SEO consulting vs. an SEO agency: deliverables and who does the work

What you receive under an SEO consulting contract is three files: an audit report, a keyword roadmap, and a technical spec. Implementing those files on the site falls to the client company's developers and content staff; under an agency contract, the vendor handles implementation as well.

If the final report contains only recommendations, developers have to go back to the vendor and ask which item to change to which value on each page. Sometimes the contract doesn't say who will do the fixes after the report is delivered.

1. Deliverables compared: SEO consulting vs. an SEO agency

An SEO consulting contract delivers three documents, while an SEO agency contract also delivers edited pages and published posts. If the scope of work in a proposal from an SEO optimization vendor includes editing pages and publishing posts, it is an agency contract; if not, it is a consulting contract. PION runs GEO consulting and managed GEO as separate services.

2. Who receives the three consulting deliverables and what they do next

The CEO or marketing lead who decides the budget takes the audit report and picks the items to fix this quarter, the content staff copy the keyword roadmap into the publishing calendar, and developers log the technical spec as work tickets.

The audit report lists the current value and pass/fail status for items such as bot access, index-blocking tags, canonical URLs, internal links, and page experience. The verification method and pass criteria columns for each item are in Essential technical SEO checks: a checklist to hand to your developers.

The keyword roadmap is a table that assigns one target URL to each search query, and each row should state whether it is an edit or a new page, along with the planned month. How to choose the target page that fits a query is covered in Higher website rankings: A table for choosing the right page.

The technical spec is a table with one row per URL listing the current value, the new value, and the source document. Developers mark a row as implemented once it has been deployed.

3. When to choose consulting and when to choose an agency

If you have an in-house developer who can edit the site code and someone who can publish posts every month, and both can work through the spec and the roadmap on time, get consulting only and implement it yourselves. If either one can't keep up, hand implementation and publishing to an agency as well.

At a company that chooses consulting, the developer implements the spec within the next deployment cycle, and the content staff member keeps to the roadmap's monthly publishing count. One of the two is given Full permission or higher in Search Console to check the results. The conditions under which an early-stage startup that has drafts written but has not published them for more than a month should consider outsourcing publishing are covered in What kind of GEO consulting suits an early-stage startup?

In its GEO consulting, which runs four weeks by default, PION delivers a "site structure and SEO baseline diagnosis report," a GEO diagnosis report, and an improvement priority roadmap with an execution guide. When the client's in-house marketing team or existing agency handles execution, PION provides consulting only and writes a more detailed execution guide. The contract PION signs with clients who want to hand over content writing and publishing as well is managed GEO.

4. How to verify that the spec has been implemented

Enter one URL from the spec into URL Inspection in Search Console and run Test Live URL to see whether the changed value is in the HTML of the page fetched in real time.

1. The person in charge picks one URL marked as implemented in the spec and enters it in the search bar at the top of Search Console.
2. Run Test Live URL, then compare the title, meta description, and canonical URL values in the HTML under View Tested Page with the new values in the spec. For rows where an index-blocking tag was removed or added, compare against the value in the test results that shows whether indexing is allowed, instead of the HTML.
3. If the value matches the new value, record the implementation date in that row of the spec; if not, send the row back to the developer. If only a few URLs were changed, click Request Indexing and record the request date as well. If there are many, ask the developer to submit a sitemap with lastmod set on the updated pages.
4. Two weeks after the request date, inspect the same URL again and look for the changed value in the Google Index result. According to the URL Inspection tool help, "Indexing can take up to 1-2 weeks, and you can check its progress with this tool." If the value isn't there and the last crawl time is earlier than the implementation date, the page has not been recrawled yet.
5. A few weeks after the implementation date, the person in charge checks the clicks and impressions for that URL in the Performance report. In its Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide (updated December 18, 2025), Google recommends: "In general, it's a good idea to wait a few weeks to assess whether your changes have had a beneficial effect in Google Search results."

If the problem noted in the spec is a type that the Page indexing report shows as a reason a page isn't indexed, such as a redirect error, the developer fixes every URL affected by that reason, and then the person in charge clicks 'Validate Fix' on the details page.

For page experience items, after the developer fixes every URL grouped under the same issue, the person in charge clicks 'Start tracking' on the issue details page of the Core Web Vitals report and checks the validation result 28 days later. The report's help states: "If this issue does not appear on any URL on your site over a 28-day period, the issue is considered fixed."

5. Deliverable formats and acceptance criteria to write into a consulting contract

A consulting contract should specify the file format and the acceptance criteria for each deliverable. Check the delivered files against that format and those criteria, and accept them if they match.

If the proposal leaves out the file formats or acceptance criteria for the three deliverables, ask the vendor before signing to add them using the values in the table below.

Before accepting, check that the page experience items in the audit report list the 75th percentile values and pass/fail status separately for mobile and desktop. As stated in Web Vitals (updated October 31, 2024), a pass should be marked only on items where all three Core Web Vitals metrics meet the recommended targets at the 75th percentile.

PION's managed GEO runs in four stages: GEO assessment, content creation and publishing on your own site, external content and PR, and live monitoring and improvement. You can see what each stage involves in the GEO agency service overview. Companies that also want to check their readiness for AI answers can answer the 8 questions in the AI answer visibility basics check to get their weak areas and the items to fix first.