SEO consultant vs in-house hire: the arithmetic, line by line

A consultant costs less than an in-house hire until your search work fills a working week, every week. Past that point the hire wins, and it should. A salary set against a monthly fee is, in my judgment, the wrong pair of numbers to put side by side.

The comparison I would make instead uses only figures anyone can look up.

Before you read the rest: I sell the consultant side of this choice. I also sell advisory, a second opinion for firms that already have someone in-house. In my view, the hire is often the right call. Check every figure below against its source. Do not take mine on trust.

What I read, and on what date

On 22 October 2026 I read the Job Bank wages for the job of “search engine optimization specialist” in Ontario. Its wage table names the Labour Force Survey from Statistics Canada as the source.

Hourly wages, low, median and high, in dollars per hour:

Where	Low	Median	High
Ontario	21.63	40.00	56.41
Canada	21.48	38.46	57.16

Job Bank gives the reference period as 2023-2024. It says the wages were updated on November 19, 2025.

That median has two limits. Job Bank says the information for this title is applicable to all web developers and programmers, NOC 21234. In my reading, the median is therefore not a figure for search people alone. And it is a wage. It is not what the person costs you.

What the law adds to the wage

An employee costs the wage plus what the law puts on top of it. Payroll first:

• CPP. The contribution rate is the same for employee and employer. For 2026, the maximum annual employer contribution is $4,230.45.
• EI. The employer premium is 1.4 times the employee premium. For 2026, the maximum annual employer premium is $1,572.30. The page gives separate figures for residents of Quebec.

Then the Ontario chapters of Your guide to the Employment Standards Act, on vacation and on termination:

• Vacation pay. It must be at least four per cent of gross wages for someone with less than five years of employment. The same person is entitled to two weeks of vacation time each year.
• Notice. In most cases, ending the job of someone continuously employed for three months takes written notice, termination pay or a combination. The minimum notice is one week for less than a year of employment, and two weeks from one year to less than three.

Then benefits. Job Bank reports that 95% of Ontario workers in this occupation receive at least one type of non-wage benefit, so a candidate will likely ask about them.

Then there are the costs no law lists. The weeks spent hiring. The months before a new person knows your customers. The tools a search person needs, and somebody’s time to manage them. I have no public number for any of those, so I leave them out of the sum. They are not zero.

The other column: my published prices

My own column comes from the price list for my SEO consulting services and what each one leaves out. Canadian dollars, with HST on top:

What you buy	Price	Who does the work
Audit	$499, one time	Your person or your developer, working from a fix list I rank
Advisory	$499 a month and up	Your person, with me reviewing what was done and what moved
Retainer	$750 to $1,500 a month	I do, profile and site both
Full programme	$2,500 monthly	I do, plus Google Ads, call tracking and missed-call follow-up

There is no setup fee and no minimum term past the month you are in. The notice is one month, either direction.

Now put the two columns side by side. On my arithmetic, the top of the retainer range costs about one working week of the Ontario median wage. That is before CPP, EI, vacation pay or any benefit. The hire gives you every week of the month. The retainer gives you the part of the month the work needs, and nothing for the rest.

The hire is not the expensive option. The idle hire is.

How much search work you actually have

So the question that decides this is not price. It is volume. What follows is my judgment, not a measurement.

You likely have a full week of search work, every week, when:

• You run many sites or many locations. Each one needs pages written and kept current.
• Your product changes often. New pages, new categories and new technical faults never stop arriving.
• Search is the main way customers find you. A slow month in search is then a slow month for the whole firm.
• You have developers in the building. Somebody has to write their briefs and check what they built.

You likely do not, when you run one site for one service business in one market. There the work is heavy at the start and lighter after that. A hire in that firm spends the second half of the year looking for things to do, and you pay for every week of it.

If you are not sure what the work even contains, start with what an SEO consultant does from month to month, and count the hours yourself.

What leaving costs on each side

For an employee, the floor is the notice or termination pay set out above. What your employment contract adds to that is a question for an employment lawyer, not for me.

A consultant who is not working out should cost you one month. Mine does. That is the term I sell on, and it costs me the comfort a salaried person has, because I have to earn the next month every month.

The other cost of leaving is knowledge. When an employee leaves, what they knew about your site often leaves too. Put every account in the firm’s name on day one, whoever you hire. Search Console, Analytics, the Google Business Profile, the ads account. All of it. The person changes. The accounts stay.

The arrangement in between

There is a third shape, and it is the one I would test first in most firms that are tempted to hire.

Google’s guidance says that deciding to hire “a company or person” for search “is a big decision that can potentially improve your site’s visibility and save you time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation.” The page was last updated on 5 June 2026. In my view, the same holds for a salaried person. The risk is larger when nobody in the building can tell good work from damage.

Picture a firm with no search knowledge that hires one search person. If the work is wrong, my judgment is that nobody in that firm finds out until the months are spent. The fix is not a second hire. It is a second opinion.

The sequence I would use:

1. Buy the audit first. The ranked fix list tells you how much work your site holds. That is the number that decides whether you need a person at all.
2. Write the job description from the fix list. A list of real work describes the job better than a list of skills, and it tells you whether the role is junior or senior.
3. If you hire, keep advisory for the first months. Your person brings what they did and what moved. I say what I would change. They do the work.
4. Stop the advisory when your person stops needing it. That is a good outcome, and I would rather lose that line than bill for a review nobody uses.

That last point is the cost of my position. In this arrangement the better I do the job, the sooner it ends.

If you are also weighing a firm against a person, the SEO consultant vs agency comparison covers that choice. It is a different question from this one.

Questions

How much does it cost to hire an SEO consultant? My audit is $499. Ongoing work runs from $499 to $2,500 monthly, priced in Canadian dollars with HST on top. For the rest of the market, see how much an SEO consultant will cost you in Canada.

Should the first search hire be junior or senior? In my view, a junior with nobody to check the work is the costly version of both options. The low and high Ontario wages in the table above are far apart, and in my view the gap between those two people is mostly judgment. If budget means junior, pair the hire with a second opinion until they have it.

Is a consultant worth it if I already have a marketing person? Often, as advisory rather than a retainer, because your person knows the business and the consultant knows search. Whether any fee pays back is a sum you can run first, in whether SEO consultants are worth it on your numbers.

What I cannot see from here

This post cannot know how much work your own site holds. That is the number the whole decision turns on, and it is what the audit measures. The audit is priced to stand alone, so it is worth buying even if the answer turns out to be a hire.

Method

The full-week test, and the reading that the top retainer is about one working week of the median wage, are my judgment and my arithmetic, not a measurement.