SEO Consultant vs Agency: Who Does the Work, What It Costs
An SEO consultant usually tells you what to change and bills $100 to $150 an hour; an agency usually makes the changes for a monthly fee. Which do you need?
By Tyler Phan6 min readLast reviewed
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"Should I hire an SEO expert or an agency?" someone asked on r/SEO on October 5, while thinking about outsourcing SEO for their business. "If I hire a team member then I may need to train him/her. And if I hire an agency then I may have to look for massive budget. Just confused." The post drew 46 comments.
The question usually gets framed as one person against a firm. We think the split that matters is who makes the changes on your site. Below, a consultant means someone who mostly sells advice: an audit, a plan, training, a second opinion. An agency mostly sells the work itself, month after month. Ahrefs' poll of 439 SEO providers doesn't separate advice from execution; it groups providers as agency, freelance or consultancy. It does show consultancies charging more per hour and per month.
| Who | Per hour | Per month | Per project |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO consultancy | $171 average ($100 to $150) | $3,250 average ($2,501 to $5,000) | $8,686 average ($5,001 to $10,000) |
| SEO agency | $99 average ($75 to $100) | $3,209 average ($500 to $1,000) | $9,508 average ($2,501 to $5,000) |
| SEO freelancer | $72 average ($75 to $100) | $1,349 average | $2,349 average ($101 to $250) |
| Elmrank | Not sold by the hour | $500 first month, then $300 | None |
Ahrefs worked out its averages by assuming every provider charges the top of the price band they ticked, which is why an average can sit outside the most common band. Read the averages as likely ceilings and the bands as what you're more likely to be quoted. The poll covers providers worldwide, and Ahrefs notes that "SEOs in India, Central, and South America charge the least." In its U.S. and Canada data alone, 66.7% charged $75 to $200 an hour, against 47% of all respondents. Ahrefs first published the poll in December 2023, and the page's byline says it was updated in August 2024. Either way, the rates are more than two years old.
What you get from each
Google's page on hiring an SEO lists what "many SEOs and other agencies and consultants" provide. The list includes "Review of your site content or structure", "Technical advice on website development", "Content development", "Keyword research" and "SEO training". Most of that list is advice. Content development, and the campaign management the list also mentions, are the parts someone has to keep doing every month.
Advice like that usually arrives as a document, a call or a training session, and the changes themselves, rewriting pages, fixing redirects, publishing articles, are yours to make or to hand to someone else. Some consultants do the changes as well, often on retainer, so ask. An agency's work should end on your site, and the monthly report should say what changed.
Consultants don't come cheaper per month, either. Their most common retainer band in the poll, $2,501 to $5,000, sits well above the agencies' $500 to $1,000. At those rates you're paying for a senior person's time and judgment, so the money only works if your team has time to act on what they say.
When a consultant is the better buy
A consultant fits when you have the hands and need the plan. Google's own advice starts there: "If you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself." If you or your developer will make the changes, paying someone senior to point at the right ones is good value.
It also fits a job with an end date. Google says "a great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign (the earlier, the better), or planning to launch a new site." A redesign review of 10 to 20 hours at the common consultancy rate of $100 to $150 an hour comes to $1,000 to $3,000, our arithmetic from Ahrefs' band. We think that's a fair price for catching problems before a migration rather than after it.
Before booking, we'd write down who will make the changes, and by when. If the answer is "we'll see", what you've bought is a document to file.
When an agency is the better buy
An agency fits when nobody on your side will make the changes, or when the work never ends, like publishing articles or keeping up with fixes. The most common agency retainer in the poll was $500 to $1,000 a month, and the average, built from the top of each band, was $3,209.
At the agencies' most common hourly band, $75 to $100, a $1,000 retainer pays for about 10 to 13 hours of work a month. That's enough for a few fixes and a couple of articles, not a rebuild. Ask how the hours are split before you sign, because the number of hours sets what you'll see in the report.
Whichever you pick, Google suggests one question to ask: "Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?" A consultant should answer yes without thinking. An agency should too, and its monthly report is where you check.
Pay for the plan before you pick
In the same r/SEO thread, the highest-scored reply in the archive we read, at 4 points, from u/OrigenRaw, suggested "hiring someone small, entry level, but ambitious" so you can "make a few mistakes affordably and learn what it is you are looking for." Another, at 1 point, from u/TrafficAcademySEO, put the plan first: "Pay for a one-off audit/roadmap before hiring either. Once you know whether the real work is technical SEO, content, links, local, etc., it's much easier to decide if you need an employee, a freelancer or an agency."
We'd go with the second, as long as the audit is the kind Google describes. Its hiring page says to "only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access)," and that "An SEO audit should be about giving you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved." We'd judge any audit, ours included, by that last part. A list of 80 issues with no hours next to them doesn't tell you which kind of help to hire.
Before you hire either, ask:
- Who makes the changes on my site, and by when?
- How is time billed, and is there a monthly cap on hours?
- What do I have at the end: a document, or changes I can see on the site?
- Will you show me every change and the reasoning behind it?
- Can the audit run on read-only Search Console access?
- When we stop, who keeps the accounts, the content and the code?
Which one we are
We work like a small agency that publishes its price: we make the changes on your site, and we work by email. Our articles go through an AI pipeline that researches, drafts and fact-checks them, and a person approves each one before it's published. The first month, $500, covers an SEO and GEO audit, the technical fixes (speed, indexing, schema and site structure), site design and a content plan. After that, $300 a month covers up to 30 articles, ongoing technical fixes, hosting, the domain and a monthly report with your Search Console clicks and impressions. Our sample report is filled in with one of our own sites. There's no minimum contract, and the one result our terms promise is about Google clicks after six months, with four conditions.
We don't sell advice by the hour, link building or meetings. If you have a developer and a writer and want a plan to hand them, a consultant is the better buy. If nobody on your side will make the changes, that's the gap we fill; the technical SEO page lists the fixes we make. If you're weighing a full-time hire instead, our post on in-house SEO vs an agency compares the costs.
How we know this
Written by Tyler Phan. Every source below was read on the date shown; the page was last reviewed on Oct 28, 2026.
- Ahrefs, SEO Pricing: How Much Does SEO Cost? 439 People Polled (first published Dec 2023), accessed Oct 19, 2026
- Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO?, accessed Oct 19, 2026
- r/SEO, Should I hire an SEO expert or an agency? (post by u/Salman_Shk, comments by u/OrigenRaw and u/TrafficAcademySEO), accessed Oct 19, 2026
- Elmrank, Terms of Service, accessed Oct 19, 2026
Send us your site.
We reply within 12 hours with what we'd fix first. Then we run it for you, technical SEO and content: $500 for the first month, then $300 a month for up to 30 articles. You don't need any technical knowledge, and you can cancel any time.
