Do you need an SEO consultant? What one does, and the questions to ask

Start with your bottleneck. If you do not know which searches you want, hire a consultant. If you know the plan but cannot ship, hire an agency. If you only need a second opinion, buy a report once. If nothing is live yet, do DIY for a month before you spend.

• Hire a consultant when you need a strategy, an audit, or a roadmap you can run for six to twelve months.
• Hire an agency when you have a clear brief and need pages written, fixes shipped, and links earned.
• Buy a one-off report when you want judgement once before you commit budget.
• Go DIY when you can give one hour a week and your product is small. Use Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, PageSpeed Insights and a crawler’s free tier.

A small product often runs paid and organic together. Paid tests which queries convert. Organic holds them. If you are pre-product market fit, spend little on either. Learn first from users and the results page.

Judgement. Not headcount. You are buying decisions you can act on. Expect these deliverables, not vague advice.

• An audit: how your pages, templates, internal links, speed and indexation stand. Prioritised issues and the fixes.
• A strategy: three answers written once a year and read each month. Which searches you want, which pages will answer them, and how you will earn links and mentions.
• A plan: the strategy with dates and an order. What to write this quarter, what to refresh, which technical debts to clear, and who does what.
• A roadmap: draw the plan over quarters. Plot your launch windows and content batches.
• KPIs and a dashboard: one KPI to read weekly, and the supporting metrics. Set up Search Console. For most small sites it is the dashboard. You can add Looker Studio with GA4 for free.
• A monthly report template: one page. What changed in KPIs and why, what shipped, what next month does, and the figures as a small table.
• Reviews of work: notes on drafts, templates, and migrations before they go live.

A worked example: yourproduct.com has no /pricing in the menu and a slow hero image. The audit says add /pricing to the header, compress the 2 MB image, and link /guides/getting-started from the homepage. The plan puts a “/alternatives/yourproduct-vs-bigtool” page in week three. The KPI is clicks from search per week. The goal is two hundred clicks a week from non-brand searches by March. You get a short checklist for each item with owners and dates.

Execution. Agencies write pages, fix templates, pitch for links, and manage the calendar. They are a fit when you have a clear brief and budget tied to work, not to vague rankings.

• Give them a list of pages to ship, with outlines per topic. One page per topic: “/guides/how-to-export-csv”, “/integrations/slack”, “/alternatives/bigtool-alternative”.
• Give them technical tickets in your tracker: fix Core Web Vitals on product pages, add internal links to orphaned posts, add canonical tags to variants.
• Ask for a monthly log of shipped work and links earned. Compare it to the plan.

If you do not have a strategy and plan, an agency will guess. That drifts scope and time. Bring a plan, or buy judgement first from a consultant or a report.

A report is a consultant’s judgement once. It suits you when you want a quick map, a second opinion, or a pre-migration check before you spend more. You keep execution in-house or with freelancers.

• Expect a crawl, a list of target searches, a page map, and a link and mention plan built for launches, listings, tools or data you can ship.
• Expect three to five KPIs and a one-page monthly report format you can run yourself.
• Expect clear next steps for the next eight weeks, tied to URLs and owners.

Porteur is one such option. It is a report bought once, 99 € or 199 € with product analytics. It suits a founder who wants judgement and keeps execution with their team or a freelancer.

Send these in your first email. Ask for plain answers in writing. Compare replies across vendors. You will save weeks.

• Which searches will we target first, and why. Expect categories, alternatives, comparisons, jobs the product does, integrations and brand.
• Which pages will we ship this quarter. Expect one page per topic with working slugs, for example “/alternatives/yourproduct-vs-bigtool”.
• How will we earn links and mentions. Expect launches, listings, tools, or data aligned to your niche, not bought links.
• What are the KPIs and goals. Expect one number to read weekly. Goals as a figure and a date, not positions on one keyword.
• What is in the monthly report. Expect a one-page note: KPI movement and causes, what shipped, what next, and the figures as a table.
• Who will write, edit, and publish. Ask who signs off content and code.
• What technical scope is included. Core Web Vitals, indexation, internal links, canonical tags, redirects, and migrations.
• How will you measure impact. Expect Search Console for clicks and impressions, GA4 or product analytics for signups and revenue.
• What will you not do. Look for honesty about link buying, guarantees, and content at scale.
• What access do you need. Expect read access to Search Console, GA4 if used, and your CMS or repo for reviews. No control of your Ads account is needed for SEO.

Ask for three recent examples with URLs. You want to see a before and after in Search Console or on the live site. You are looking for clean site structure, sensible page titles, and links on relevant sites. Do not weigh a private case study without live examples the web can verify.

• Guaranteed rankings or first position claims. No one controls that result.
• Secret techniques or proprietary networks. If it is not explainable, do not buy it.
• Links for sale. Buying links that pass ranking violates Google’s spam policies.
• Scaled content abuse. Producing many pages to manipulate rankings rather than help people, by automation, humans or both, is against policy.
• Site reputation abuse and expired domain abuse. Avoid any scheme that relies on these.
• Ranking a keyword as the goal. Goals should be click or signup outcomes, not positions.
• A pitch that ignores your product, pages and competitors. SEO needs context.

As of 2026, Google folded its helpful content signals into core ranking. Google does not penalise AI-assisted writing as such. It acts on pages made at scale without value of their own. A page or a page family earns when each page holds data or an answer of its own that a reader would want. Your vendor should say this plainly and work to it.

Ignore “average” prices you read online. Agencies bill retainers. Freelancers bill hourly, daily or per project. Tools bill monthly. Published ranges vary by country, scope and the seller. Size your budget from the work and from the value of a search click to your business.

• Count the pages to write this quarter. A product site might need three comparison pages, two integration pages, one /pricing update, and four help guides.
• List the technical debts. For example, fix LCP to 2.5 seconds on templates, reduce CLS to 0.1, and get INP under 200 ms on interactive pages.
• List the link and mention work. For example, one small launch, five listings, and one data post with a simple chart.
• Estimate the value of a click. If one signup from search is worth real money to you, you can invest in getting that click. If not, keep the spend low.

DIY SEO is realistic if you can give one hour a week. You can set up Search Console, fix titles and internal links, improve speed with PageSpeed Insights, and map target searches from the results page. What you cannot do alone is write forty good pages a month, or earn links without a product worth linking. Be honest about that gap before you hire, so you buy the work you lack, not a vague promise.

SEM and PPC sit next to SEO. Paid results come from an auction. Organic results come from ranking. Paid stops when the budget stops. Organic keeps sending clicks after the work. A new product often runs both: PPC to learn which queries convert, organic to hold them later. If cash is tight, keep bids low and use the data to shape your first pages.

1. 1

   Write the strategy once a year

   Answer three questions. Which searches you want. Which pages will answer them, one per topic. How you will earn links and mentions from launches, listings, tools or data. Read it monthly.

2. 2

   Turn it into a quarterly plan

   Add dates and owners. List pages to write, pages to refresh, technical debts to clear. Keep it short. Fit it on one view in your tracker.

3. 3

   Draw a simple roadmap

   Plot the plan over quarters. Mark release windows, seasonal spikes, and when you need design or engineering.

4. 4

   Set KPIs and metrics

   Choose one KPI to read weekly, for example clicks from search, signups from search, or revenue from search. Keep other metrics for diagnosis when the KPI moves: impressions, average position, indexed pages, Core Web Vitals, referring domains.

5. 5

   Build a dashboard

   For most small sites, Search Console is enough. If you need a combined view with GA4, use Looker Studio. Both are free. Keep it simple.

6. 6

   Write goals as figures and dates

   For example, two hundred clicks a week from non-brand searches by March. Never a position on one keyword.

7. 7

   Report monthly on one page

   Write what changed in KPIs and why, what shipped, what next month does, and the figures as a table. Keep it to one page so it gets read.

A fixed page shows up in the report as a line item tied to its KPI effect. For example, “/alternatives/bigtool-alternative” shipped on 12 Oct, moving from zero to steady clicks a week by December, with new referring domains, LCP at about 2.5 s, CLS around 0.1, INP near 200 ms. No fluff. Clear cause and result you can act on or ignore next month.

You want tight loops. Here is a simple three-month arc that works for a SaaS or a store. Adjust scope to your size. Keep the cadence even. Avoid long discovery phases that hide a lack of output.

By week twelve, you should see impressions rise first, then clicks. If clicks rise with no signups, the intent is off. Change which pages you write next, not the KPI. If clicks stall, look at internal links, Core Web Vitals, and your page titles before you widen scope.