Workstream 1
Strategic direction
A prioritized roadmap your team executes, revised as the rankings move.
Roadmap · 12 monthsPRIORITIZED
18
- ✓Estimated impact
- ✓Effort required
- ✓Execution order
- ✓Measurement planned
An SEO consultant does not replace your team. They give it a direction, an order of priority and someone to settle the calls. It is the most profitable way to work in search when the skills already exist in house and what is missing is the reading of the market.
What is an SEO consultant?
An SEO consultant, also called a search engine optimization consultant or an SEO expert, analyzes the organic visibility of a website, measures the gap between it and the sites ahead of it in the search engines, and builds the optimization plan that closes that gap. The job brings together three skills few people combine.
- Technical SEO: indexing, crawling, page speed, mobile usability, URLS structure, tags and structured data
- On-page SEO: keyword research, search intent, content depth, internal linking
- Off-page SEO: backlinks, domain authority, local search when the customer base is geographic
What separates this from an agency mandate is who holds the keyboard. An SEO agency executes and reports on deliverables. An SEO consultant decides, prioritizes, trains and settles the calls, while your teams produce the content and the technical optimizations. It is one of the workstreams inside our SEO services, and the one that assumes the most maturity on the client side.
Consultant, agency or in-house expert: which one fits you
The three models answer different situations, and the wrong choice costs more than the right one returns.
| Situation | The right model | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A marketing team already writing and publishing content, with no search direction | SEO consultant | The capacity to execute exists; the reading of the market and the keywords does not |
| No internal resource, organic results needed | Agency mandate | You need hands as much as a search strategy |
| A market to win continuously, content volume every month | In-house SEO strategist, backed by a consultant | The fixed cost pays off past a certain volume of optimized pages |
| A redesign or a site migration coming up | SEO consultant | The risk to your rankings is concentrated in a few weeks |
When the balance tips toward delegated execution, our other services take over: technical SEO for the indexing and performance groundwork, and SEO writing for producing optimized pages.
What an SEO consultant is engaged to do
An SEO consulting mandate covers six missions, in this order:
- The initial SEO audit: the technical state of the site, indexing, speed, content quality and depth, backlink profile, starting rankings, analysis of the organic competition
- Keyword research and search intent mapping: which queries are worth the effort, what search volume they represent, which page should target what
- The prioritized roadmap: every optimization job ranked by expected gain and by effort, with an owner and a deadline
- Ongoing decisions: the technical and editorial calls settled as execution proceeds, before the mistake gets published
- The review of deliverables: every page read against the data of the target SERP, tags and internal links included, before it goes live
- Measurement and correction: rankings, impressions and clicks reviewed every month in Search Console, and the roadmap corrected with that data
This is where the nuance counts: the recommendations of an SEO expert are worth something only if somebody applies them. Supporting the execution is therefore part of the mandate, on the same footing as the audit and the strategy.
What your team actually receives
An SEO consultation with us produces documents you can use, not presentations.
- A map of the market: every query that counts in your industry, sorted by search volume, by intent and by difficulty
- A prioritized backlog, cut into tasks you can assign to a writer, a developer or a content manager
- Page templates, with the heading structure, the entities to cover, the tags to write and the content depth expected
- A tracking dashboard wired to Google Search Console, with your starting rankings and organic traffic locked in
- A written record of decisions after each call, so the reasoning stays in the company even if the team changes
Migrations and redesigns, where a consultant returns the most
A website redesign is the moment when search visibility is won or lost fastest. Changing URLS structure, CMS or domain without a migration plan drops rankings built over years, and recovering the organic traffic takes months if it comes back at all.
The migration plan covers the full mapping of old URLSs to new ones, the redirect table verified line by line, the preservation of title tags, meta descriptions and structured data, the monitoring of indexing and crawling after the switch, then the comparison of click and ranking curves before and after in Search Console. Our case studies show what a properly maintained foundation makes possible afterward: a regulated industry up 252% in clicks in six months, with Search Console screenshots to back it up.
Worth remembering: an SEO consultant costs the most when you call them after the migration. Called before, they protect an asset. Called after, they rebuild lost rankings.
Training and the autonomy of your team
A good consulting mandate leaves the team more autonomous as it goes. In concrete terms: training sessions on keyword research, on on-page optimization and on page structure, review checklists your writers apply on their own, shared monitoring of algorithm updates, and access to the same tools we use to measure, meaning Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Semrush and Screaming Frog.
After a few months, your writers optimize their own pages, and the consultant's attention concentrates on the high-stakes work: a migration, a new line of services, a Google Business Profile and a local search strategy in a second city. The guides on the blog extend that skills transfer between meetings.
Search engine optimization, paid advertising and generative engines
An SEO consultant also decides where organic search sits relative to the other channels. Paid advertising, Google Ads first among them, buys immediate clicks that stop with the budget, while search engine optimization builds a durable asset that keeps producing qualified organic traffic. The two combine, and the right balance depends on your margin, your sales cycle and the strength of the competitors sitting on your keywords.
A third field now counts: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews compose an answer and cite a handful of sources, with no click. The SEO consultant therefore also settles the extractable structure, the structured data and the content depth that get your site cited as a relevant source. That is the job of our GEO team.
Measurement: what proves the direction was right
A search strategy that does not correct itself with its own data is not a strategy; it is an opinion. Every consulting mandate locks a starting point into your Google Search Console, then measures rankings, impressions, clicks and the pages that are progressing every month. Google Analytics ties those clicks to conversions, Semrush tracks positions and competitive analysis, Screaming Frog watches indexing and the technical state of the pages your team produces.
That continuous measurement is what lets us put our guarantee in writing: 20% growth in ranking keywords, 20% growth in Search Console clicks and 20% more new customers in the month following the 90 days, or we keep working without billing. In three years, we have had to honour it once. Our methods are tested on the web properties we operate ourselves, where we ran our study of 200 ranking factors, before they get recommended to a client team. That is what separates a verified recommendation from an expert opinion: the team we founded in Montréal applies to its own sites first what it advises others to do.
How much does an SEO consultant cost in Québec?
An SEO consultant's fees vary with their expertise, their experience and the complexity of the mandate. With us, SEO consulting sits inside the published monthly ranges of our search mandates:
- $1,500 to $2,500 CAD per month: local small business, single location, limited geographic market
- $2,500 to $5,000 CAD per month: multi-service or multi-city company, strong organic competition
- $5,000 to $12,000 CAD per month: ecommerce, SaaS or national market, with sustained content production
Three factors decide where you land: the strength of the sites already ranking on your keywords, the maturity of your internal team, and the volume of content to produce. A consulting mandate costs less than a full execution mandate, because producing the pages stays with you. Reach us through the contact page: an answer within 24 hours, with a measured picture of your market and a free SEO audit to lock in the starting point.
FAQ on SEO consulting
What does an SEO consultant do?
Analyzing the organic performance of the site, identifying the keyword opportunities the competition has not taken, building a prioritized optimization roadmap, settling the technical and editorial calls during execution, then measuring and correcting with Search Console data.
Who needs SEO consulting?
Companies that already have the means to execute: a marketing team that writes content, an available developer, a site manager. It is also the right format when a search strategy is under way and an outside view has to validate the direction before more budget goes in.
What is the difference between an SEO consultant and an SEO agency?
The SEO consultant decides, prioritizes and trains while your teams produce the pages; an SEO agency produces them for you. The first model asks for more internal time, the second for less. We offer both, and the first conversation is there to settle which one fits.
How long before search engine optimization shows results?
The first movements appear in Search Console within 30 to 90 days: rankings, impressions, first calls. On contested queries, expect six to twelve months of continuous work. The pace depends directly on your team's capacity to execute.
What tools does an SEO consultant use?
Google Search Console for clicks, impressions and positions, Google Analytics for behaviour and conversions, Semrush for rank tracking and competitive analysis, Screaming Frog for the technical crawl. Your teams get the same access and learn to read those tools.
What does the day-to-day collaboration look like?
A decision meeting at a fixed interval, a written channel for urgent questions, and a shared roadmap. The SEO consultant reviews your pages there, settles the questions of tags, internal linking and indexing, and records every decision.
How do you recognize a good SEO consultant?
Ask for three things: results measured in the Search Console of a comparable client, the method used to set priorities, and what happens if the stated thresholds are not reached. A precise answer to all three is worth more than any certification.
Can a consultant work with a team that is already in place?
That is the most common case. The SEO consultant fits into your existing rituals, trains your writers on keyword research and on-page optimization, and settles the technical calls that are blocking progress.