Calgary, AB

Agency, freelancer, or the developer you already pay?

These are four different products sold under one word, and the right answer depends mostly on how much of your own time you are willing to spend managing it.

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What does a local SEO agency do that a marketing agency doesn't?

It works on the two surfaces that decide local search: your Google Business Profile and the pages of your own website. A general marketing agency usually works on neither.

Marketing agencies in Calgary sell brand, advertising, social and design, and they are frequently good at all of it. Local search is a narrower and less glamorous job: category fields, title tags, duplicate pages, service-area settings, and a page written every month for a question somebody typed.

The overlap is smaller than the shared vocabulary suggests, which is why 'we already have a marketing agency' and 'our local search is handled' are two separate statements. Ask yours when they last opened your Business Profile. The answer is informative either way.

Agency or freelancer?

A freelancer usually gives you the person doing the work and less resilience. An agency gives you continuity and a layer between you and whoever is typing.

Before choosing either, agree on who applies the changes. Our local SEO services in Calgary describe the work and approval process.

With a freelancer you talk to the practitioner, decisions happen in one message, and the price reflects the absent overhead. The risk is concentration: one illness, one better-paying client, and your work stops with no handover.

With an agency the work survives a person leaving, and there is capacity when something breaks on a Friday. The trade is that the person who answers your email is often not the person doing the work, and detail is lost at every handoff. Neither shape is better. They fail differently.

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Can your web developer do this?

They can do the technical half well and the rest usually goes undone, because it is writing and settings work rather than code.

Developers fix crawl access, redirects, page speed and broken markup faster than most agencies, and if your site has those problems your developer is the correct first call. That work is real and it is often the whole of the first month.

What tends not to happen is the Business Profile audit, the monthly page written for a search you do not rank for, and the position check that catches a drop while its cause is still traceable. Developers are not avoiding those. They were hired to build something, and this is a different job that never ends.

What size agency should a local business use?

Small enough that your account matters to them. A local business is a rounding error at a large agency and gets serviced accordingly.

The reliable test is not headcount, it is whether the person who looked at your site is reachable. Ask who wrote the audit and whether you can speak to them. At the wrong scale for your budget, that question gets deflected politely and repeatedly.

Size does buy things worth having: coverage when someone is away, more eyes on a strange problem, and processes that stop work being forgotten. The question is whether you are paying for those or merely for the building.

What should you never sign?

A long term with no exit, ownership of your accounts or website resting anywhere but with you, and any guarantee about Google rankings.

Every one of these is standard somewhere in this industry and every one of them exists to protect the provider from being judged on results.

A twelve-month term
SEO takes months to show, which is the argument used to justify the term. It is also the reason a provider should have to keep earning it monthly.
Accounts in their name
Your website, your Business Profile, your Search Console and your analytics should all be owned by you, with access granted to whoever is working. Access can be revoked. Ownership has to be surrendered.
A ranking guarantee
Nobody controls Google's results. Read which phrases the guarantee covers and you will usually find terms nobody searches for.
Content you cannot see first
Anything published under your business name should be read by you before it goes live, especially in a regulated trade where the wording carries consequences.

Common questions

Does the agency need to be in Calgary?
For the technical work, no. For local search it helps, because knowing which neighbourhood names people actually search and how Alberta regulators expect a health page to read is the difference between a category that sounds right and one that gets typed.
Can I bring this in-house?
Yes, and it works when somebody owns it as a named part of their job. It fails when it is added to a marketing coordinator's list underneath things with deadlines, because nothing here has a deadline until the enquiries stop.
How do I check an agency's own results?
Search for the things they say they do and see whether they appear. Then ask for a client whose site you can look at directly, and check whether the work they describe is visible on the page. Case studies without a URL are worth very little.
What if I already signed something bad?
Read the notice clause first, then make sure ownership of your website, Business Profile and Search Console sits with you before the relationship ends. Recovering an account afterwards is slow, and it is the part people forget until they need it.

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