penalized by search engines.