Service
An SEO consultant, not an agency: one named person does the work
The person who reads your data is the person who writes your pages and answers your call.
An SEO consultant is one person accountable for your search results, as against an agency where a salesperson, an account manager and a junior share the job. Here that person is Daniel Stoychev. The fee is the same tiers as the rest of the site, from £399 a month with a 3-month minimum, and the limit is honest: one person, one business per town and sector. This page says what changes when the consultant model is used, when an agency is the better choice, and what you should expect to see by month three.
What changes
Three things that are different when one person runs the account
The data and the decision sit in the same head. Search Console shows which searches already bring you impressions and which pages sit at positions five to twenty. At an agency that report is read by one person and acted on by another, through a ticket, a week later. Here the reading and the rewriting happen in the same morning, which is why the first gains come from pages that already exist rather than from new ones.
Nothing is hidden behind a process. There is no account manager to translate, no “the team is looking into it”, no monthly call whose purpose is to keep you. The report is two pages, written by the person who did the work, and Search Console is in your name so you can check every line of it without us.
The limit is capacity, and it is stated. One person cannot write thirty pages a month, run a link campaign across five countries, and manage £20,000 of Google Ads at the same time. When a job needs that, we say so in the audit and point you at an agency. What one person can do is the eight to twelve hours a month that a local or regional business actually needs, done by someone senior, every month, without a handover to a junior after the sale.
Consultant or agency
The honest comparison, including where the agency wins
Neither model is right for everyone. The table is what we would tell a friend who asked.
| Consultant (this site) | Agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Who reads your Search Console | The person who does the work, weekly | An analyst or a tool; the account manager sees a summary |
| Who writes the pages | The same person, after a call with you | A writer, often freelance, from a brief |
| Who you ring | The same person | The account manager, who then asks the team |
| Capacity | Eight to twelve hours a month per client; a page or two a month | As much as you pay for; thirty pages a month is possible |
| Price | £399, £599 or £799 a month, published | Usually quoted after a call; the pricing page shows four published rates for comparison |
| Best for | Local and regional businesses, one to a few locations, a service people search for | National ecommerce, multi-language sites, large paid-media budgets, a site that needs volume |
| The risk | One person: a holiday moves a report; the fit has to be right | The handover: the person who sold it is rarely the person who does it |
What it covers
The same work as the rest of this site, with one name on it
The consultancy is not a separate product. It is the Local, Growth and Multi-area tiers on the pricing page, described from the point of view of who does them. Month one is technical: indexing, speed, the Business Profile, structured data. Every month after is one piece of work chosen from your query data, the profile and reviews kept moving, a check for anything broken, and the report.
Where it differs from a typical consultant is the shape of the engagement. We do not sell hours or day rates, because an hour of SEO advice is worth nothing until someone acts on it. The £150 audit is the advice-only product: the diagnosis in writing, the order of work, credited against month one if you go ahead.
How to judge it
What a consultant should be able to show you, by month
Month one: Search Console and Analytics in your name, the technical list fixed with before-and-after numbers, the Business Profile complete, and the first page rewritten from query data. If a consultant cannot show you these four in writing, ask why.
Month three or four: rising impressions for the searches that name your service and area. This is the earliest honest signal; a consultant who promises rankings by month one is selling something else.
Month six: enquiries you can trace to search, counted in your own Analytics, not in a slide. By month twelve the fee should be covered several times over, or the report says why not and what changes.
Who it suits
The businesses that get more from one person than from a team
A practice or a firm where the partners want to speak to the person doing the work, not to an account manager: solicitors, accountants, clinics. A trade or installer covering a region from one base, whose whole SEO problem is the map pack, three service pages and reviews. An independent hotel or a shop with one site and one town to win. In each case the work is a few well-chosen hours a month, done by someone who has seen the query report and remembers last month's, and the cost of a team would be spent on the team.
The common thread is that the business owner will be in the conversation. The pages come from a fifteen-minute call about the jobs, the questions customers ask, and the photographs of the work. A consultant can have that conversation directly; an agency has it through a form. If you would rather never be asked, the agency model suits you better, and we say so in the audit.
When to choose an agency instead
Four cases where we would send you elsewhere
You need volume. A national ecommerce site with two thousand products needs category pages, product copy and a link campaign at a rate one person cannot sustain. The ecommerce page says where our limit is.
You need several languages or countries. Hreflang, local link profiles and native writers in each market are an agency's job.
Paid media is the bigger budget. We run Google Ads for the businesses whose SEO we do, in the order the ads page describes, but a five-figure monthly ad spend deserves a dedicated PPC team.
You want a team on call. Some businesses want a Slack channel answered within the hour. That is a retainer with an agency, and it costs what it costs.
Questions people ask before hiring a consultant
Are you a freelancer or a company?
A sole trader: Daniel Stoychev, trading as Search Engine Optimisation Company, registered with the ICO, working from Wrexham for businesses across the UK. The legal pages say the same. It is one person by design, not a company pretending to be small or a freelancer pretending to be large.
What is the difference between an SEO consultant and an SEO agency, in practice?
Who touches the account. At an agency the person who sells, the person who manages you and the person who does the work are three people, and the third is usually the most junior. With a consultant the person who read your Search Console this morning is the one who writes the page this afternoon and picks up the phone when you ring. The comparison table on this page sets out the rest.
Is a consultant cheaper than an agency?
Usually, and the pricing page shows the published rates of four UK agencies beside ours so you can check rather than take our word. The reason is not that the work is smaller; it is that there is no account manager, no office and no sales team in the fee. What you lose is capacity: one person cannot write thirty pages a month, and we say so when a job needs that.
How many clients do you take?
As many as one person can do properly, which is why the Local tier is one business per town and sector, confirmed personally in the reply to your quote. If your town and sector are already taken, the first line of the reply says so. A consultant who never says no is an agency in the making.
What happens when you are ill or on holiday?
The work is monthly, not daily, so a week's absence moves a report by a week and nothing else. Search Console, Analytics and the Business Profile are in your name from week one, so nothing about your account depends on our availability. We tell you in advance and we do not pretend to be a team of twelve.
Can you work alongside our in-house marketer or web developer?
Yes, and it is often the best arrangement: they know the business, we know the search data. We write the brief and read the results; they publish. The monthly report is written so that they can act on it without us.
Can I hire you for advice only, without a monthly retainer?
Yes, that is the £150 audit: a written diagnosis of your site, your Business Profile and the three competitors above you, with the order of work. It is credited against the first month if you go ahead within 60 days, and it stands on its own if you do not. We do not sell day rates.
One person, named, on your SEO, from the free audit onwards
Send the site and your town. The audit is written by the person who would do the work, and it says whether the consultant model fits your business or whether you need more hands than one.