There's no official certification or minimum experience threshold to call yourself an SEO consultant, which is why the industry has credibility issues. You can print business cards tomorrow. The real question is how much experience you need to deliver actual value and justify charging for strategic advice. Most legitimate consultants have 2–3 years minimum of implementation work before they switch to pure advisory. That timeframe lets you see full SEO cycles: you've watched rankings build over 6–9 months, survived at least one major algorithm update, diagnosed why a campaign failed, and worked across enough sites to recognize patterns. You need to have personally built links, fixed technical issues, written content briefs, and analyzed why traffic didn't convert. Consulting means recommending what others should do, so you'd better have done it yourself first. The experience gap shows up in specifics. A consultant with six months of experience might recommend "create quality content," while someone with three years knows the difference between informational content that ranks fast but doesn't convert versus commercial content that takes longer but drives revenue. They can estimate that fixing crawl budget issues on a 50,000-page site takes different resources than on a 500-page local business site. At Ottawa SEO, we've run campaigns since 2014 and manage 500+ domains, which means our consultants have seen hundreds of scenarios: e-commerce sites that tanked after platform migrations, local businesses that ranked with minimal links, content sites that got hit by updates. That pattern recognition is what clients pay for. When someone asks if they should noindex thin category pages, the answer depends on site architecture, internal linking, and competitive landscape, not a one-size-fits-all rule you read in a blog post. If you're considering consulting with under two years of experience, partner with or work under someone senior first. Your early-career enthusiasm is valuable, but strategic advice requires having survived your own mistakes on someone else's dime before you charge clients for recommendations.