Hiring an SEO Expert? 4 Things to Look Out For

Are you looking at your website traffic and wondering why it isn’t growing? Or, worse yet, why it keeps declining? I’ve been there. There’s no worse feeling than watching that line trend downward - especially when the business and revenue attached to it are your responsibility. But what if there was a way to flip a switch and turn that around? There is. All you have to do is hire an SEO expert.

Just kidding. 

It’s rarely as easy as that. But hiring a really good SEO consultant or SEO company can be a game-changer, one that continues to deliver return on investment over time. 

An SEO specialist can help you figure out the barriers that might be preventing your website from reaching its intended audience. Unfortunately, SEO services can also be too limited in scope, too focused on “traffic” and, depending on your team and its abilities, generally unhelpful.

So, how to hire an SEO expert that’ll give you your money’s worth - and more? Here are five red flags to look out for before pulling the trigger.

Your SEO Expert Is Selling an “SEO Audit”

I’ve worked in content marketing and creating online content that drives organic traffic since 2005. I was (and am) very good at building pages that rank using good content strategy, on-page SEO, and some bootstrapped linkbuilding and PR campaigns.

But until a few years ago, I hadn't gone down the rabbit hole of technical SEO, like the configurations that help a site or piece of content perform well in search, and the basic auditing and technical maintenance that should happen on a site to keep its SEO engine primed and performing at its best.

What helped me level up in this area was hiring less-than-stellar SEO consultants who sold me a service called an “SEO audit.”

What is an SEO audit? In itself, it’s a core part of any SEO expert’s services. It involves using various SEO tools to assess a website and pinpoint some of the issues that could be limiting - or even suppressing - its search performance. This audit is usually delivered in the form of a report listing all the key issues and prioritization in terms of how critical each issue is.

For most SEO professionals, an audit is the starting point of any professional relationship; before an SEO can offer guidance, they need to have an understanding of what might be going wrong or what could be improved. But SEO audits can also be a reductive way of looking at SEO. In a worst-case scenario, they can even be an expensive make-work project for whoever buys them. 

In my case, the company I was working for paid $6,000-$8,000 for audits that delivered a long spreadsheet of “problems,” a brief cut-and-paste explanation of what those problems meant, and a prioritization schedule of how critical the issues were. 

On paper, a list like that probably sounds pretty helpful. In reality, if a company is looking for help with technical SEO in the first place it probably isn’t. Understanding that there are, for example, 5,000 pages of duplicate content and understanding why that’s a problem is a long, loooong way from understanding why those pages exist in the first or how to fix them. And while fixing them may be a job for a developer, that doesn’t mean your developer truly understands the problem - or the most beneficial way to fix it - either. In other words, a lot of SEO audits provide a long list of problems, and very little in the way of real solutions.

Oh, and by the way, most SEO tools like SEMRush, Moz and Ahrefs can spit out a list of technical SEO issues as well as basic prioritization of problems like this. If all you want is a spreadsheet, get yourself a subscription (for $100 to $150 per month!) and go to town.

They’re Not Reading - Like, Really Reading - Your Content

Content isn’t everything to search engines, but it counts for a lot, and there aren’t many pages that don’t have any content on them. Plus, the quality of that content matters more than ever. In 2022, Google confirmed that E-A-T, short for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (now E-E-A-T with an extra “E” for Expertise) is assessed for every single search query. What that means is that Google’s algorithm is aiming for the highest quality content - the kind that takes skill, effort and expertise to produce. And, if you want your site to be a true “authority” in any topic area, you have to do this well every time over a long period of time.

What I’m getting at is that E-E-A-T is relatively complex. Assessing whether a site has it (and where it’s lacking) takes careful assessment, experience and judgment. In fact, Google asks site owners to ask themselves dozens of questions about their content to help them assess whether their content meets the mark. Those questions include digging into the expertise behind the content, its quality, its audience and whether it meets search intent. In most cases, sorting this out will also entail doing a similar deep dive into your competitors' content to understand who's outperforming you and why.

Beyond that, a good SEO should be assessing your pages for whether they address the search intent for the keyword they are targeting (and they are targeting something, right?), whether the meta data is as optimized as it could be and other details that, when taken together, can make a huge difference to your search visibility.

I’ve had SEOs tell me the “content seems comprehensive.” What does that tell me? They haven’t even read it. If you have content pages on your site and your SEO expert can’t answer ALL of these questions about them, move on. 

They Haven’t Asked About or Assessed Your Competitors

When I first started working in content marketing, you could put together a great page, get it ranked on page one and it would just … stay there. Your position would continue to generate organic backlinks, traffic would continue to flow to the page and, over time, it became very hard for other sites to knock you out of that position. 

That has changed. Now, any competitive and profitable keyword is a horse race, one where top contenders trade places - and run the risk of being knocked out of contention - on a regular basis. 

“Good” SEO doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your strategy and content could be aces, but that doesn’t mean your competitor hasn’t come up with something better. 

Has the SEO expert you’re planning to work with asked about your competitors? Have they had a look at your top-converting content and topic areas and who else is vying for those keywords? Do they have a sense of who is getting a piece of a pie that could potentially be yours (and why Google has chosen not to award that piece to you?) If not, I’d keep looking. 

If you’re holding on to a valuable position in search, you’d better believe that other marketers are sniffing around and trying to figure out how to knock you off that pedestal. Hire an SEO expert who has their eye on the ball when it comes to your competitors - and can offer up creative ideas on how you can beat them - or continue to hold them off.

They’re Not Interested in Your Long-Term Strategy

Some of the services SEO experts sell assume that an SEO campaign is a one-and-done thing. Just deploy some fixes, and then kick back and watch that traffic growth chart trend upward.

I wish. In reality, SEO, and especially SEO that involves content, is a long game. It takes time to rank new content. It takes time to build topical authority. It takes time to build an audience that will trust you and turn to you as a resource. Then there’s testing, iterating and improving all of this to help ensure your site is meeting its traffic and conversion goals.

Not everyone likes to hear this, and this is probably why SEO consultants and SEO companies sell packages that just scratch the surface - people want to believe that’s all there is to it. In reality, getting results from SEO takes time and consistency. And that requires a strategy.

The best SEO experts do more than fix SEO bugs every month. They should be helping their clients think strategically, own results and be looking to continually push anyone they work with toward success. In other words, I urge you to hire an SEO consultant or company that behaves as a partner in your company’s growth and success. 

And if your SEO strategy isn’t contributing to your company's growth and success … what’s it even for?

Looking to hire an SEO expert?

If you're looking for someone to help boost your site's organic performance, do your due diligence. There are lots of excellent SEO agencies and consultants out there. You deserve one.