What does an SEO consultant do? The work, and the paper it leaves

An SEO consultant works out why a business is not being found in search, decides which fixes are worth doing and in what order, and then either does those fixes or writes them up for whoever will. The first half is diagnosis and the second half is follow-through. Everything else on a consultant’s invoice is a version of one of those two, and you can check each one, because real work leaves paper behind it.

I searched “what does an seo consultant do” from Toronto on 6 October 2026. Google showed an AI answer, and the first organic result was a webhill.ca page titled “SEO Expert in Toronto: When Do You Need One for Your Business”. The third compared SEO experts with agencies and included a section on Dubai. The “people also ask” box asked four questions, and all four were about SEO as a job: whether it pays well, whether it is hard to learn, what the salary is, and whether it is a high income skill.

The “people also ask” box read the question as a career question. The organic results did not; the first and the third were both about hiring. If you are here because you are thinking of hiring someone, the box answers the wrong question, so here is the right one.

Google’s own list of the work

Google publishes a page called “Do you need an SEO?”. It is the description of the job written by the company whose results the job is about, and it names eight services that “many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide”. I have put each one beside what it should leave in your hands.

Google’s wording	What you should be able to hold afterwards
Review of your site content or structure	A list of pages with the fault on each, ranked, not a single score
Technical advice on website development	Written instructions on hosting, redirects, error pages or JavaScript that your developer can follow without a meeting
Content development	Pages published, or briefs for pages, each with the search it is meant to answer
Management of online business development campaigns	A record of what ran, what it cost and what came back
Keyword research	The searches you can realistically win, with the demand behind each one
SEO training	Someone on your side who can now do part of the work alone
Expertise in specific markets and geographies	An answer to why your town or your trade behaves differently from the general advice
Optimizing for generative AI	Advice that matches Google’s published guidance on AI features, and says where it does

Not every consultant does all eight, and nobody should charge you for all eight by default. In my view, a plumber with one location needs the first, the second and the fifth far more than the sixth. A company with a marketing hire needs the sixth more than anything.

Most of the job is deciding the order

The table describes tasks. What you are actually paying a person for is the ranking of them. A site with forty faults does not need forty fixes this month. It needs the three that stand between existing demand and the phone, done first, and the rest left alone until they matter.

That is the part that cannot be bought as a tool subscription, and it is the part I spend the most time on. I have written about how to find which few fixes carry the result, with a worked example, because the honest version of this job is mostly saying no to things that look busy.

In practice the diagnosis means reading what is already there before touching anything: the crawl, the Search Console history, the business profile, the competitors who show up where you do not. Then a list goes to you, with a reason beside every line. You strike out what you will not do. What is left is the plan.

What the follow-through looks like

After the plan, a consultant does one of two things, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before you sign.

They do the work. They change titles, fix redirects, write and publish pages, clean up the business profile, chase the citations, and report what moved. You need to give them access, and they need to tell you what they changed.

They brief the work. Your developer, your marketing hire or your agency does it, and the consultant writes the instructions, checks the result and tells you when something drifted. This costs less and suits a business that already has hands but no one who knows search.

Both are real consulting. The difference is who touches the site. If an SEO consultant proposal does not say which one it is, ask, because the price and the risk both depend on the answer.

What a consultant should not be doing

Google’s page is blunt about this, so I will quote it rather than paraphrase. “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” It warns against anyone claiming “a ‘special relationship’ with Google”. It says “You should never have to link to an SEO.” And it tells you that “you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire”.

It also gives a rule about access that is worth knowing before anyone logs in. If someone offers an audit, Google says to “only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don’t grant them write access)”. An audit is reading. A person who needs to change things in order to tell you what is wrong is asking for more than the job requires.

One person also cannot be several departments at once. If the work is a full rebuild with design, development, content and paid search running together, a team is the better buy, and I have set out where an agency beats a consultant without trimming the list.

How to check that it is being done

Google gives you the question to ask before you hire: “Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?” If the answer is anything other than yes, stop there.

After you hire, three things tell you the work is happening.

1. A change log. Dated, in plain language, with the page or setting that changed. If you cannot point to last month’s entries, nothing you can verify happened last month.
2. A baseline from before. Calls, enquiries, Search Console clicks, map positions, taken before the first change. Without one, every report compares this month with a memory.
3. A list of what did not work. Some fixes do nothing. A consultant who never reports one is either very lucky or not reporting.

Where I fit in this

I do both kinds of follow-through, and the audit stands on its own if you only want the diagnosis. The scope and the price of each are on the page that lists my four SEO consulting services, priced in Canadian dollars and starting with the $499 audit, so you can decide which half of the job you need before we speak. The wider market is in what an SEO consultant costs in Canada, and I will not guarantee a ranking for the same reason Google gives.

Questions that come up when you are about to hire one

Is this the same as an SEO specialist or an SEO expert? In practice the titles overlap, so the title tells you little. Ask what they will deliver, then check it against the table above.

Do I need one at all if I run a small local business? Possibly not. Google’s own page says that if you run a small local business “you can probably do much of the work yourself”, and it points to its starter guide. An SEO consultant earns the fee when you do not have the hours, or when you have tried and do not know why it is not working.

Should I hire before or after a new website? Before. Google names a site redesign or a new launch as “a great time to hire” and adds “the earlier, the better”, so that the site “is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up”.

What about the salary and career questions Google shows? Those are for people who want to do this work, not people who want to buy it. What matters to a buyer is what the person will hand over each month, and the rate, which is on the page linked above.

Can one consultant handle everything? The diagnosis, yes. The volume, sometimes. A single person is the right buy when the problem is not knowing what to fix, and the wrong buy when the problem is having a year of known work and no hands.

Method

The search was run on 6 October 2026 from Toronto, in English, and the results described are those recorded that day. They move. The eight services and every quoted sentence come from Google’s “Do you need an SEO?” page as published that day. The second column of the table and the advice on order, follow-through and checking are my own judgment from doing the work, not a survey.