What's the difference between an SEO company and consultant?

An SEO company plans the work and does it; an SEO consultant advises and leaves the doing to you or someone you hire. Both can be good value. The deciding question is not which is more expert but who will make the changes on your site, because advice that is never implemented does not move your rankings. If your own team can reliably turn recommendations into finished changes, a consultant may be all you need. If it cannot, a company that carries out the work is the better buy.

The question underneath: who implements

SEO work produces results only when it ends in a change: a fixed template, a rewritten page, a new section, a redirect, an outreach email. A company includes the people who make those changes. A consultant produces the decisions and the reasons for them, and your developer, writer, or marketing coordinator makes the changes. Hiring a consultant without that capacity buys a plan that waits.

What a consultant should hand you

The output of a consultant is your work plan, so judge it as one. Each recommendation should name the page or template it affects, the exact change, the reason, the effect it is expected to have and how you would see it, the effort involved, and who on your side would do it. Recommendations should be ranked, so your team knows what to do first if time runs short. A long report of general observations is not a plan your team can carry out.

Consultants can be hired for a single audit, a roadmap, a specific problem such as a migration or a manual action, or a few hours a month of review. Because one person does the thinking, you speak directly to the person whose judgment you are paying for.

What a company adds

A company adds the hands: technical fixes, content production, outreach, and reporting, carried out by people in different roles and coordinated by an account lead. You get one party responsible for both the plan and its execution. You also pay for that structure in a larger fee, and you deal with an account layer between you and the specialists, which works well only when you can reach the people doing your work.

Test your capacity before you choose

For example, imagine a consultant’s audit gives you three high-priority changes. If your team completes all three within a month, with the quality the consultant expects, you have the capacity to work with a consultant. If they are still waiting a month later, your bottleneck is execution, and more advice will not fix it. A paid audit is a useful way to run this test, because it also tells you how much work your site needs.

Using both

A consultant and a company can work together: the consultant can review a company’s plan and results as a second opinion, or set the strategy that a company or your own team then carries out. When a consultant oversees a company, agree in writing who decides what, so the company is not caught between two sets of instructions.

Access for either

Whoever you hire should have their own access to the accounts they need, at the level their work requires. Google’s guide on hiring an SEO advises granting only read access to Search Console during an audit, and a consultant who only advises may never need more.