The best SEO specialist for your business is someone who understands your goals, investigates your website using evidence, and proposes work your team can realistically implement. Before hiring, compare their reasoning, relevant experience, deliverables, and approach to measuring progress. Searching for a “top SEO specialist” can help you build a shortlist. The next step is finding out whether each person’s skills match the problem you need to solve. This guide gives you practical questions to ask before committing to an SEO project or monthly service.
What should an SEO specialist help you achieve?
Start by describing the business problem behind your search. Perhaps customers cannot find important service pages. Your online store may have products that receive little search visibility. Or your website attracts visitors, but few become qualified enquiries. These situations call for different investigations. Before requesting proposals, write a short brief covering your main products or services, target customers, priority markets, website platform, and current concerns. For example: “Our website generates enquiries for commercial maintenance services. We want to understand why our main service pages receive little relevant search traffic and identify improvements our developer can implement.” This gives a prospective specialist something concrete to assess.
What questions should you ask an SEO specialist?
1. What do you need to understand about my business?
Listen to the questions they ask before recommending a package. Do they want to know which services matter most, how customers choose you, and what counts as a valuable enquiry? Do they ask about your available resources and who manages the website? Google’s hiring guidance recommends checking whether a prospective SEO is interested in your business and how your customers find you. [1] My recommendation is to look for a connection between those answers and the proposed work. If your priority is qualified enquiries for one service, the proposal should explain how that service will be assessed.
2. How will you investigate the problem?
Ask what information they need and what their initial investigation will produce. A useful response might describe reviewing search performance, inspecting important pages, checking the website’s structure, and identifying questions that need further testing. Request an example of how they explain a finding. It should make the relationship between evidence and recommendation clear. Consider this hypothetical example: “Several important product pages have no internal links from their categories. I would check how those pages are discovered, review their indexing status, and determine whether the navigation needs changing.” That explanation gives you an issue to verify and a reason for the proposed investigation.
3. Can you show evidence of relevant work?
Ask for examples that help you evaluate the skills your project requires. For a technical project, useful evidence might include an explained audit, a documented implementation, or a demonstration of how the specialist diagnoses a problem. For content work, ask to see how they connect customer questions to page improvements. When reviewing a case study, ask: What was the starting situation? What did the specialist personally do? What changed during the period? How were the results measured? What other factors might have influenced the outcome? If someone has limited client experience, ask them to distinguish personal projects and demonstrations from paid client work. You can then decide whether a small, clearly scoped project is an appropriate way to evaluate the fit.
4. What exactly will I receive?
Before agreeing to a price, clarify the deliverables. Will you receive an audit, a prioritised implementation plan, revised content, completed technical changes, or ongoing support? Who will implement each recommendation? Also agree on how changes will be reviewed and verified. For example, a technical audit might include affected URLs, supporting evidence, recommended actions, priorities, and a discussion with your developer. Implementation would need its own defined scope if it is not included. A clear agreement helps you compare proposals that otherwise look similar.
5. How will you decide what to fix first?
Ask the specialist to explain how they would choose between competing tasks. My recommended approach is to consider the evidence, the importance of the affected pages, the likely benefit, and the effort required. Dependencies matter too: a content recommendation may need to wait until a publishing problem is resolved. Use this hypothetical situation during an interview: “Our audit identifies inaccessible service pages, missing image descriptions, and several titles that could be improved. How would you investigate and prioritise these?” The explanation should reveal how the specialist handles uncertainty and makes decisions.
6. How will we measure progress?
Agree on the starting position and the indicators that matter to your business. Depending on the project, these may include relevant search impressions and clicks, qualified enquiries, sales attributable to organic search where tracking allows, and completion of verified improvements. Ask how the specialist will distinguish activity from outcomes. Publishing pages and completing tasks demonstrates work performed; evaluating their effect requires additional evidence. For reports, I recommend requesting a short explanation of what changed, what remains uncertain, and what should happen next.
7. What results can you reasonably promise?
A specialist can commit to defined work, communication, and agreed delivery dates. Search rankings depend on factors beyond their control. Google explicitly warns that nobody can guarantee a number-one ranking. [1] Ask the provider to explain what they expect, which assumptions support that expectation, and what could affect it. A proposal should help you understand the uncertainty before you commit.
Should you hire a technical SEO specialist or a general consultant?
Choose according to the work you need. For concerns involving crawling, indexing, website migrations, or development changes, investigate the provider’s technical skills and experience with your platform. For a project that combines content planning, technical improvements, and ongoing coordination, assess whether one consultant can cover the scope or whether a team is needed. Job titles alone will not answer this. Ask who will perform each part of the work and how they will collaborate with your existing team.
How should you evaluate SEO and GEO services?
GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is commonly used to describe work intended to improve visibility in responses from generative AI systems. Ask providers to identify the specific platforms and outcomes their service addresses. For Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google states that established SEO practices remain relevant. It does not require special AI markup or additional technical optimisations to appear in those features. Eligibility also does not guarantee inclusion. [2] If a provider proposes GEO work, ask: Which platform does this recommendation address? What documentation or evidence supports it? What changes will be made to my website? How will you measure the outcome? What limitations will the report explain? For content improvements, examine whether the work makes your pages more useful and trustworthy. Google’s content guidance encourages clear sourcing, descriptive titles, and information that provides value beyond simply rewriting other sources. [3] An occasional AI mention is an observation to investigate. Ask how the provider will account for variation across prompts and responses before presenting it as a broader result.
How do you compare SEO proposals?
Read each proposal against the same business brief. Check whether it explains the problem to investigate, the evidence required, the deliverables, the implementation responsibilities, and the reporting process. Then compare the cost against that scope. A lower price may cover advisory work only, while another proposal includes development or content production. Before choosing, make sure you can answer one practical question: “What will happen after I approve this proposal, and who is responsible for each step?
What should you do before signing?
Confirm the scope, payment terms, communication arrangements, and access requirements in writing. For an initial audit, Google recommends granting read-only access to Search Console rather than write access. [1] For implementation, agree on the permissions needed, how significant changes will be approved, and how completed work will be checked. My recommendation is to begin with a focused diagnostic project when the problem is still unclear. Its findings can help you decide whether ongoing support is justified.
Find the right SEO specialist for your business
Choosing the best SEO specialist means evaluating how someone investigates, explains, and carries out the work your business needs. Use the initial conversation to test that fit. Bring your goals, important page URLs, available search data, and a brief description of recent website changes. Book a free 10-minute SEO consultation to discuss your website, your priorities, and what needs further investigation.
References
Google Search Central: Do you need an SEO?
Google Search Central: AI features and your website
Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content