SEO agency vs SEO consultant: Which is best for you?
Should you hire an SEO agency or an SEO consultant? Obvious and boring answer first—it depends. But on what? And what are the trade-offs of each option?
Josh Gallant November 27, 2025
Josh is the founder of Backstage SEO, an organic growth consulting firm that helps B2B marketing teams capture demand from search.
He’s a self-proclaimed spreadsheet nerd by day, volunteer soccer coach by night (and weekends), and wannabe fantasy football expert every fall. Most days you’ll catch him hanging out with his his fiance Morgan, his dog Bean, his cat—Cat.
Go Raiders.
Josh graduated from Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia, Canada, with a degree in Public Relations and Marketing.
Before starting the business, he spent 7 years at Foundation Marketing—a leading B2B SaaS content marketing agency—where he started as a young, no-clue-what-to-do digital strategist and worked his way up to become the Director of Strategy.
Here’s just a few wins he’s helped put on the board over the year:
→ Led an SEO team & built the systems used to generate over 1,000 high-quality backlinks in under two years.
→ Earned a 160% increase in non-branded organic visits in nine months for a legal SaaS client.
→ Achieved 1,000,000 organic search impressions in one year for MarTech SaaS client.
→ Closed and delivered on over $1M in SaaS retainer work across content marketing, organic growth & SEO.
Their most recent articles.
Should you hire an SEO agency or an SEO consultant? Obvious and boring answer first—it depends. But on what? And what are the trade-offs of each option?
Allow me to expose the ugly “282” agency cycle. That’s right, I’m gonna say the quiet part out loud. Grab your popcorn.
What if every prospect in your space came directly to YOU for advice on which product to use? It’s not as difficult as it sounds.
Most B2B companies chase traffic while their conversion infrastructure sits broken.
The longer someone is around on your website, the more time you have to sell them on your unique POVs.
To put it simply, you don’t have unlimited resources. If you did—sure, go chase every shiny object. Since you don’t, just do this instead.
Pipeline-focused search marketing for B2B SaaS. We help companies get found in ChatGPT and Google, then turn that visibility into qualified leads.