SEO agency

When a company looks for an SEO agency, it is usually looking for results and certainty above all. In my experience, a senior independent consultant is the better choice for most small and medium-sized companies. For similar money, you usually get a more experienced person who works directly on your website.

I am not a typical freelancer who does everything alone. I am supported by two or three people, so I can handle larger projects too. But I keep hold of the strategy, the priorities and the communication with you, with no account managers and no reselling of hours.

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Agency vs consultant in six points

Who actually works on your website

At an agency, it is often someone other than the person at the first meeting. With a consultant, it is the person you are talking to.

Where the hourly rate goes

At an agency, a large part of the rate covers sales, management and overheads. A smaller share reaches the person doing the SEO.

Seniority

In my experience, experienced agency specialists often go freelance, move in-house or start their own agencies.

Direct communication

No chain through an account manager and a project manager. You ask your question directly to the person who knows the answer.

Flexibility

The scope of the work can be adjusted to what you need at the moment, without long contracts or notice periods.

When an agency makes sense

When you need SEO, PPC, social media and a large team under one roof at the same time. Then an agency has its place.

Who have I provided website and SEO consulting for?

How much of the agency hourly rate goes to the person working on your website

An agency hour of SEO in the Czech Republic costs roughly €60 to €120 excluding VAT. Out of that, the agency has to pay for salespeople, account managers, project management, offices, tools and its own profit. Based on what I see on the market, the person who actually works on your website is often left with only about a fifth. So from an hour at €75, around €10 to €15.

This is not because agencies are bad. They have high overheads and have to cover them. For you, though, it means that for an hour at a senior rate you often get an hour of work from someone who would cost much less on the open market. A senior independent consultant costs a similar amount, roughly €60 to €85 per hour, and for that money you get their work directly. I have written more about pricing in the article SEO pricing.

Why the most senior people are rarely found at agencies

The economics of an agency push the work towards cheaper people. When an experienced specialist sees they receive a fraction of what the client pays, they have a strong reason to leave. To go freelance, to join the in-house team of a large company, or to start their own agency.

That is why, at many agencies, projects are handled mainly by junior and mid-level staff under senior supervision. That is not necessarily bad, but it is good to know whose work you are paying for. A junior works through a task list. A senior can tell which 20% of the tasks will bring most of the results.

Who talks to whom

The second difference is communication. At an agency, the path runs from you through an account manager to a project manager and only then to the specialist. Every extra link in the chain adds time and room for misunderstanding.

With an independent consultant, you talk directly to the person who both designs and carries out the strategy. When something changes on your website, you can deal with it straight away with the person who works on it.

Types of SEO agency you will come across

On the Czech market, the term SEO agency covers five quite different kinds of company. Before you start comparing offers, find out which type you are talking to. Both the price and the results depend on it.

Full-service digital agency. Websites, campaigns, social media and SEO. The advantage is a single invoice; the weakness is often that SEO is a side service handled by a small team.
Performance agency. Its main business is PPC and it sells SEO as an add-on. It is good at measurement, but content and links tend to be weaker.
Specialist SEO agency. It only does search engines and has dedicated people for each discipline. The closest to what you expect from SEO, but with full agency overheads.
Link building or PR agency. It only deals with links and mentions. A good complement, but it will not do your SEO on its own.
Agency that resells the work. It has its own sales and account staff but sends the actual work to subcontractors. You pay two margins and know the least about who works on your website.

The last type is not always bad, but insist on knowing who does the work. A reputable agency will tell you who its subcontractors are.

Payment is either a monthly retainer for ongoing work or a fixed price for a one-off project such as an audit or a migration. An hourly rate is used more for consulting. For SEO that is meant to build up over time, a retainer with a breakdown of hours makes sense.

You can identify the type with two questions. How many people at the agency do only SEO, and what share of its revenue does SEO make up? If it is, say, two people out of fifty and SEO is five per cent of the business, you know what priority your website will get.

What an agency report looks like and what to look for in it

The monthly report is the only thing you regularly see from an agency, so you judge the whole collaboration by it. With clients who come to me from agencies, I often see reports running to dozens of pages of charts. Rankings, the number of keywords in the top 10, traffic and a tool export. It looks like a lot of work and says almost nothing.

A good report fits on a few pages and answers four questions. What was done that month and how many hours it took. How orders and revenue from organic search changed. What did not work and why. What will be done next month and what they need from you for it.

If the report lacks hours and a list of work, you do not know what you are paying for. If it lacks revenue, you do not know whether any of it is worthwhile. And if next month’s priority repeats every month, nothing is being implemented.

What to check in the contract

Read a contract with an agency as a document for the day the collaboration ends. That is when most of the trouble happens. Here are five points I check when I help a client review a contract.

Scope. How many hours a month and what breakdown. A retainer without a breakdown is a black box.
Notice period. A long notice period and a year-long commitment protect the agency, not you.
Accounts and data. Search Console, Google Analytics, ad accounts and Merchant Center should be set up in your name. The agency should only be a user in them.
Content and links. Who owns the texts written and what happens to links the agency places from its own websites.
Handover. What you get when you leave. Documentation, a list of the work done, a list of the links acquired and the status of access rights.

If an agency hesitates on any of these points or puts off the answer until the contract is signed, that tells you something in itself.

The simplest test is to ask outright what happens if you end things after six months. The proper answer is documentation, an overview of what was done and a handover report. The answer “it depends on the situation” means nobody has ever thought about handovers.

When an agency is the better choice

An agency makes sense when you need to cover many channels at once. SEO, PPC, social media, design and development under one roof and with one invoice. Or when you have such a large volume of work that even a consultant with a small team cannot handle it.

It also helps where you need guaranteed cover, as a larger team can more easily cover holidays or illness. But if your main concern is SEO, in my experience you often pay more for these advantages than they bring you.

How to choose an SEO provider

Whether you are choosing an agency or a consultant, ask the same questions at the first meeting. The answers will tell you more than the testimonials on their website.

Who will work on my website? Their name, experience and whether you will talk to them.
How many hours a month will I get and what will they include? A retainer without a breakdown is a black box.
How will you measure results? Traffic is not enough; ask about revenue or enquiries.
Do you have references from my sector? Someone who has done SEO for similar companies tends to be faster and more accurate.
How long is the notice period? A good provider does not need to tie you down with a contract.

I describe the whole selection process, including how to tell a good answer from a bad one, in the article how to choose an SEO consultant. The same applies to agencies.

Warning signs that should make you walk away

Some things you only need to hear once. In its own help documentation on hiring an SEO, Google warns against providers who guarantee rankings. The same goes for those who claim a special relationship with Google or offer priority submission of your website. According to Google, nobody can guarantee the top spot.

The second group of signs concerns links and content. Google’s guidelines explicitly classify buying links to improve rankings as spam. The same applies to mass-producing pages whose main purpose is to manipulate rankings. An agency that promises hundreds of links a month for around a hundred euros, or thousands of automatically generated pages, is more likely to harm your website.

The third sign is organisational. Accounts set up in the agency’s name, a retainer offered before anyone has looked at your data, a report that never includes revenue, and reluctance to say who works on your website. Each of these may have an explanation. Two at once do not.

How to move away from an agency

Leaving an agency is the moment when something most often gets lost. Data and access, sometimes even links. Here are five steps I usually take with a client who comes to me from an agency.

Access. Check that you are an owner in Search Console and an Administrator in Google Analytics 4. Only an owner can add and remove other users.
Verification tokens. After removing users in Search Console, delete their verification tokens too. You will find them in the settings under Users and permissions, among the unused tokens. Google warns that as long as a token remains on the website, a former owner can use it to verify again.
List of work. Ask for an overview of the changes made, the redirects and the links acquired. Without it, nobody knows what to build on.
Link check. Go through which links come from the agency’s websites. These may disappear once the cooperation ends, and it is good to know this in advance.
Short audit. Before I start work, I carry out a short audit so that we know what to build on and what to do differently.

Plan the transition so that the end of the notice period coincides with the new supplier starting. A month with nobody working on the website will not break anything on its own. However, lost access and a missing list of work will delay the start by several more weeks.

How I work

I work as an SEO specialist and consultant with more than eight years of experience, together with a small team of two to three people. I am personally involved in projects from strategy to checking results, and I communicate with clients directly. I most like taking over from agencies, because the client already knows what to expect from SEO and can appreciate the difference.

The Erika Fashion case study shows what this looks like in practice: visits from Google grew from 115,140 to 436,000 a year over two years. I specialise mainly in e-commerce stores and B2B companies.

You can start with a consultation, or simply write to me. In the form at the bottom of the page, tell me what you do and who you have worked with on SEO so far, and I will get back to you with a proposal for the next steps.

How much does an SEO agency cost?

An agency hour of SEO costs roughly between €60 and €120, and monthly retainers start at several hundred euros. A senior independent consultant costs about the same or less. It depends on the scope and the size of the website.

You will find a detailed overview of agency and consultant prices, including audits and link building, in the article SEO pricing.

Isn't an independent consultant riskier than an agency?

The main risk is that one person can fall ill or leave. That is why I work with a small team that can stand in for me and knows the projects.

With an agency, on the other hand, you need to expect that the people on your project may change during the cooperation.

What if I also need PPC or social media?

If you need all channels under one roof, an agency may be more practical. However, a combination often works well too: a consultant handles SEO and a specialised PPC agency or freelancer handles performance advertising.

The two can be connected well. You just need to write down at the start who is responsible for which channel and who is responsible for shared measurement.

How can I tell who at the agency is working on my website?

Ask directly and request a name and their experience. A reputable agency will tell you without any problem and will let you speak to that person.

If you only get a vague answer such as “our team”, ask for specifics and request that the person attends the next meeting.

What access to Search Console should I give a new agency?

In its help article on hiring an SEO, Google recommends giving a new supplier read-only access at first, not write access. You remain the owner of the website in Search Console.

Add broader permissions only when they are really needed, for example to submit a sitemap. Only the owner can add and remove users.

What is an SEO agency

An SEO agency is a company that provides search engine optimisation for several clients at once. A project is usually handled by a team: specialists, a project manager and an account manager. The alternative is an independent SEO consultant who works with the client directly.

As a client, or even as an SEO specialist, feel free to create something like a maturity model. Look at which stage you are at in each pillar. Especially on larger projects, the marketing manager can then present this status to the management and explain how certain steps make sense and can move everything forward. In technical SEO, for example, well-designed filtering that is fully indexable and covers hundreds of relevant keywords would help us significantly. On some projects you simply get on with it, but on others it remains a forgotten task somewhere. An SEO consultant must also fight for their priorities and not let them die.

Patrik Pilous