SEO consultant: what one does, and when to hire.

What an SEO consultant actually does

The job is not producing SEO work. It is deciding which SEO work is worth producing.

Most businesses arriving here do not have a shortage of activity. They have had blog posts written, citations submitted and reports delivered on schedule, and none of it moved the number that matters. The missing piece was never effort. It was somebody senior enough to look at the whole picture and say which two things out of thirty were actually holding the business back, and which twenty-eight were noise.

In practice that means diagnosis first: what is indexed, what is ranking, what is technically broken, how the site is structured, what the map pack is doing, who is winning and why, and whether AI assistants know the business exists. Then a sequence, because doing the right things in the wrong order wastes months. If you only want the diagnosis, that is what an SEO audit is for. Then the execution, or the direction of whoever executes it.

You are hiring judgement about what to do, not capacity to do more.

Consultant, agency or in-house

These get compared as though they are three prices for the same thing. They are three different purchases, and picking the wrong one is expensive in a way that takes six months to become obvious.

In-house is the third option and the one most often decided on cost alone. It works when the work is genuinely constant and one person can own it properly. It struggles because modern search is not one discipline: technical SEO, content, local search, platform policy and AI visibility are four or five specialisms, and expecting one hire to cover all of them is how businesses end up with a competent generalist who is out of their depth in three of the five areas that matter.

What the work covers

Search stopped being one surface. Local packs, organic results, Maps, Shopping and AI answers are separate places to be found, all feeding each other, and most suppliers still work only the one they were hired for. These five are treated as one system here because that is what they are, and each has its own service page: local SEO, multi-location SEO, organic and national SEO, AI search visibility, and Google Business Profile recovery.

Hiring a local SEO consultant

Local is where most of this work starts, and it is the area where the gap between a consultant and a supplier shows up fastest. Local visibility is decided by three things you can only partly control: relevance, prominence, and proximity. Most of what gets sold as local SEO only touches the first two, then quietly blames the algorithm for the third.

Proximity is the part nobody wants to say out loud. A single location cannot rank across an entire metro area, no matter how good the work is. Map pack visibility falls away with distance from your address, and past a certain radius the businesses closer to the searcher win regardless of how strong your profile is. A consultant tells you that on the first call and builds the campaign around the territory you can realistically own, then extends it deliberately. A supplier sells you a package that quietly targets the whole city and reports on the postcodes where it happened to work.

What that means in practice: geo-grid rank tracking rather than a single postcode check, so you can see the actual shape of your visibility rather than one flattering number. Category and attribute selection, which decides which searches you are even eligible for. Review velocity, because reviews are local and a strong profile in your flagship suburb does nothing for the branch two suburbs over. Citation and listing consistency, so the same business details appear the same way everywhere. And the entity work underneath all of it, which is what keeps rankings stable instead of drifting every time Google adjusts something.

If you want the service rather than the advisory relationship, that is local SEO services, with local SEO in Perth and Google Maps SEO covering the specific ground. The difference is straightforward: hire the service when you know what needs doing, hire the consultant when you need someone to work out why it is not happening and decide what to do instead.

How this engagement is different

Three things, and they are the reasons businesses move here from somewhere larger.

You work with the specialist. Dorian does the strategy and the execution personally, whether the work is a map pack campaign or a national technical rebuild. There is no account manager relaying decisions, no junior analyst producing the deliverables, and no handoff after the first call. The person who assesses your account is the person who works on it.

Reporting is built around enquiries. Rankings, traffic and impressions are inputs. Enquiries, booked jobs and revenue are outputs. If reporting cannot connect the two, every performance conversation turns into an argument about the numbers instead of a decision about the business.

No lock-in. Month to month, 30 days notice. A minimum term protects the supplier, not the client. If the work is producing results you will stay because it is working, and if it is not, a contract should not be what keeps you.

Where most hires go wrong

What it costs

Retainers start at $1,999 per month plus GST, with the actual figure set after a scoping call rather than read off a rate card. The variables are scope, how many locations are involved, and how competitive the market is. Five locations in one metro area is a different job from five spread across five competing capital cities.

If you are not ready for a retainer, the diagnosis can be bought on its own. The audit tiers are $49 for a 15-minute Loom review, $599 for the comprehensive 25-point audit, or $999 for an audit with the on-page work implemented. Some businesses take the audit away and execute it internally, which is a legitimate outcome and considerably cheaper than discovering the same findings slowly over a year of retainer.

Google Business Profile reinstatement is priced separately at a fixed $550 including GST, reinstated or refunded. Merchant Center and Google Ads account recovery are quoted per case.

When you should not hire a consultant

Worth saying plainly, because it saves everyone a call. If your website cannot convert the traffic it already has, fix that first, because more visitors to a page that does not persuade is an expensive way to prove the page does not persuade. If the problem is what people find when they search your name, that is reputation management, not SEO. If nobody internally can answer the phone or respond to enquiries within a day, lead generation is not your constraint. If the budget is a few hundred dollars a month, the honest answer is that specialist consulting is not the right purchase, and you will get more from doing the Google Business Profile basics properly yourself.

If any of that sounds like your situation, say so on the call and you will get told directly rather than sold a retainer.

Frequently asked questions

If you want a straight read on where your business actually stands, book a 30-minute call. You will get an honest assessment of what is holding visibility back and what it would take to change it, including whether a consultant is the right hire at all.