An SEO consultant for businesses that have people, not direction.
You may already have a marketing person, a developer, or an agency doing the work. What is missing is someone who can look at the whole thing honestly and say what to do next, in what order, and what to stop paying for. That is consulting, and it is a different service to a retainer.
Strategy modeDiagnosis before spend
When to hire an SEO consultant instead of an agency
These are genuinely different purchases, and buying the wrong one wastes months. Google publishes its own guidance on hiring an SEO which is worth reading first. Here is the honest split.
| Your situation | SEO consultant | Monthly retainer |
|---|---|---|
| You have staff who can execute | Better | Paying twice |
| You have nobody to do the work | Plan sits unused | Better |
| An agency is already working on it | Second opinion | Duplication |
| You suspect you are being oversold | Exactly this | More of the same |
| You need direction before spending | Better | Premature |
| You want it handled, not explained | Not the fit | Better |
| Rankings dropped and nobody knows why | Diagnostic first | Guessing |
A plan with owners and dates, not a forty page PDF nobody reads.
How an SEO consulting engagement runs
Four stages, usually across two to three weeks, ending with a plan your own people can start on the Monday after.
Access and audit
Search Console, Analytics, your Google Business Profile and a full technical crawl, read against Google's own traffic drop debugging guide. We look at what is happening rather than what anyone believes is happening.
Diagnosis
Every issue found, ranked by how much it is costing you rather than how easy it is to fix. Most audits get this backwards.
The plan
A prioritised ninety day plan with owners, dependencies and dates. Written so a developer and a marketer can both act on it.
Handover and support
A working session to walk your team through it, then optional check-ins as they execute. You own the document either way.
What a consultant should tell you, even when it costs them the work
- When SEO is the wrong channel. If your buyers are three large corporates, search is not how you reach them, and no retainer will change that.
- When the site has to be fixed first. Campaigns on a broken site burn money. Sometimes the honest advice is a rebuild before any content work.
- When your current agency is doing fine. Second opinions that always conclude "fire them and hire me" are sales calls, not consulting.
- When you can do it yourself. Plenty of small businesses need a plan and an afternoon of training, not a monthly invoice.
- When the timeline is unrealistic. If you need enquiries within a month, we will point you at landing pages and paid ads instead.
SEO consultant rates
Three ways to buy, depending on whether you need an answer, a plan, or somebody alongside your team for a while.
By the hour
For a specific question, a second opinion on a proposal, or an hour reviewing why something dropped. Billed in fifteen minute increments.
Strategy engagement
The full audit, keyword map, competitor gap analysis and ninety day plan, plus a working session to hand it over to your team.
- Technical and content audit
- Keyword to page mapping
- Competitor gap analysis
- Ninety day plan with owners
- Handover session
Ongoing advisory
A standing monthly session with your team, reviewing progress, unblocking what has stalled and adjusting the plan. Your people do the work; we keep the direction honest.
If you would rather we did the work instead of advising on it, that is SEO services. Market pricing on SEO cost.
SEO consultant questions
What does an SEO consultant charge in South Africa?
Ours is R850 an hour, R6,500 for a full strategy engagement, or from R3,450 a month for ongoing advisory. Across the market, freelance SEO consultants charge roughly R400 to R1,500 an hour depending on experience, and strategy engagements run from R5,000 to R40,000.
What is the difference between an SEO consultant and an SEO agency?
A consultant tells you what to do and why. An agency does it. If you have people who can execute, consulting is cheaper and faster. If you do not, a plan without hands to carry it out just sits in a folder.
Can you review what my current agency is doing?
Yes, and it is one of the more common reasons people call. We look at the work being delivered against what you are paying, and give you a straight answer. Sometimes that answer is that they are doing fine and the problem is expectations.
My rankings dropped suddenly. Can you find out why?
Usually. Sudden drops are typically a technical change, an accidental noindex, a botched migration, a manual action or an algorithm update. An hour or two of diagnostic work identifies which, and that is worth doing before anyone starts rewriting content.
Will I get an actual plan or just a report?
A plan. Reports list problems; plans say what to do, in what order, by when, and who is doing it. If the deliverable cannot be handed to a developer and a marketer on Monday morning, it has not been finished.
Do you work with businesses outside Gauteng?
Yes. Consulting is delivered remotely by video call, so location makes no difference. We work across South Africa and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, where engagements are quoted in US dollars.
Do you offer once-off SEO audits?
Yes, at R4,500, and it is the most common way an SEO consultant engagement starts. You get the full technical and content audit with a prioritised plan, and no obligation to continue. Plenty of clients take it to their own developers.
Can you train my team to do SEO?
Yes. An SEO consultant is often most valuable as a trainer. A working session or a short series, built around your actual site rather than generic slides, so your marketer leaves able to write pages that rank and your developer knows what not to break.
What tools do you use for SEO consulting?
An SEO consultant lives in Google Search Console and Analytics as the ground truth, plus professional crawling and rank tracking tools. The tools matter less than knowing which numbers are decoration and which ones pay invoices.
How is a paid audit different from free audit tools?
Free tools list generic findings, most of them trivial, with no sense of which matter. A paid audit ranks issues by what they cost you specifically, checks things tools cannot judge such as content quality and intent match, and ends in a plan rather than a score.
Will you sign an NDA before looking at our data?
Yes, happily. Search Console and analytics data is commercially sensitive and treating it that way is basic professionalism.
What size business do you consult for?
An SEO consultant suits anything from owner-run businesses to companies with in-house marketing teams. The engagement scales: an owner gets a plan they can action in evenings, a team gets a plan with owners across roles.
The rest of what we do
Consulting is one part of it. Start from website design company in South Africa for the overview.
Tell us what is not working. We will tell you why.
A short call costs you nothing and usually identifies the real problem. If the answer turns out to be that you do not need a consultant, we will say that too.