How to hire a
SEO strategist.
SEO strategists range from technical-only to content-only. The right hire depends on whether your bottleneck is rendering / crawl issues or content depth.
Hire in-house
SEO is your top-2 growth channel and you have continuous content / technical roadmap.
Outsource to a studio
You're ramping SEO for the first time. Agencies do the audit + first 6 months better than a junior hire.
Signs of strong candidates.
Strong signals
- Has done both technical audits and content production
- Knows current Google ranking factors (E-E-A-T, helpful content, AI overviews)
- Familiar with programmatic SEO patterns
- Has shipped schema implementations
- Reads SEO research, not just blogs
Red flags
- ✗Generic "SEO best practices" with no specifics
- ✗No technical depth (can't talk about render-blocking, hreflang, sitemaps)
- ✗No examples of pages they've gotten to rank
- ✗Outdated tactics (keyword stuffing, exact-match domains, etc.)
- ✗No experience with AI-search optimization
Questions to ask.
- Q1
Walk me through a technical audit you ran. What did you find first?
- Q2
How do you scope a programmatic SEO program?
- Q3
What schema markup do you add by default to a SaaS site?
- Q4
How do you optimize for AI Overviews vs traditional rankings?
- Q5
How would you audit our crawl budget right now?
We bridge
to your hire.
We can assess SEO candidates technically. If you're not ready to hire a SEO strategist yet, brief us — we can fill the gap and help you hire later.
Brief us