How to hire an SEO consultant: What to look for and what to ask

SEO

Hiring an SEO consultant can be a slightly strange experience.

You’re looking for someone because you need SEO expertise. But that also means you may not have enough SEO expertise yourself to know whether the person sitting opposite you actually knows what they’re talking about.

Helpful!

And SEO doesn’t make things particularly easy.

There are plenty of impressive-looking reports, complicated tools and three-letter acronyms to hide behind. Two consultants can look at exactly the same website and recommend completely different things.

So, how do you find a good SEO consultant?

I’d start by looking for someone who can understand your business, explain what they’re recommending in language you understand and prioritise the work that is most likely to make a meaningful difference.

You shouldn’t need to become an SEO expert before you can hire one.

But there are some useful things you can look for, and some very useful questions you can ask.

First, do you actually need an SEO consultant?

Before deciding who to hire, it’s worth deciding whether consultancy is actually the right type of SEO support.

An SEO consultant generally provides expertise, strategy and guidance. For example, they might:

• Investigate why your organic performance has changed.
• Audit your website.
• Research keywords and search intent.
• Identify opportunities.
• Map keywords to pages.
• Advise on technical SEO.
• Create a content strategy.
• Prioritise SEO activity.
• Review work completed by your team.
• Monitor performance and adjust the strategy.

But consultancy usually works best when there is someone available to implement those recommendations.

Perhaps you already have a marketing manager, a content writer and a freelance web developer working for you. In that situation, you may not need to outsource an entire SEO campaign.

What you need is someone who can help those people decide what to do, why they’re doing it and what to tackle first.

If you want a deeper explanation of the role itself, have a read of our guide to what an SEO consultant does.

When might hiring an SEO consultant make sense?

Sometimes there’s an obvious trigger.

Your organic traffic has fallen off a cliff, and nobody knows why. But it isn’t always that dramatic. You might need outside SEO expertise because:

• Rankings have gradually plateaued.
• You’re creating lots of content but seeing very little return.
• Your main service pages aren’t appearing for commercially important searches.
• Organic traffic is growing, but enquiries aren’t.
• You have several pages competing for similar keywords.
• You’ve accumulated SEO reports but don’t know what to prioritise.
• You’re planning a new website or migration.
• Your marketing team wants an experienced second opinion.
• You’re unsure whether your existing SEO strategy is working.
• You have internal marketing capacity but nobody who specialises in SEO.

Sometimes the biggest clue is simply that your SEO activity feels busy but not particularly focused. Lots of articles are being written, website changes keep being made, but nobody can confidently answer: “What are the three most important SEO things we should be working on right now?”

That’s the sort of problem consultancy can solve.

How do you find a good SEO consultant?

There isn’t one qualification, accreditation or job title that automatically tells you somebody is good at SEO, and I wouldn’t choose purely on who ranks first for “SEO consultant”.

Yes, being visible organically is a useful sign, but it isn’t the whole recruitment process.

Instead, I’d look at a combination of experience, evidence, approach, communication and fit.

1. Make sure they can explain SEO without hiding behind jargon

I am listing this first, as I believe this is essential to determining whether you are getting a good ROI from your SEO spend. SEO is technical in places, and so sometimes complicated language is unavoidable. But an SEO consultant’s job isn’t to demonstrate how much SEO terminology they know; it’s to help you make better decisions.

For example, if the consultant recommends changing your website architecture, you should understand why. If they want your team to create six pieces of content, you should know what role those pages have. After all, both activities will cost time and money, so you want to be assured that you are spending wisely.

Clear communication is such an overlooked and under-appreciated soft skill in the world of SEO. There are cowboys out there who use jargon to beguile a client into spending more than they need to. They’ve given our industry a bad name!

A useful consultant should make SEO feel clearer, not more mysterious. I’ll often use metaphors to help explain SEO concepts when consulting with clients, as it helps them to understand concepts better; it’s a lesson I’ve learned from my experience as a teacher. Whilst you do not need your SEO consultant to have a postgraduate certificate in education just to reassure you that they can explain things clearly, it is a good sign if they are aiming to break things down for you and working hard to help you understand. 

2. Look for someone who wants to understand your business

This is the second most important thing to look for. If your first conversation is entirely about keywords, backlinks and rankings, I’d be a little cautious. SEO doesn’t happen in isolation. A consultant needs to understand things such as:

• What does your company actually sell?
• Which services are most profitable or strategically important?
• Who are your ideal customers?
• How long is your sales cycle?
• What makes a genuinely valuable enquiry?
• Which markets are you trying to grow?
• What expertise exists internally?
• What marketing activity is already happening?

Why?

Because the “best” SEO opportunity on paper isn’t necessarily the best opportunity for your business.

Imagine one keyword gets 2,000 searches every month but mostly attracts people looking for something you don’t really sell. Another gets 40 searches, but those searchers are exactly the organisations you want to work with. (This can be particularly true in B2B).

I’ll take the 40, thanks!

A good consultant needs enough commercial context to make that distinction.

3. Look for evidence that they can diagnose problems

It’s easy to tell someone they need more content or backlinks. 

Those things might even be true. But the harder bit is establishing why the website isn’t currently performing and what is actually limiting it.

A good SEO consultant should be comfortable investigating what may have caused the problem. That could mean looking at:

• Google Search Console.
• Google Analytics.
• Rankings.
• Website architecture.
• Existing content.
• Technical issues.
• Backlink profiles.
• Competitors.
• Conversion performance
• Historical changes to the website.

For example, imagine your organic traffic has fallen by 20%. That could be for a myriad of reasons. Rankings have dropped across the whole website, and one particularly high-traffic blog has lost visibility. It could be that search demand has changed, or a migration has caused technical problems. And that’s just the start!

“Your traffic is down; let’s write four blogs” isn’t much of a diagnosis.

A consultant should be curious enough to work out what is actually happening first (if possible).

4. Ask how they prioritise SEO recommendations

This is one of the questions I’d definitely ask.

Most established websites have far more potential SEO work than there is time or budget to complete.

An audit may reveal that you need to:

• Rewrite 40 page titles.
• Create 25 articles.
• Improve 12 service pages.
• Fix 63 technical warnings.

Great.

But what happens on Monday?

That’s where prioritisation matters. A good SEO consultant shouldn’t just be able to identify work. They should be able to distinguish between:

• Things that are actively holding you back.
• Things likely to make a meaningful improvement.
• Things that would be nice to fix but probably won’t transform your results.

Ask them: “If you found 100 potential SEO improvements, how would you decide what we should tackle first?”

There isn’t one perfect answer, but you should hear some discussion around commercial importance, likely impact, effort, existing momentum, dependencies and resources.

If everything is apparently “urgent”, nothing really is.

5. Check whether they understand search intent

Keyword research isn’t just finding terms with search volume. The consultant also needs to understand what the person making the search is trying to achieve.

Take these searches: “What does an SEO consultant do?” and “SEO consultant Birmingham”.

They sound closely related, but the person searching them is at a very different stage in the customer journey. 

Someone asking what a consultant does is probably researching and is at the very start of their journey, whereas someone looking for an SEO consultant in Birmingham may be actively comparing providers and therefore is much further along their journey. Those searches usually need different pages.

A consultant who understands search intent should be able to decide whether a search belongs on:

• A commercial service page.
• A blog.
• A location page.
• A guide.
• A case study.
• A comparison page.
• Somewhere else entirely.

This becomes especially important on larger websites where several similar pages can accidentally start competing with one another.

Ask: “How do you decide which keyword should target which page?” You want more than: “We put the keywords with the biggest volumes on the strongest pages.” There should be some consideration of intent.

6. Look at how they approach content

“We need more blogs.”

Maybe you do. But more content isn’t automatically better SEO. Sometimes the right recommendation is to create something new; sometimes it is to improve an existing article sitting in position 11. It could be that two overlapping pages need consolidating, or that a service page is too thin.

Sometimes you’ve already got everything you need, but your internal linking is terrible! 

A good consultant should be willing to recommend content changes, rather than “write more content” when that makes more sense.

I’d look for someone who thinks in terms of your website as a whole rather than treating the blog like a publishing treadmill. That may include:

• Commercial-page optimisation
• Keyword mapping
• Content gaps
• Topic clusters
• Supporting articles
• Internal linking
• Updating older content
• Consolidation
• Using genuine subject-matter expertise from people within your business.

7. Ask to see relevant evidence

Case studies and testimonials are useful when assessing whether a consultant is a good fit for your organisation. 

But when you look at SEO evidence, try to understand what actually changed. A screenshot of traffic going upwards doesn’t tell you very much on its own (it is a pet peeve of mine when you see this!).

Instead, a case study should explain:

• What was the original problem?
• What did the consultant recommend?
• What work was actually completed?
• What changed afterwards?
• How long did it take?
• Was the improvement in traffic, rankings, enquiries or revenue?
• What other marketing activity was happening at the time?

You don’t need a consultant to reveal confidential client information, but you do want to see evidence that they can connect problem → strategy → activity → outcome.

I’d also pay attention to whether their examples are remotely relevant to your situation. Someone may be brilliant at ecommerce SEO for websites containing 100,000 products, but that doesn’t automatically make them the right consultant for a specialist B2B service business trying to generate ten highly valuable enquiries a month.

8. Find out who you’ll actually be working with

This one gets overlooked quite a lot. 

The person on the sales call may not be the person who works on your account. Although it’s not as common in the Consultant world, in the SEO agency and digital marketing world, agencies do sometimes outsource work to freelancers when they’re very busy. 

That isn’t inherently a problem, but you should know who will be doing any work that you’ve requested.

If you’re specifically hiring consultancy because you want access to expertise, direct access to the expert matters. There’s not much point paying for an experienced SEO consultant if every question has to go through three layers of account management before reaching them.

9. Ask how they measure SEO success

SEO metrics are useful, but some matter considerably more than others. A consultant may track:

• Rankings
• Impressions
• Clicks
• Organic sessions
• Service-page visibility
• Conversions
• Enquiries
• Backlinks
• Share of search visibility.

The right combination will depend on your objectives.

For example, if you’re a B2B service business, ranking for 300 additional informational keywords isn’t necessarily a great result if your commercial pages still don’t generate enquiries. Ask: “How would you measure whether your recommendations are working for our business?” and make sure that the answer goes beyond “improved rankings”.

10. Understand their approach to reporting

The same measurement should be applied to your reporting. 

What will you actually receive?

A monthly report? A dashboard? Meetings? Written recommendations?

There isn’t one correct format, but the report should help you understand what is happening and decide what happens next.

A report shouldn’t exist just to prove that the consultant has been busy. In fact, I’d prefer a concise report that tells me:

• Here’s what changed.
• Here’s why we think it changed.
• Here’s what we’ve learned.
• Here are the next three priorities.

…over 50 pages of colourful graphs nobody reads!

What should you ask an SEO consultant before hiring them? A quick summary

You don’t need to interrogate them for three hours (it can come across as a bit intense). But I would ask enough questions to understand how they think. Here are some useful ones:

About your business

• What would you need to know about us before making recommendations?
• How would you decide which services or products to prioritise?

About strategy

• How do you identify SEO opportunities?
• How do you prioritise recommendations?
• How do you decide whether we need new content or should improve existing pages?
• How do you map keywords to pages?

About implementation

• How do you work with internal writers and developers?
• Can you support implementation if our team becomes stretched?

About performance

• How would you measure success?
• How often would we review the strategy?
• What happens if the original strategy isn’t producing the results expected?

About experience

• Have you worked with businesses with a similar sales model or website?
• Can you show us an example of a problem you’ve diagnosed and how you approached it?

About the working relationship

• Who will we actually work with?
• How often will we speak?
• How will recommendations be documented?
• How quickly can we ask questions when something unexpected happens?

You don’t necessarily need a particular answer to every question. Instead, you’re trying to understand whether their way of working suits yours.

What are the red flags when hiring an SEO consultant?

Most SEO consultants are perfectly legitimate professionals trying to do good work. But there are still things I’d be wary of.

1. Guaranteed number-one rankings

Nobody controls Google’s rankings.

An experienced consultant can identify opportunities, improve your website and increase your chances of gaining visibility. They cannot guarantee position one, especially before they’ve properly analysed your website or competition.

2. They recommend a solution before understanding the problem

If you’ve been speaking for seven minutes and they’ve already decided you need 20 backlinks a month, I’d ask a few more questions. Recommendations should come from diagnosis (especially if they are practising SEO ethically).

3. Everything revolves around traffic

Traffic matters. But relevant traffic matters more. If you’re selling a £50,000 B2B service, you don’t need a million visitors. You need the right organisations discovering you at the right point in their buying journey.

4. They can’t explain what they’re doing

You don’t need to understand every technical detail. But “trust me, it’s SEO” isn’t good enough. You should have reasonable visibility over the strategy and why particular activities are being recommended.

5. Their strategy is identical for every client

Similar strategies will often work for organisations within the same industry, but every business (and website) is unique. Different organisations have different strengths, weaknesses, markets, competitors and internal resources, and your SEO strategy should reflect that if it’s to help you reach your business goals. 

6. They immediately dismiss everything your internal team is doing

A consultant should bring expertise, but they should also listen.

Your marketing manager probably understands your customers better than an external SEO consultant does on day one. Your sales team knows which questions prospects repeatedly ask, and your technical staff understand your product.

Good SEO consultancy should bring those perspectives together.

How should you brief an SEO consultant?

The better the initial information, the quicker your consultant can get under the skin of the problem. You don’t need to arrive with a beautifully prepared 40-page briefing document, but I would try to explain:

1. Your commercial priorities

Which services, products or markets matter most? Are you trying to increase overall enquiries or enter a new market? Do you want to improve visibility for one service or recover lost organic performance? Make sure you are clear on what you want to achieve. 

2. Your ideal customer

Who are you trying to attract? For B2B businesses in particular, this can make an enormous difference to keyword and content decisions. Saying “just more enquiries” is not enough here. Are there specific industries? Specific-sized organisations? Particular decision makers? 

3. What’s happening now

Share any concerns you’ve noticed. For example:

• Traffic has fallen.
• Leads have dropped.
• One competitor seems to be everywhere.
• Blogs aren’t performing.
• The website recently migrated.
• Your internal team isn’t sure what to work on.

Don’t worry about diagnosing it yourself; that’s the consultant’s job.

4. Your internal resources

Tell them who can actually implement the work internally. This helps shape a realistic strategy.

There’s not much value in producing a plan requiring eight articles a month if nobody has time to write them.

5. Previous SEO activity

If another agency or consultant has worked on the website, explain what has already happened. Old audits, keyword research, content plans and reports can all provide useful context.

What should a good SEO consultancy engagement look like?

This will vary, but I’d expect it to broadly move through several stages.

1. Understand

The consultant gets to know the business, customers, services, objectives and existing marketing resources.

2. Investigate

They review performance and identify the problems and opportunities.

3. Prioritise

Instead of handing over a gigantic SEO wish list, they establish what matters most.

4. Plan

Recommendations become a practical roadmap that may cover:

• Technical SEO.
• Commercial-page optimisation.
• Keyword mapping.
• Content.
• Internal linking.
• Authority building.
• Measurement.

5. Implement

Your internal team carries out the work, potentially with additional support where required.

6. Review

The consultant monitors what happens and looks for new information.

7. Refine

The strategy changes in response to actual performance. 

This final stage is important; SEO strategies shouldn’t be carved into stone tablets.

Should you hire a local SEO consultant?

You might have got to this part of our guide and thought “Fab, I know exactly what to look for now.” That’s great! But before you dive in, it’s important to assess whether it is important that you can physically meet your consultant. 

Most SEO consultancy can be delivered perfectly well remotely. However, location can matter if you value:

• Knowledge of your local market.
• The ability to meet in person.
• Working with another local business.
• Closer relationships.
• Having someone nearby who understands the business community you’re operating within.

The important word there is value. Choose a Birmingham SEO consultant because their experience, approach, and way of working suit your business, not because Google Maps says they’re the closest.

SEO consultant or managed SEO agency?

There’s one final question worth asking before signing anything: “Do you want advice, or do you need somebody to actually do the work?” 

If you have an internal team that can:

• Write.
• Update the website.
• Work with developers.
• Publish content.
• Carry out recommendations.

… but you’re missing specialist SEO direction, consultancy may be a very good fit.

But if nobody internally has the capacity to implement the strategy, a managed SEO campaign may make more sense.

There is also a middle ground.

You might use an SEO consultant to guide the strategy while outsourcing individual pieces of implementation when your team needs some extra capacity.

That’s often much more practical than trying to squeeze every business into a rigid “consultancy” or “agency” box.

How much does an SEO consultant cost?

Costs vary depending on whether you’re buying an hourly consultation, an audit, a roadmap or ongoing monthly support.

The level of experience involved, the complexity of your website and the amount of analysis required will all affect the price too.

We’re covering this properly in our guide to how much an SEO consultant costs in the UK, because price deserves more than a couple of sentences tucked into this article.

The bigger point when comparing quotes is not simply: “Who is cheapest?” It is actually: “What am I buying, and is it going to help us make better SEO decisions?” A cheap consultant who creates a long list of tasks your team doesn’t understand or have time to implement isn’t necessarily good value.

Why hire an SEO consultant rather than trying to work it out yourself?

You absolutely can learn SEO yourself. There are some brilliant free resources available.

The difficulty is normally not access to information; it’s working out which information applies to your particular website and what changes will bring the best results when considering the time and resources you have available. 

If you Google something like “how to improve SEO”, you’ll find advice telling you to:

• Publish more content.
• Improve your Core Web Vitals.
• Build links.
• Fix technical errors.
• Update old blogs.
• Improve E-E-A-T.
• Add schema.
• Optimise titles.
• Improve internal links.
• Create topic clusters.
• Target long-tail keywords.

…and another 400 things.

Most of those suggestions aren’t inherently wrong; you just don’t need all of them at once.

The value of an experienced consultant is often being able to look at your particular situation and say, “Ignore most of that for now. These are the things I’d focus on first.”

That clarity can save an enormous amount of time.

Looking for an SEO consultant in Birmingham?

If you’ve reached this point, you probably have a fairly good idea of what I think makes a useful consultant: someone who listens before prescribing, someone who can explain what they’re seeing, Someone willing to prioritise rather than hand you an enormous to-do list and someone who can work alongside the expertise that already exists within your business.

That’s the approach behind our SEO consultancy in Birmingham service.

It’s designed particularly for businesses that already have people capable of implementing marketing activity but need experienced SEO input to help analyse performance, identify opportunities, create a strategy and decide what should happen next. Our consultancy can also flex with additional implementation support when needed.

Explore our SEO consultancy in Birmingham service and see whether consultancy is the right fit for your team.