Hiring a local SEO consultant is one of the best ways for small and local businesses to increase their online visibility and gain new customers. But if you aren’t a local SEO expert yourself, it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Good thing I have a strong disdain for subpar SEO and want to help you out with this! That’s why I put together this free guide on hiring a local SEO consultant. It’s meant to help you through the interview process and find the best SEO consultant for your needs and budget. Let’s go!
When is the right time to hire a local SEO consultant?
The sooner you start doing local SEO, the better. Waiting another 3 months to get started only means it will take 3 months longer to see results. So if you are in a position where you want to get more traction on Google, NOW is the right time to hire a local SEO consultant.
Your business doesn’t even need to open to start with local SEO. You can create a Google Business Profile up to 12 months ahead of your expected grand opening and start building hype ahead of time. You can also add photos and posts up to 90 days ahead of your opening date.
I’ve seen it work for companies like NYC Bud where they hired a local SEO consultant 3 months ahead of time and got traction from SEO right away once their store was officially opened.
But even though it’s never too soon to start local SEO, there are a few things I want you consider:
- When your domain was first registered – It’s harder for brand new domains to rank high because Google hasn’t learned to “trust” them yet. Domains that are less than 12 months old will generally take longer to see results. I’m not saying you should wait to do SEO — because you shouldn’t. You should start now but adjust your expectations accordingly.
- Your website design – Website architecture is an important factor for local SEO. It works best when search engines can easily crawl your website and understand what each page is about. If your website wasn’t designed with SEO in mind, you might need to make some changes before you see results. If you are currently designing your website, make sure to bring your SEO consultant into the conversation.
- The niche you are in – It might be harder for your business to get traction with local SEO just because of the niche you are in. If your market is highly competitive, it will take more time and effort to see results. In contrast, businesses in emerging markets may have a harder time finding their audience if demand hasn’t caught up yet.
None of this should deter you from kicking off your local SEO strategy. Just keep in mind there are several factors that can affect your timeline and results. You can also use social media and paid advertising to build your audience while your local SEO strategy catches up.
How to approach the interview
When going through the process of hiring a local SEO consultant, you need to keep in mind that SEO is about more than technical ability. A local SEO consultant who has all the technical chops in the world will be less valuable than someone who understands your business and your customers.
This is because SEO involves a very important thing we call “search intent” which means you have to understand what search terms surround the business, why people are using those terms and what they are hoping to find. Without a solid understanding of search intent and business goals, everything you do becomes a shot in the dark.
SEOs are a dime a dozen, but even the good ones can struggle when it comes to developing a customized strategy for your specific business. And this is what separates the pros from the amateurs.
Another thing you need to be careful about is the SEOs that only talk about percentages but don’t show you the real numbers. Anybody can take a site from 0 to 1000 monthly visits, or from page 40 to page 7. But those are not significant gains. Even if a 1000% increase sounds impressive, you need to see the full numbers and proof that those increases came from their specific work. This isn’t hard to prove and any SEO worth their reputation should be tracking that anyway.
Finally, be wary of hiring a local SEO consultant that focuses solely on content creation or link building to increase traffic. While both those things will form the backbone of your local SEO strategy, there is a lot more that needs to be discussed.
Your local SEO consultant should also be thinking about technical issues like page speed, site structure, and schema markups. This isn’t something you need to grill your SEO consultant about on the first interview, but they should be able to elaborate on the differences between on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO as your discussions progress.
8 questions to ask when hiring a local SEO consultant
Now that you know what to look for and what to avoid in a local SEO consultant, I want to give you some specific questions to ask during the interview process. But keep in mind that there often won’t be a right or wrong answer. What you really want is to look at how they answer the questions.
You can use this table chart as a sort of “cheat sheet” to help you with your interviews:
Now without further ado, here are eight questions you can ask when hiring a local SEO consultant:
1. How long will it take to see results from organic search?
This question is designed to show you how well your local SEO consultant can manage expectations. There are no guarantees with SEO, so be skeptical of anybody who makes specific promises on results and timelines.
An acceptable answer can be anywhere from 3 – 9 months depending what kinds of results you expect to see and how much competition you are up against. Good SEO consultants will avoid making specific promises during an interview, but they should be able to provide a loose timeline and set some kind of expectation.
2. What are our competitors doing with SEO that we should consider?
This question will help you discover how much research your SEO consultant has done and whether they plan on winging it or are thinking strategically.
Don’t expect them to have a whole strategy prepared just yet, but they should be able to give you some breadcrumbs like “I’m seeing a lot of backlinks coming from these # publications.” or “your competitors have hundreds of Google reviews. We need to get more reviews.”
3. Do you outsource any of your processes or deliverables?
This question will help you uncover how much control your local SEO consultant has over their own process or if they are just acting as an intermediary.
It’s not uncommon for local SEO consultants to outsource parts of their process. Content creation and certain technical tasks require unique skill sets that a consultant may not have. Plus, outsourcing may help to remove bottlenecks and make the process more scalable. Just beware that there is some risk involved with outsourcing, so you want to make sure that your consultant is reviewing the quality of any deliverables that are being outsourced.
4. Is there anything unique or challenging about our customers?
The main thing that sets a good SEO consultant apart from a great SEO consultant is how well they do marketing. This question will give you some insights into how well the person you are interviewing understands your industry and customer psychology.
As I mentioned earlier, local SEO is about more than technical ability and a good SEO consultant will have some understanding of who your customers are and how they shop.
5. How do you measure the success of your SEO campaigns?
This is another question designed to show aptitude. Any good SEO consultant should be able to show you some standard reports and metrics they track.
But keep in mind that local SEO is about more than keyword rankings, it’s about customer acquisition and that should be reflected in how your consultant reports on results. In addition to traffic and keyword rankings, they should also be reporting on things like conversions and phone calls that have a more direct impact on your business.
6. What are some of the most common SEO mistakes that we should avoid?
This question will give you some insight into how much experience your consultant has and where they tend to put their focus. If they have been doing local SEO for a while, they have seen (and made) their fair share of mistakes.
There is no specific answer that you’re looking for, but just a general statement that shows you they have been around the block a few times. It could be a comment about content quality, website architecture, backlink strategy — anything, really.
7. What is the scope of work you do?
This question will give you some insight into their process and strategy. Local SEO involves a lot of moving parts — on-page SEO, off-page SEO, Technical SEO, and content strategy — that need to be considered.
If your SEO consultant is just writing blogs and doing on-page optimizations, that’s not really SEO. It’s more like content marketing. Don’t expect them to come up with a full scope of work right then and there, but they should touch on each of those four buckets.
8. What is the benefit of investing in SEO vs. other channels, such as Google or Facebook Ads?
This question helps to uncover how well your SEO consultant understands what their role is in your marketing strategy. You shouldn’t expect them to be experts in other tactics, but they should have a general understanding of how it all works together.
If they say something like “SEO is a cost-effective long term strategy while Google and Facebook Ads are expensive and produce short-term results. Both tactics compliment each other well.” That is an acceptable response.
Remember that the goal of these questions isn’t necessarily to find someone who has all the answers, it’s to find someone who knows enough to get you the answers when you need them.
Finding the best local SEO consultant
The key to hiring a good local SEO consultant is to find one that has skills in both SEO and marketing psychology. Remember that doing local SEO isn’t just about getting to the number one spot in Google, it’s about getting customers interested in your business.
As long as you have the right expectations in place and ask a few tough questions during the interview process, you can find a great local SEO consultant who has skills and is within your budget.
Contact me today and I’ll start you off with a competitor analysis and SEO audit to get things started. If you like what you hear, we can dive deeper into the strategy and create a proper scope of work.
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