An SEO consultant is one specialist who works out what’s holding your site back, writes the plan and often carries it out as well. An SEO agency does the same kinds of work through a team of people. A freelance consultant suits a business that wants to deal directly with the person doing the work. An agency suits work that needs many hands at once. Neither is better in general. What matters is which one fits the work you need done.
Peacock Search is a consultancy, so we have a side in this. The aim is to help you choose well, even when the answer is an agency.
What does an SEO consultant do?
Some consultants only advise and leave the changes to your team. Others make most of them themselves: technical fixes, page briefs and rewrites, local listings and the monthly report. Ask which kind you’re talking to.
Google’s guide to hiring an SEO (updated 5 June 2026) lists the services consultants and agencies provide. They include a review of your site’s content or structure, technical advice on things such as redirects and error pages, content development, keyword research, SEO training, knowledge of particular markets and optimising for generative AI.
The strength of a consultant is directness. The person who looked at your site is the person who answers your questions, so you hear the reasoning first-hand.
What does an SEO agency do?
An agency has a team, often including specialists for technical SEO, content and links, and an account manager who coordinates them. Its strength is capacity. It can produce a lot of content each month and keep the work moving when someone’s on holiday or off sick. Good agencies tell you who works on your account and how much of their time it gets.
When an agency is the better choice
- You need a large volume of content every month
- You run several brands, countries or languages in parallel
- You want SEO, paid social, design and development from one supplier
- The work can’t pause when one person is away
When a freelance consultant is the better choice
- You want to deal with the person doing the work
- Your site needs focus and judgement more than volume
- You’ve paid for SEO before and couldn’t tell what was being done
- You have your own team and need a clear plan and an expert to check the work
There’s a third option. Google’s guide says that if you run a small local business, “you can probably do much of the work yourself”, starting with its SEO starter guide. If you’ve got the time, that’s a fair place to begin.
Questions to ask an SEO agency or consultant
Google suggests interviewing any SEO before you hire, and its sample questions include how they measure success and whether they’ll share every change they make to your site, with the reasoning. We’d add these:
- Who does the work? Not who manages it. Who actually makes the changes?
- Whose name are the accounts in? Your Search Console, Analytics, Google Ads and Business Profile should belong to you. In each one, the owner or administrator decides who else gets in, so a supplier can work as a user on your account rather than you being a guest on theirs.
- What’s the notice period? A long minimum term mainly protects the supplier. Ask how you leave and what you keep.
- What does a monthly report look like? Ask to see an example. If you can’t follow it, you won’t follow yours.
- What happens in the first month? A good answer names specific checks and a written plan.
- How do you build links? If the answer involves paying for them, walk away. Google’s spam policies treat buying links for ranking purposes as link spam, and sites that break those policies may rank lower or not appear in results at all.
- How will we both know it’s working? The answer should start with your own Search Console and Analytics data and the enquiries you get, not rankings alone.
Warning signs
Google’s guide puts the first one plainly: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” It also tells you to be careful with any company that’s secretive or won’t clearly explain what it intends to do. We’d add three more: contracts that run for a year or more with no way out, accounts set up in the supplier’s name, and reports that show rankings and nothing else.
If you’ve been burned before, or worry about lock-in, unreadable reports or traffic that never becomes enquiries, these signs are where to look. A good agency and a good consultant can both answer those worries plainly.
Freelancer, consultant or consultancy?
The words overlap. A freelance SEO consultant and a one-person SEO consultancy often work the same way. The label matters less than the answers to the questions above.
Where Peacock Search fits
Peacock Search is a founder-led consultancy based in Leeds, working with businesses across Leeds, York, Harrogate and Sheffield. The About page explains how Peacock Search works and why it’s one consultant rather than an agency.
To answer our own questions: every account stays in your name, and the monthly report fits on one page. Ongoing work is a rolling month-to-month agreement on one month’s notice. And if your project fits the agency list above, you’ll be told so at the start.
If you’d like to see the approach on your own site, request a free visibility audit.
