When to hire for SEO, and what to ask before you do
You are deciding whether to hire an agency or a specialist, and how to tell a good one from an expensive one.
Short answer
Hire once you know which of your pages work and why, because that is when outside help can scale something rather than guess. Hiring before you have that answer buys someone else’s guesses at your expense. The single best filter is whether they will tell you what not to do.
The wrong time
Before you know whether anyone searches for what you do, before you have a page that answers a query well, and before you can say which pages produce your traffic. An agency arriving into that vacuum will produce a content calendar, because that is the only thing that can be produced without the information.
The right time
When you have a page set with a clear distribution of winners and losers, a rough idea why, and more work than time. That is a scaling problem, which is what hired help is genuinely good at.
Ask what they would not do
A good operator will tell you which parts of your list are not worth doing and why. Anyone who agrees that everything is important is either not experienced or is selling hours. This question separates the two faster than any case study.
Ask how they will measure it
Specifically: what comparison, over what window, against what baseline. If the answer is a rankings report or a traffic graph with no control for seasonality, they will be unable to distinguish their work from the weather, and so will you.
Ask what happened when they were wrong
Everyone has a case study. Fewer have a documented failure and a description of what they learned. The second tells you far more about how they think, and its absence tells you they may not be measuring carefully enough to notice.
Never outsource the judgement
What your product is, who it is for, and what claims you are willing to make. An outside writer can produce competent pages about your category; only you can produce the thing nobody else has, which is the only content that reliably works.
Structure the engagement to be falsifiable
Agree in advance what success looks like, over what period, on which metric, with brand excluded. Without that, every review meeting becomes a negotiation about which chart to look at, and the engagement renews on narrative rather than result.
Questions
- Agency, freelancer or in-house?
- A freelancer for a specific problem, an agency for sustained volume you cannot staff, in-house once search is a primary channel. Cost per outcome usually favours the freelancer at small scale.
- What should it cost?
- Widely variable, and price is a poor signal of quality in this market. Judge on how they answer the measurement question rather than on rate.
- What if they guarantee rankings?
- Walk away. Nobody controls a search engine, and a guarantee means either meaningless terms or tactics you will pay for later.
Measured, not asserted
ihatepdf.cv reached 100,542 users and 42,320 clicks with no agency and $0 spent on advertising. That is not an argument against hiring; it is an argument about sequence. The information that would have made a hire productive, that 6 of 85 pages produced 82.9% of the clicks, only existed after the work.
Free tool for this: Search Console Analyzer. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 30 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.