Questions to ask before hiring an SEO consultant

An SEO consultant tells you what to do and checks that it got done. Your own team, or a developer or writer you already pay, does the work. That is different from hiring an agency to carry out the fixes, and the questions to ask are different too. This guide lists the ones that tell you the most before you sign anything.

For how we run consulting, see SEO consulting services.

Question 1: who does the work?

Ask this first. In a consulting arrangement the advice comes from the consultant and the execution stays with you. If nobody at your business can make site changes or write pages, advice alone will sit unused, and a service where the provider does the work is the better fit. A good consultant will tell you which one you need rather than sell you the wrong one.

Question 2: what do I get in writing?

Look for deliverables you keep: a written audit of the site, a short plan in priority order and notes from each call. Ask whether the audit is yours whatever you decide next. Ask what happens to the documents if you stop.

Question 3: how are priorities set?

An audit can list hundreds of items. What helps is a short list for this quarter, with the reason for the order and a note on what was skipped and why. If the answer is a long spreadsheet with no ranking, you are paying for a crawl report.

Question 4: whose accounts does the data live in?

Search Console, Analytics and the Google Business Profile should stay in your name, with the consultant added as a user. Ask directly. If the consultant wants to run them under their own login, you lose the history when the work ends.

Question 5: how will we read results?

Ask what the consultant will look at and how often. A monthly read of your own Search Console data, covering queries, pages, clicks and what changed, is a reasonable baseline. Be careful with anyone who promises a ranking or a date. Search results are decided by the search engines, and no outside party controls them.

Question 6: what does the contract say?

Check the term, the notice period, who owns the deliverables and what is in scope. Month to month with a short notice period keeps you free to leave. If you want a starting point, we wrote a guide to the parts of an SEO contract and a generator that builds a draft in your browser.

Question 7: how much of my time does it take?

Consulting needs somebody on your side to make the changes between calls. Ask how many hours a month the consultant expects from your team. If the honest answer is more than you can spare, say so early.

Question 8: will they work with my developer or agency?

Many businesses already have a developer or an agency. A consultant should be able to write tickets your developer can act on, review the work when it ships and say plainly where something is hurting you.

Red flags

• A promise of a set ranking, traffic figure or timeline.
• No written deliverables.
• Refusal to give you access to your own accounts.
• A long lock-in term for advice-only work.
• Vague answers about who does the work.

Where to go from here

Our SEO consulting services page describes how we run it: an audit you keep, a plan in order of payback and a standing call. You can also run the SEO audit checklist yourself first, and whatever you cannot answer is what a first call is for. Passieon is an independent agency, and what suits you depends on your site, your team and your goals.