What An SEO Consultant Actually Does
Ask a prospective SEO consultant how they would approach your site in the first 90 days, what tools they use and why, and how they measure success beyond rankings. A real SEO expert will talk about business outcomes - qualified traffic, conversions, revenue - not vanity metrics. They'll also be honest about timelines; anyone promising page-one rankings in 30 days is either lying or planning to use tactics that will eventually get you penalized.
How AI Search Changed the Consultant's Job Search has moved beyond ten blue links. AI Overviews summarize answers directly in Google, ChatGPT and other assistants cite sources conversationally, and users increasingly get their answers without clicking through to a website at all. This is often called GEO - generative engine optimization - and it has fundamentally reshaped what a modern SEO consultant is hired to do.
GEO - generative engine optimization - is about getting cited by AI systems like AI Overviews and ChatGPT. As more users get answers from AI, being a trusted, quotable source increasingly protects your visibility, so it matters for most businesses today.
The Technical SEO Audit Almost every engagement should begin with a technical audit. This is where an seo expert examines how search engines crawl and render your site: index bloat, duplicate content, slow templates, broken canonical tags, orphaned pages, and JavaScript that hides content from crawlers. These issues rarely make headlines, but they quietly cap your ceiling no matter how much content you publish.
GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is about being cited by AI systems such as AI Overviews and ChatGPT. It matters because these tools increasingly answer questions directly, and a modern audit must check whether your content and entity signals make you a source they can trust and quote.
Consultant vs Agency vs In-House The core difference is simple: with a solo seo consulting engagement, the person you talk to is the person doing the work. With an agency, you talk to an account manager, and the actual execution is handled by a team you rarely meet - sometimes junior staff, sometimes subcontractors. Neither model is inherently better; they suit different needs.
Conclusion There's no universal winner in the consultant-versus-agency debate. A solo SEO consultant gives you senior thinking, direct access, and strategic depth, which is often exactly what an SMB needs to get unstuck. An agency gives you scale and production capacity once your strategy is clear. The costly mistake is buying volume before you have direction. Start with a diagnosis - a proper audit and roadmap from a genuine SEO expert - and let that determine what kind of ongoing help, if any, you actually need. In an era where AI is reshaping how people find information, expertise and adaptability matter far more than headcount.
The Questions a Consultant Asks the Founder Expect pointed questions early. A serious seo professional will want to know things like: What have you already tried, and why did it stop? Who owns content internally? Can your development team ship changes, or is the site locked behind an agency? What does a qualified lead actually cost you today?
The question is not "consultant or agency?" - it's "do I need senior strategy or high-volume execution, and which am I willing to pay for?" For many SMBs, the smartest sequence is to hire a senior SEO professional first to set strategy, fix the technical foundation, and define the roadmap - then decide whether to bring execution in-house or hand a well-documented plan to an agency for volume. Guidance on structuring that kind of engagement is available through resources like this consulting overview, which frames the relationship as advisory rather than commodity output.
This is precisely where a specialist who has kept pace with research matters. A GEO-focused SEO expert like Stanislav Peev - who has published research on how AI systems select and cite sources - approaches your visibility differently than an agency still optimizing purely for classic rankings. The skill set has widened, and generalist teams haven't all caught up. When you vet a provider, ask directly how they think about AI Overviews and chatbot citations; the answer reveals whether they're operating in the present or the past.
The technical audit is the foundation Before anyone writes a word of content, a competent SEO specialist will run a technical audit. This is where hidden problems live: duplicate URLs diluting your equity, JavaScript that hides content from crawlers, orphaned pages nobody links to, and schema markup that either helps machines understand your entity or is missing entirely. A well-scoped audit is often the single most valuable deliverable a consultant produces early on, because it prevents you from pouring money into content that sits on a broken foundation.
If a prospective SEO partner promises to put you at the top of Google within 30 days, you already know the most important thing about them: they are willing to say whatever it takes to close the deal. Guaranteed rankings are the oldest trick in the trade, and they remain the single clearest signal that you are talking to a salesperson rather than a practitioner.