If you’re a CMO, a Marketing Director, or Digital Program Manager, there may come a time when you find yourself in search of professional SEO expertise. Maybe you’ve already been here before. Or maybe that time is now.
If you’ve already developed first-hand experience with high-functioning SEO programs, identifying a strong SEO consultant is going to come much easier for you.
But if you haven’t?
Welcome to Vegas, baby. Feeling lucky?
In this guide, I’ll introduce you to the various superpowers that SEO consultants come with, so that you can zero-in on the superpower that fits your marketing program, then I’ll show you exactly where to look, so that you can get in touch with a high-impact SEO consultant.
The Problem
For marketing leaders with little-to-no experience with high-functioning SEO programs, finding and hiring the right SEO consultant is oftentimes a crapshoot.
To make this challenge even more daunting, you might be going into the program with a list of blind spots, misnomers, and false assumptions about how a high-functioning SEO program is supposed to operate.
If your miscalculated expectations meet the reality of how SEO programs actually operate, and if the SEO consultant that you hire isn’t equipped to help your team put the right systems in place to build growth, then it’s going to be a tough road to make this channel shine the way that it should.
Let’s figure out how to avoid that scenario.
First Thing’s First, Clarify Your Needs, Goals, & Expectations
Does it make any sense to hire an SEO consultant if you can’t articulate the needs, expectations, and growth goals that you have for your SEO program?
Of course not, but this lack of clarity is shockingly common. A few examples:
- Are you searching for a consultant because your website lost traffic and you need someone to step in and build a recovery plan?
- Are you trying to capture more high-intent leads for your sales team?
- Are you just trying to grow top-level website traffic and brand awareness?
- Are you running into numerous technical SEO problems?
You absolutely have to communicate these goals clearly. Contrary to what you might think, SEOs have a wide variety of superpowers and knowing what your goals are will dictate which type of SEO consultant you should be looking to hire.
Second, Identify the SEO Consultant Superpower That Matches Your Growth Plan
As best I can, I’m going to list out the primary superpowers that you’ll find in an SEO consultant.
Content-Driven SEO Consultants
Content is in my experience, the primary way that businesses drive organic traffic growth. So finding a content-driven SEO consultant is going to be the best possible skillset to hire for when your main goal is to drive higher levels of top-level traffic and rankings for revenue-generating keywords.
Full-disclosure, content-driven SEO is a term that I’ve coined as I progressed in my career to the point of learning that Content was the strongest SEO growth lever I could wield. As you can imagine, I myself am a content-driven SEO, so I am biased in this direction (with numbers to show for it).
Product-Led SEO Consultants
Product-Led SEO is a discipline coined by my very well-respected colleague Eli Schwartz (S/o to Eli!). And to be clear, I’m not implying that product-led SEO is in any way inferior to content-driven SEO. In many ways, I actually think that product-led SEO is superior to content-driven SEO. But it may not be a strategic fit for all teams.
Technical SEO Consultants
Technical SEO is often misunderstood in leadership teams. I find that there’s a desire among many leaders to look at technical SEO as the solution to their traffic goals. That can be the case sometimes, but more often than not, a technical SEO isn’t going to bring heaps of traffic to your website (sorry tech SEO friends).
What a technical SEO consultant WILL bring is structural cohesion to your website, as well as a keen ability to diagnose and fix any technical issues that arise which could be standing in the way of your website’s performance.
The perfect example of projects that a technical SEO is going to really thrive in is web migration projects. Furthermore, it’s common for technical SEOs to add tremendous value to enterprise organizations.
If your site is fairly small, hiring a technical SEO expert may not be the right way to go. However, if you’re working within an enterprise organization that handles tens of thousands of URLs, or if you’re running a complex eCommerce site, those are scenarios where you really should consider working with an SEO consultant that specializes in the technical side.
eCommerce SEO Consultants
The skillset that’s required for an SEO consultant to be successful in eCommerce is related, but still very different from the skillset required for a B2B SaaS consultant. As mentioned above, technical skills tend to play a larger role in eComm. Essentially, the entire website is a very different build from category & product pages to site architecture to internal linking. If you’re in eComm, finding a consultant who has really been in the trenches with eCommerce expertise is where you’ll want to direct your search.
B2B & SaaS SEO Consultants
SEO consultants who specialize in B2B and/or B2B SaaS strategy will typically have experience with lead gen, or in some cases, direct signups. Companies that operate with an SLG or MLG business model (sales-led growth or marketing-led growth) should seek out an SEO professional who specialize in lead generation. While companies that operate with a PLG (product-led growth) model should seek out an SEO consultant with experience driving direct signups.
My own personal experience is primarily in the lead generation side of B2B SaaS.
Affiliate SEO Consultants
Affiliate marketing is a whole different ballgame entirely and it’s my belief that SEO experts in the affiliate space are some of the most well-trained and disciplined SEO professionals in the game. Some SEO consultants also buy and grow their own affiliate websites, giving them real skin in the game. If you’re lucky enough to work with one of these SEO experts, an affiliate SEO consultant is going to give you the realest, most honest advice and strategies they know. Affiliate SEO is where I cut my teeth during my early career, and it’s where I leveled up the fastest in my SEO game.
Local SEO Consultants
Local SEO. How hard can it be, right?
Wrong!
Local SEO is as respectable as any other skillset in the SEO game, and if you’re operating a business that competes for localized results with physical addresses, you’ll really need to find a specialist consultant in Local SEO. These talented professionals sometimes don’t get the credit they deserve, given the lower budgets and narrower audience targeting in Local SEO, but a consultant with specialized local SEO expertise is an absolute A-player.
Linkbuilding & Digital PR Consultants
Linkbuilding is such a specialized skillset that most SEO consultants out there actually do not go near it. I’m sure most could if it really came down to it, but at the end of the day it’s like asking your designer to code up a landing page. Some designers might be up for the task, but design and dev are two different skillsets entirely. If links is what you’re really going for, best to find a consultant that has a strong track record with quality guest posting campaigns, or a Digital PR consultant who can help you build a campaign-based outreach strategy.
Other SEO Consultant Specialties
The list of consultant superpowers doesn’t stop there. SEO consultant specialties also include:
- International SEO consultants
- Programmatic SEO consultants
- Shopify and WordPress SEO consultants
- + Consultants who shine in data analytics, tag manager, dashboard building & the list goes on.
How Much do SEO Consultants Typically Charge?
On a wide-scale model, most SEO consultants will typically charge in the range of $50 to $500 per hour, depending on their experience level, track record, and personal brand reputation. Narrowing this range down a little further, it’s more realistic that the SEO consultant you hire will fall somewhere in the range of $75 per hour on the low end, to $250 per hour on the high end.
If a consultant is charging below $50 per hour, chances are high that you’ll be working with an inexperienced SEO, who may function a bit more like a freelancer than a consultant.
Where to Find Your Ideal SEO Consultant
Here’s the part you may have been waiting for… where to find and high-impact, bona-fide SEO consultants.
With gig economy marketplaces popping up right and left these days, you might be tempted to start searching on a platform like Upwork, Freelancer, or Toptal. I’ve done my share of searching on these platforms and I do think they have good talent pools, but it’s more likely that the talent you’ll run into will be on the lower end of experience and expertise. If that’s the type of consultant you need, great! Gig economy marketplaces are an okay start.
On the other hand, if you’re really looking for a strong professional who can add tenured consulting expertise to your program, I would steer very clear of these marketplace platforms. In order of best-talent to lowest-talent, here’s what I actually recommend.
Twitter (now X 🙄)
Yes, even though Twitter has rebranded to “X,” it still appears to me as though the SEO community’s most engaged and vibrant professionals are alive and active here, making it the perfect place to source word-of-mouth introductions to the greatest SEO consultants on the planet. If I were looking for an A-player and I had to start anywhere, I’d start by heading over to Twitter… I mean uh… X, searching the hashtag #seo or #seotwitter and strike up a conversation with the true SEO professionals that you come across to ask them for recommendations.
Slack Communities
Next to, or perhaps better than Twitter… X… uh… that thing, Slack communities are a powerful place to engage with SEO experts who can steer you in the direction of a powerful consultant.
Some of my favorite Slack communities are:
SEOJobs.com
Built and managed by the well-respected Nick LeRoy, SEOJobs.com is a site that is primarily dedicated to FTE roles. But this shouldn’t stop you from leveraging the site to find SEO consultants. When I say that top SEOs are connected to Nick & this particular web project, I mean it. The site has recruitment services, which you can look into, as well as a contact form where I’m sure you’ll find helpful recommendations.
Yes, LinkedIn is an obvious source and search engine for finding SEO consultants. Problem is, it’s really hard to know what you’re getting from a LinkedIn search. There are so many people on LinkedIn that have some variation of “SEO consultant” in their profile.
Some of them are the real deal, but most are unvetted. If you really know a lot about vetting SEO candidates, LinkedIn searches can be a good place to go, but if it’s your first time hiring an SEO consultant, I would recommend keeping caution in mind.
MarketerHire
Although I haven’t officially vetted this source, MarketerHire has a very strong reputation behind it, and some of the SEOs that I know personally have listed themselves on the platform.
This source is going to be a better go-to in terms of marketplace platforms than Upwork and Freelancer.com because it’s a platform built specifically for marketing talent and only marketing talent.
Gig Marketplaces
Alas, if these resources fail, then I would recommend doing your due-diligence on the following gig marketplace platforms.
Vetting Your SEO Consultant
It’s hard enough these days for companies to vet SEO agencies without getting burned. The same applies to SEO consultants.
I will say that every SEO consultant I’ve personally interacted with has a genuine pull to put their client’s interests and goals first, but then again, my network is quite strong, so I’m interacting with SEOs who are already at the top of their game.
Rest assured that for every qualified consultant, there are a dozen or more out there who claim expert status with incompetent skill levels.
Here are the requests I suggest when hiring an SEO consultant for the first time:
When did you start in the SEO industry and why were you drawn in?
What companies have you worked with in the past?
What’s Your SEO Superpower?
Can you show me examples of websites that you’ve grown, along with real data trendlines?
Is there another SEO in your industry who can vouch for your work? Can I contact them?
How do you approach content, links and technical SEO for a website of my particular size and industry?
If you were tasked with analyzing a website that’s been experiencing traffic declines over the last 3 months, what would be your thought process to diagnosing and improving traffic?
How would you drive conversions for a website like mine?
And last but not least, what are your consultancy rates and agreement lengths?
That’s it. That’s how I would vet a prospective SEO consultant. Most importantly, I’d be looking for colleague recommendations from other highly-skilled SEO professionals. I’d be looking at the track records of brands or domains that the consultant has worked with, paying close attention to the validity of their case study data (it helps to cross-check in third party tools like Semrush & Ahrefs), and I would be having conversations to understand this person’s professional fit, personality, and approach to problem solving.
Good Luck in Your Search!
I hope the information here has been insightful and beneficial to your search. If your team happens to be in the B2B SaaS space in search of a consultant with my own skills and abilities, please get in touch with me via the contact form below.
