How to choose an SEO consultant

Written for someone collecting two or three quotes with no way of telling which is any good. It includes the cases where an agency suits you better than I do.

What you're actually buying

You are not buying positions. You are buying someone's judgement about what to fix first and what to leave until next quarter, given your budget and your trade. Two consultants with identical tools can hand you completely different plans, and the one worth having is the one who has understood where your money comes from.

Which is why the useful questions are hardly ever about SEO. They are about how that person works, what happens when something does not work, and what you are left holding if the two of you part company.

Questions worth asking

The answers matter less for their content than for their shape. Anyone who cannot explain their work in language you follow will not be able to explain the invoice either.

What would you do in the first three months, and in what order? A real answer starts by looking at what you already have, not by proposing a blog.

Who is going to do the work? At an agency, ask whether the person in the meeting is the person who later touches your site.

Which accounts do you need access to, and whose name do they stay in? Search Console, Analytics and the Google Business Profile should be created under your email, not theirs. It sounds like a detail and it causes more grief than anything else on the day you part ways.

Which tools do you use and why those? There is no correct answer. There is an answer with reasons.

How will you measure that this is working, beyond rankings? Clicks and impressions in Search Console, phone calls, form submissions, quotes requested.

What do you need from me, and how much of my time? Most SEO that fails, fails because the client never signs off the copy and the developer never changes anything.

What happens if I want to cancel? And if the answer is "there is a twelve-month minimum", ask why twelve rather than three.

Answers that should worry you

The word "guaranteed" attached to a ranking position. Nobody controls Google’s algorithm, so the promise is either untrue or impossible to verify at the moment it is made. Under Spanish advertising and unfair-competition law it also sits squarely in misleading-advertising territory.

"We know people at Google", or that being in Google’s partner programme lifts your rankings. That programme concerns paid advertising and has no bearing on organic results.

A fixed price quoted before anyone has looked at your site. If they do not know how many URLs you have or what it is built on, the number came off a template.

Refusing to say what will actually be done, "because it is our methodology". The method is not a trade secret. It is the only thing you are buying.

Links included in the package, with a monthly quota. Buying them is against Google’s guidelines and the risk stays on your domain, not on the domain of whoever sold them.

A monthly rankings report as the sole deliverable. A ranking PDF is not work. It is a photograph of work somebody should have done.

Pressure. Discounts that expire on Friday, diary slots about to run out. SEO is the least urgent thing you will buy all year.

How to read a proposal

A useful proposal reduces to one sentence per heading: what gets done, when, by whom, what it costs, and what is not included. If you have to read it twice to work out what you will receive, the problem is not you.

Look for three things. Countable deliverables: "rewrite 12 product pages" can be checked, "ongoing on-page optimisation" cannot. The exclusions: if nothing says what falls outside the scope, everything will fall outside it the day you ask. And the hours or monthly scope, because 400 and 1,200 euros a month do not buy the same number of working days, and that is the whole difference.

Then read the dull part: payment terms, notice period, and whose name the copy and code end up in. If it is not there, ask for it in writing before you sign.

A real audit, and a generated PDF

Both cost money and only one is any use. You can spot the generated one immediately: eighty pages, a traffic-light chart, a score out of a hundred, and a list of "errors" ordered by what the tool detected rather than by what is costing you sales.

One worth paying for is prioritised. It opens with the three or four things holding you back most and explains why that order. It names your own pages by URL. It separates what your developer can fix from what you have to decide. It says how much work each item is, even as a range. And it ends with a plan you could execute without rehiring the person who wrote it, even if you end up rehiring them.

One move before you pay: ask to see the contents page or an anonymised example. Anyone who has written real audits has one to hand.

Freelance or agency

I have an obvious stake in this question, so I will answer the half that goes against me first.

When an agency is the better choice

If you need SEO, paid campaigns, design and development running in step, an agency saves you from conducting the orchestra. If you publish at volume — dozens of articles or product pages a month — that needs a writing team, not a person. If you operate across several countries and languages, or your site is large enough that the technical work never ends, one person’s capacity runs out. And there is a risk I cannot paper over: if I am ill, there is nobody behind me; an agency has cover. If your company requires approved suppliers, that structure exists for a reason.

When one person is the better choice

If your site is a manageable size and what you need is judgement rather than production-line output. If it matters to you to always speak to the person doing the work, without the brief passing through a salesperson, an account manager and a junior first. If your budget is the kind that puts you on an agency’s bottom rung with their most junior staff, while the same money buys direct access to someone who has been doing this a while.

One dull signal worth more than the rest

That the person tells you no about something: that the shop will not work with that catalogue, that the service you asked about has too little search volume in your region, or that what you need first is not SEO but a website that works. Anyone who says yes to everything on the first call will bill you for eight months before you find the problem.

If you want to see how I answer these questions myself: How I work is the long version, step by step, and About is who I am and where I work from.