What To Ask SEO Consultants: 10 Questions
Are you looking to hire an SEO consultant for your company but not sure where to start? Choosing the right SEO professional to partner with can be a daunting task, especially if you don’t fully understand the ins and outs of search engine optimization (which you probably don’t if you’re reading this article). Never fear, in this blog we’re going to give you our top 10 questions to ask an SEO consultant when hiring them, and explain what kind of answers you should be listening for.
What SEO services do you provide?
There’s no one way to answer this question, but we can help explain some of the typical responses you can expect to hear and what they mean.
SEO Strategy
This isn’t much of a service on its own, but an SEO strategy works as the supporting game plan for the rest of the services to be provided. Think of it as an outline or map on what needs to be done to achieve the desired results.
Keyword Research
This is a foundational SEO service that every professional should be performing. Without keyword research, there is no way to know what kind of results can be expected from an SEO campaign. Typically, you will provide your SEO provider with a few examples of search terms you think your target demographic would use to find you. From here they will use industry leading tools like Semrush to identify the exact phrases that are most commonly used in Google.
On-Page SEO
When an SEO consultant says this, what they are referring to is changes made to your actual website. This will most commonly be changing or adding text to the pages of your website that include your target keywords. Although you can see success without on-page SEO, it is probably one of the most critical aspects to an SEO campaign and you should consider it a red flag if your SEO provider is not making changes to the content of your website.
Off-Page SEO
When you hear this it most commonly refers to link building- acquiring links from other websites that direct to your own website (often referred to as “backlinks”). This is a common method of increasing the rank of your site as it shows Google your site is authoritative and work talking about. There are also other nuanced methods of off-page SEO, but we won’t get into all those for now. Depending on how competitive your industry is, off-page SEO may not even be needed to see results.
What will you do first when we hire you?
Any good SEO consultant should start every new client engagement with an SEO audit, followed by putting together an SEO strategy. In an SEO audit (which is mostly an automated process through software) your provider should identify all the technical, on-page SEO problems with your website. Next, they should put together some level of a strategy to get the project started. It’s important to understand SEO strategies may change month to month, so you don’t necessarily need to expect anything that elaborate here.
Do you have experience providing SEO for our industry?
We’ll be honest- industry experience isn’t always a requirement for finding a good SEO consultant. But it can definitely help. We’d recommend finding someone that can provide success stories from past projects and see if any of those resonate with you or seem somewhat similar to your own business.
Do you have any case studies you can share?
Following the above question, you’ll definitely want to see some case studies displaying your SEO provider’s work and how they solved a problem for other clients. You don’t necessarily need to see a ton here. Think quality over quantity.
How long does your SEO work last?
SEO is a long term game, but that doesn’t mean you can’t see results in a month or two. Let’s put it this way- if your SEO consultant isn’t measuring their campaign in “months” you need to run. Typical SEO campaigns last 6-12 months at a minimum. This doesn’t mean you can’t have success with a campaign shorter than that, but understand that’s what the typical timelines are like.
What will you do to improve our search engine rankings?
This question is similar to asking what services are provided, but we’re looking for something a little more specific here. Your SEO consultant should be able to give you some ideas or suggestions unique to you, explaining exactly how they’ll apply their services to get results for your business.
Can you guarantee we will rank #1 on Google?
As much as we love guarantees, they just aren’t real with SEO. Well, at least in terms of getting the #1 (or any other specific number) spot. SEO experts do not have direct control over Google and anyone that guarantees they’ll get you to the #1 spot is making a promise they won’t always be able to back up. A better response to this question is something like “I can guarantee you will see a quantifiable increase in traffic by this date.”
How will you track performance and report to us?
This question will vary depending on what tools your SEO consultant is using, but you just want to make sure they have a way to track your organic search performance and prove they’re getting you results. Google Search Console is a common tool for this.
Will you be making changes to our website?
In the vast majority of cases, you will not see real success in SEO without making changes to your website. If you SEO consultant is promising they won’t need to change anything on your website this is a red flag.
How do you price your SEO services?
You may be seeing a theme here, but this question will vary depending on who you talk to. That said, there are some industry standard ways of billing you can expect to see.
Some SEO consultants charge a flat fee by the project, others have an ala carte pricing structure.
You may also get hit with a big start up fee at the beginning of the project and a smaller retainer fee recurring each month after that. Either way, understand that there’s a lot of extra work that goes into the start of an SEO project. If you aren’t paying a larger start up fee, your first month results may be a little more delayed as a lot of the efforts will be allocated to that initial setup.
