Expect BestDeciding to hire an SEO expert is easy. Working out which one to trust is the hard part, and it is where most of the money gets wasted. The industry has no licensing, no required qualification and no barrier to calling yourself a specialist, which means the confident sales pitch and the competent practitioner look identical from the outside.
Here is how to tell them apart before you sign anything.
Ask what they would do first, and why
The single most useful question in the meeting: what is the first thing you would change, and what makes you think that is the priority?
A good answer will be specific to your site and will come with a reason. Perhaps your service pages compete with each other for the same phrase. Perhaps the pages that earn links are not the pages that sell. Perhaps you rank well already and the real problem is that the enquiry form is buried.
A poor answer is generic. Content, backlinks and technical audit, delivered in that order, with nothing in it that could only have been said about your business. If they have not looked at your site properly before the meeting, they are not going to look at it properly afterwards either.
Listen for what they refuse to promise
This is the clearest signal you will get. Anyone willing to guarantee a position on Google is either misunderstanding how it works or counting on you to. Nobody controls the ranking. What a specialist controls is the work that makes ranking more likely, and an honest one will say exactly that, usually without being asked.
Treat these as the conversation ending:
- A guaranteed number one, or a guaranteed position at all
- Results promised in weeks rather than months
- A refusal to name the sites a link would come from
- Reporting that leads with impressions or keyword counts rather than enquiries
That last one is subtler than the others and costs businesses more. Traffic that never contacts you is not a result, and a report designed around vanity numbers is usually hiding the absence of the ones that matter.
Ask to see the work, not the logos
Client logos prove somebody paid an invoice once. Ask instead for a specific example: a site they worked on, what state it was in, what they changed, and what happened over the following six months. The answer should include something that did not work, because everything working is not a track record, it is a sales deck.
If confidentiality prevents naming clients, that is fair. They can still describe the problem and the fix without the name attached.
Find out who actually does it
Plenty of firms sell the work of a senior specialist and deliver the work of whoever is free. Ask who will be doing the work, whether they are in house, and whether you can speak to them. It is a reasonable question and the reaction to it tells you a good deal.
Agree what reporting looks like before you start
Decide up front what you will both look at each month, and make sure at least one of the measures is a business one: enquiries, calls, quote requests. Rankings and traffic are useful context and terrible targets. Agreeing this early also protects the specialist, because it stops the goalposts moving when a competitor does something unexpected.
What it really costs to hire an SEO expert
Cheap SEO is usually expensive. At the low end the economics only work if the same template is applied to every client, which is precisely why it does not work for any of them. That does not mean expensive is safe either. What you are buying is time and judgement, so ask how many hours a month you are paying for and what gets done in them. If the answer is vague, the hours are probably vague too.
Before you hire an SEO expert, the most valuable thing you can do is get two or three of them to look at the same site and tell you what is wrong with it. The overlap is your real priority list. The differences tell you who has actually looked.
If you would rather talk it through with someone local, our SEO service explains how we work, and there is no obligation in a conversation.