SEO Consulting | What You Need to Know in 2026!

Article

SEO

SEO Support | Complete Guide to Organic Search Optimization

I. What is SEO Consulting?

‍

SEO consulting involves providing consulting services to help your site appear first on Google for strategic search queries for your business, without having to pay for Google Ads or other advertisements. This activity is known as organic SEO.

‍

This SEO is called "organic" because your site ranks first for a query by best answering the user's search, and not because you paid for an advertisement on Google.

SEO is the acronym for "Search Engine Optimization."

‍

In French, it translates to "optimisation pour les moteurs de recherche." Thus, an SEO agency will help you optimize your site so that it is competitive and ranks first on search engine results pages, focusing, of course, on the most well-known: Google.

‍

II. Why Work With an SEO Agency?

‍

SEO consulting has two main objectives.

‍

The primary and most fundamental goal of SEO support is to bring you new clients.

‍

By ranking first for qualified search queries, your site will no longer be just a business card but will become a powerful marketing tool that will introduce your services to internet users who didn't know you and who could become your clients.

‍

Practical example: You are a Parisian notary firm. If you rank first for the query "best notary Paris," you are sure to receive a large number of calls from people interested in your services.

‍

The second goal of SEO support is to strengthen your brand image. Indeed, if your site ranks first for key topics in your sector, it's a mark of quality. This will enhance your brand's credibility within your industry.

‍

Furthermore, this will have many other beneficial effects, such as improving your employer brand, making you more attractive and helping you recruit new talent.

‍

Practical example: You are an investment fund. If you appear first for the search query "responsible investment", your brand will be associated with the concept of responsibility, which will allow you to become a reference in this theme that has become fundamental in finance.

‍

Your attractiveness to young people, who are concerned about their impact, will be greatly enhanced when they land on your site and read articles on these topics.

‍

Partnering with a quality SEO agency provides certain guarantees: a business understanding to target keywords that bring you new clients (avoiding informational keywords), the provision of writers, designers, and developers coordinated by a project manager, and the certainty of comprehensive support delivered on time according to a predefined roadmap.

‍

Conversely, hiring a freelance SEO consultant carries higher risks, but can result in a lower-cost service.

III. How does SEO support work?

‍

1. An initial month of scoping to audit your site and define the keyword strategy

The SEO agency assisting you will conduct, during the first month, a thorough audit of your site to identify key areas for improvement. The goal is to conduct an assessment to provide you with KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you can compare at the end of the engagement.

The agency will also work with you to define the most effective keyword strategy to implement.

‍

To do this, it will need to understand the topics you want to highlight and determine your primary need. Acquire new clients? Strengthen your brand image? Drive maximum traffic to your website?

‍

Once your need is identified, the agency will research and identify the strategic keywords for which your site should rank first on Google to achieve your objectives. To do this, it will need to conduct a competitive analysis of a list of target keywords. This will enable it to recommend the keywords to prioritize.

‍

It's important to determine which are the keywords offering the best balance between search volume and competition intensity. To do this, several questions must be asked. What traffic does the keyword generate? How qualified is the traffic it generates for you? How difficult is it to rank for the keyword? Who are the competitors for this keyword?

‍

Once this analysis is complete, the agency will propose an action plan and a roadmap outlining the actions to be taken in the coming months. The SEO action plan can begin.

2. Optimizing all aspects of your site.

A quality SEO agency will work on all aspects of your site. Here we present the four areas into which the topics to be addressed can be divided.

‍

A. Technical Aspect

The technical aspect of your site refers to everything related to its IT development.

‍

The agency assisting you will work on optimizing the technical aspect of your site by correcting all SEO errors and poor practices. For example, it will improve page loading times and optimize the mobile version. Google heavily penalizes sites that do not meet standards in these two areas.

‍

It will also ensure that your site is intelligible to search engines like Google. The goal is to make it perfectly readable for them so they can understand your content and highlight it when relevant.

‍

B. Semantic Aspect

The semantic part of your site refers to everything related to its content.

‍

A reputable SEO agency will offer to create SEO-optimized content for you. The goal is for your site to provide value to users by creating content that perfectly answers their queries. If Google realizes you are fulfilling this mission well, it will rank you in the first position.

‍

Practical example: You are a company that sells CRMs. As a reminder, a CRM is software that helps manage customer relationships. You have written an article that perfectly explains what a CRM is, its advantages, and its disadvantages.

‍

Aside from the real difficulty in ranking for the keyword in question, you would have every chance of ranking in the top positions for the Google query "What is a CRM?".

‍

After satisfying the user's request, you can then offer a "call to action" to convert them into a customer. A call to action is a visible button that links to a product page on your site or a contact page.

‍

Note that many agencies do not offer SEO-optimized content creation and remain in a purely advisory role. Content writing is the most complex part of SEO. The agency must perfectly master your industry and its jargon and write high-quality content, which is very time-consuming.

‍

Working with these agencies can be risky. Indeed, if your organization lacks anyone willing to learn SEO best practices and capable of producing at least 3 optimized content pieces per month, your site's performance will not improve, or will do so only marginally. You will have invested your money for no results.

‍

C. Authority Section

Your site's authority refers to the credibility Google assigns to it. Your authority score is determined by the amount of organic traffic to your site and the number of quality websites that reference you. This happens when they cite your content or provide a link back to an article on your site. This type of link is called a backlink.

‍

As a reminder, organic traffic refers to users who arrive at your site via a search engine.

‍

An SEO agency will advise you on which backlinks to pursue and will work to forge strategic partnerships with other players in your sector so they reference you. A link established with a reputable player in your sector can have a very strong impact on your SEO.

‍

Furthermore, if you express the need, the agency can manage your public relations so that the media highlights you and links back to your site.

‍

D. User Experience (UX) Section

Your site's UX refers to the overall quality of the experience a user has when browsing your site.

‍

A quality SEO agency will help you improve your site's UX. Few agencies offer this service. This is because the SEO agency must have a specialized UX designer who perfectly masters SEO principles. However, the combination of these two skills is difficult to find.

‍

Yet, the quality of your site's UX is crucial. It is absolutely essential that navigating your site is easy and pleasant. If you write excellent articles that are unpleasant to read, no one will spend time on them, and your site's ranking for the associated query will drop.

‍

Moreover, if your site isn't intuitive and easy to use, it's highly likely that users will never reach your contact page or product pages after reading one of your articles. They will leave your site at the first opportunity after finding the information they came for.

‍

Thus, good UX helps with retention and improves the conversion rate on your site.

‍

IV. How long does SEO support last?

For SEO support to have an impact, it's necessary to work on all the aforementioned aspects over time.

‍

It is unrealistic to expect results in just a few weeks starting from scratch. Indeed, it takes a long time for Google to recognize that your site produces quality content that deserves to be highlighted. It generally takes several months for an SEO strategy to start bearing fruit.

‍

Therefore, support lasting less than 7 months would, in the vast majority of cases, be ineffective and yield no results. The first month is for scoping, and the following six are for implementing the various actions.

‍

It is recommended to establish an SEO strategy for a minimum of 13 months.

If you need quick results and an almost immediate return on investment (ROI), investing in Google Ads would be more suitable for you.

Be aware, however, Google has recently significantly increased its prices.

‍

In some sectors, profitability has become challenging. In the legal sector, for instance, the average cost per click (CPC) has exceeded €6.

‍

SEO thus allows for a much stronger and more sustainable return on investment. It will prevent you from having to pay substantial sums to Google every month, in addition to potential agency fees. However, it will require significant long-term effort from you.

‍

V. What is the cost of SEO support?

‍

The cost of SEO support varies and depends on the number of monthly actions you want your agency to perform. The price will depend on your SEO agency's average daily rate (ADR).

‍

The cost of a reputable SEO agency offering comprehensive SEO support with quality SEO-optimized content creation—meaning not written by artificial intelligence like ChatGPT—will be at least €1,000 ex-VAT per month. Market leaders' prices for full support with content creation start at around €1,800 ex-VAT per month.

‍

This price can be significantly reduced if you decide to create your own content, with the risks mentioned earlier. In this case, the agency's role will be to supervise, correct, and optimize your content in terms of SEO.

‍

You can get support if you have a monthly budget of €500 ex. VAT. However, it should be noted that most reputable SEO agencies offer packages starting at €800 ex. VAT per month.

SEO requires a certain budget because an effective SEO strategy is very time-consuming to implement.

‍

In return for the effort it requires, SEO is by far the digital acquisition channel with the strongest return on investment today. [SEG SEGMENT 8]