Fredericton SEO Consultants.
Different Model. Different Math.
A consultant is one person doing the work. An agency is a team doing overhead. Both have their place. Here's how to tell which one fits your Fredericton business, with a plain dimension-by-dimension comparison.
Side by Side, Across 8 Dimensions
Who does the work
Consultant
The person you hired. The one who answered your first email is the one doing the Google Business Profile updates, writing the content, and filing the citations.
Agency
A team, usually. Your sales rep pitched you, your account manager emails you, and a rotating set of specialists (often junior or subcontracted) does the actual SEO work.
Monthly cost
Consultant
Typically $500-$1,500/month in Fredericton. No agency overhead, no sales commissions, no office rent baked into the invoice. We're $599 flat.
Agency
Typically $1,500-$5,000/month. The extra pays for sales, account management, and the overhead of a larger operation -- not necessarily more SEO work.
Response time
Consultant
Direct line to the person doing the work. Questions usually answered same day.
Agency
Email the account manager, wait for triage, wait for the specialist to respond back through the account manager. Measured in days, not hours.
Depth on any one client
Consultant
Focused caseload -- we cap Fredericton Local SEO at a number that lets us actually move the needle for each client.
Agency
One specialist may handle 20-40 clients at once. Your account gets a set number of hours per month and whatever is left after the big clients.
Specialization
Consultant
Built around one discipline. We only do local SEO for Fredericton and surrounding NB -- no PPC, no branding, no side offerings.
Agency
Multi-service. Strength in one channel often comes at the expense of another. Ask: what percentage of revenue is SEO work?
Contract
Consultant
Often month-to-month. Ours is $599/month with 30 days' notice to cancel.
Agency
Typically 6-12 month contracts with early termination fees. The contract exists because average client retention drops after month 4.
Reporting
Consultant
Short monthly note in plain English: what we did, what worked, what's next.
Agency
30-page PDF full of auto-generated charts, most of which you won't read. Real signal gets buried in dashboard noise.
Accountability
Consultant
One name on the invoice. If the work is bad, you know who to talk to, and there's nowhere for the problem to hide.
Agency
Diffused across a team. When results stall, blame can get passed around before anyone fixes it.
Pick a Consultant When...
Pick an Agency When...
If you fit the agency profile, one of the firms on our best SEO agencies scorecard is probably a better fit than we are. No hard feelings -- the goal is to match the right model to your business, not ours.
Common Questions About Hiring a Consultant
Is a Fredericton SEO consultant really cheaper than an agency?
Yes, and for a specific reason: you're not paying for sales, account management, or office overhead. A consultant bills for SEO work. An agency bills for SEO work plus everything else required to run a 20-person operation.
Can one consultant really do everything an agency does?
For local SEO, yes. Local SEO is a focused discipline: GBP, citations, on-page, schema, reviews, content. It doesn't require a 10-person team to execute -- it requires one person who knows what they're doing and has time to do it.
What happens if my SEO consultant gets hit by a bus?
Fair question. We keep client access, credentials, and documentation in shared systems you own. If something happens, you walk away with full administrative access to your GBP, site, analytics, and every tool we've been using -- not locked into a proprietary agency dashboard.
How do I know a consultant is qualified?
Ask for live examples of work, not case study PDFs. A Fredericton SEO consultant should be able to show you the actual GBP listings they've optimized, the actual pages they've written, and the actual rankings they've moved -- verifiable on Google right now.
If a Consultant Sounds Right
Start with the free 48-hour audit. You'll see how a consultant scopes and scores a business before you commit to anything.