When to hire for SEO, and for what

One founder with the free tools and an hour a week can do a great deal: verify the property, fix what blocks the index, write the pages that answer the searches that matter, ask for a few links. What that cannot do is volume.

• You know which forty pages to write and you will write four.
• Search Console shows a queue of pages sitting at positions five to fifteen and nobody has time to improve them.
• The technical list is written, understood, and three months old.
• You have a page family that earns and no hours to extend it.
• Your rivals are being named on lists you are not on, and nobody is doing the asking.

A consultant sells judgement, an agency sells execution, a freelancer sells hours, an in-house hire sells continuity, and a report sells the judgement once. We make one of those: Porteur is a report bought once, which is the cheapest way to buy the first item on that list.

Ask these before money changes hands. The answers separate someone with a method from someone with a template.

• What will you look at in the first week, and what will you hand me at the end of it?
• Which figures will you report, and where do they come from?
• How do you decide what to write, given the results pages in my category?
• How will you get links, specifically, for a product like mine?
• What will you not do, and what should I keep doing myself?
• Who writes the pages, and can I read three they wrote for someone else?
• What happens in month four if nothing has moved?

Good answers name your category and your pages. Poor answers name deliverables and hours.

• Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls the results page.
• Secret techniques or a proprietary algorithm nobody may see.
• Links for sale. Buying links that pass ranking violates Google's spam policies, and you carry the risk, not the seller.
• A promise of the first position on a named keyword.
• A monthly report of impressions and nothing else.
• A twelve-month contract before a single page has been shipped.

You cannot judge rankings in a month. You can judge a person completely.

1. 1

   Week one: give them one real decision

   Hand over Search Console read access and ask which ten pages to write next, and why. Judge the reasoning, not the list.

2. 2

   Week two: one page, end to end

   Ask for one page against a brief: the query, the intent from the results page, the facts. Read it as your customer would.

3. 3

   Week three: one technical fix, shipped

   Something specific and checkable: the duplicate titles, the canonical, the redirect chain. It should land in your repository or theirs, not in a slide.

4. 4

   Week four: the report

   One page: what was done, what it should move, how it will be judged, what is next. If this is a wall of charts, you have your answer.

At the end you know their judgement, their writing, their shipping and their reporting. That is everything you were buying.

• The weekly ten minutes in Search Console. It is your product, and the figures are the only honest ones.
• The pages that need first-hand knowledge: the pricing page, the comparison with your rivals, the case study.
• The decision about what the product is called and how it is described. Consistency of naming is yours.
• The relationships. A founder gets a podcast, a partner link and an editor's reply; an agency mostly does not.

A vague brief gets a generic quote and a generic first month. Write these six lines and the answers you get back will be comparable.

• What the product is, who buys it, and the three queries you believe a buyer types.
• What you have already: the property verified, the pages that rank, the pages that do not.
• The outcome you want in two quarters, as a figure and a date, not as a position.
• What exists to work with: a site you can deploy to, a writer, a designer, or none of them.
• What you will not do: buy links, publish forty thin pages, rebuild the site this quarter.
• How you will judge the work: the KPIs you already read, and who reads them with you.

Send the same six lines to everyone you are considering. The replies sort themselves: some answer your situation, and some answer a template.

Published price ranges vary by country, scope and seller, so any figure called the average is somebody's marketing. Size it from the work and the value instead.

1. Count the work: pages to write this quarter, technical fixes outstanding, links you want asked for.
2. Price the work as hours, at a rate you would pay a contractor you respect.
3. Compare that to what a search click is worth to you, from your own signup and revenue figures.
4. Buy the first month as a project, never as a retainer, and let the retainer follow the evidence.