4 Red Flags to Look Out for When Hiring an SEO Specialist

You’re ready to hire an SEO Specialist to improve your website health and grow your online business. Congratulations! A professional SEO strategy is a demonstrated method for increasing your website traffic and connecting with the right types of consumers for your business. However, if you don’t know much about Search Engine Optimization, how are you going to know if the person you’re hiring has the necessary skills to do the job? Are they a trained, experienced, well-rounded SEO Specialist, or are they just a great salesperson? Continue reading to learn about 4 red flags to look out for when hiring an SEO Specialist.

1. They do not mention all three aspects of SEO

There are tons of signals that Google uses to determine if a website is worth serving on their search results page. These signals come from three places: 

  • on-page SEO: content quality, keyword optimization, and image optimization
  • off-page SEO: backlinks, reviews, and citations
  • technical SEO: schema markup, site speed, and crawlability

Ensure that the SEO Specialist you’re working with includes all 3 aspects of SEO in their strategy. Ignoring one or two of these aspects means that you’re missing out on many ranking signals, leaving weak spots in your strategy and looking untrustworthy to search engines. 

2. They don’t keep up-to-date with SEO trends

Google’s algorithms are always changing. Therefore, SEO is always changing. It’s important for SEO Specialists to keep up-to-date with these changes and adjust their processes accordingly. Beware of SEO Specialists working off of outdated techniques like keyword stuffing or using blog comments as a way to build backlinks. Ensure that your SEO Specialist follows reputable SEO news sources like Moz, Search Engine Land, or SEMRush. 

3. They guarantee immediate results

No one has complete control over how the search results page is going to be displayed. SEO Specialists can only influence these results based on guidelines provided by Google and advice from experts. White-hat SEO is when an SEO strategy follows these guidelines and your website gains authority and trust over time. This will lead to long-term success for your website, but it can take a few months to see results. Black-hat SEO is when an SEO strategy finds loopholes in the guidelines and takes advantage of them. While using black-hat techniques may give you immediate results, they can also be highly detrimental to your website health. Your website may even be penalized by Google, which is difficult to recover from. 

4. They offer a completely hands-off experience

“Don’t worry, we’ve got it from here!” While this does sound appealing, this is a problematic offering from any SEO Specialist. An SEO Specialist needs background information about your business and access to your different accounts like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. If the person you’re working with does not ask questions, they will not be able to build an effective SEO strategy for your website.

With the knowledge of these 4 red flags, you can be confident that you’ll make the right decision for your business when hiring an SEO Specialist. 

8 thoughts on “4 Red Flags to Look Out for When Hiring an SEO Specialist”

  1. Hey Klaus !!
    Thank You for sharing valuable and helpful tips . i implement all details as soon as fast in my blog.

    Reply
  2. Hey Mate,
    I am Blogger Rohit Kumar from India
    You had written a great article to read, you are doing work, keep it work.
    looking for more articles like this. thanks for sharing this article

    Reply
  3. Thank you for such a good and helpful article. I am so glad to read your article. In this article you well explained about 4 Red Flags to Look Out for When Hiring an SEO Specialist. I am a passionate motorcycle blogger. I will apply this.

    Reply
  4. Great post! Having worked for an SEO company in the past, we would always bring up these 4 things with clients. Especially when they couldn’t understand why results weren’t immediate when another firm they spoke with offered this.

    Reply

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