SEO Recruitment: How to Hire Someone Who Can Deliver

SEO recruitment is the process of identifying, evaluating, and hiring practitioners who can improve a business’s organic search performance. It sounds straightforward until you try to do it, because SEO is one of the few disciplines where the gap between someone who talks well and someone who delivers results is enormous, and most hiring managers cannot tell the difference until six months of budget have disappeared.

The problem is structural. SEO has no licensing body, no universal certification, and no agreed standard of competence. Anyone can call themselves an SEO specialist. That makes hiring harder than it should be, and it means the quality of your process matters more than almost any other factor in getting the right person in the role.

Why SEO Hiring Is Harder Than Hiring for Other Marketing Disciplines

When I was scaling iProspect from around 20 people to close to 100, hiring SEO talent was one of the most consistently difficult problems we faced. Paid search was easier in some ways: you could look at account structure, bid strategies, and ROAS numbers and get a reasonably clear read on whether someone knew what they were doing. SEO was murkier. Candidates could point to rankings that had improved for reasons that had nothing to do with their work, or attribute traffic growth to their efforts when it was mostly seasonal.

That experience taught me something I still believe: the ability to evaluate SEO talent is itself a skill, and most businesses do not invest in developing it. They write a job description, post it on a job board, and hope that the interview process will surface the right person. It usually does not, because the interview process is not designed to test what actually matters.

SEO is also a discipline that has changed substantially over the past decade. The technical foundations matter more than they used to. Content quality is assessed differently than it was five years ago. The relationship between links, authority, and rankings is more nuanced. Candidates who were excellent in 2018 may be operating on assumptions that no longer hold. Moz’s forward-looking analysis of where SEO is heading gives a useful sense of how the discipline continues to shift, and it is worth reading before you write a job description, not after.

What a Good SEO Job Description Actually Looks Like

Most SEO job descriptions are a list of tools and a vague promise of growth. “Proficient in SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console. Experience with on-page optimisation and link building. Strong analytical skills.” That describes roughly 80% of people who will apply for the role, including many who cannot do the job.

A better job description starts with the business problem you are trying to solve, not the activities you want someone to perform. Are you trying to grow organic traffic to a content-heavy site? Recover from a penalty? Build topical authority in a competitive vertical? Improve crawl efficiency across a large e-commerce catalogue? These are different problems that require different skills, and conflating them produces a brief that no one can actually respond to with specificity.

Be honest about the technical environment. What CMS are they working with? What is the current state of the site’s technical health? Is there a development team they can work with, or are they expected to implement changes themselves? Candidates who have spent their careers on WordPress will struggle with a headless architecture. Candidates who have always had developer support will struggle in an environment where they need to write their own schema or push changes through a ticket queue. These are real constraints that affect who can succeed in the role.

If you want to understand the broader strategic context that your SEO hire will be operating within, the Complete SEO Strategy hub covers the full picture, from positioning and technical foundations to content and measurement. It is worth orienting yourself there before you define what you actually need from a hire.

The Agency Versus In-House Question

One of the most persistent mistakes I see in SEO recruitment is treating agency experience and in-house experience as equivalent. They are not. The skills overlap, but the working context is different enough that someone who excels in one environment can genuinely struggle in the other.

Agency SEOs are typically working across multiple clients simultaneously. They develop breadth fast. They get good at diagnosing problems quickly, writing recommendations clearly, and presenting findings to clients who may not have deep technical knowledge. What they often do not develop is the patience and political navigation required to get things implemented inside a single organisation. In-house SEO is slower. You are dealing with competing priorities, resource constraints, and stakeholders who may not understand or care about organic search. The ability to influence without authority matters enormously.

In-house SEOs, on the other hand, often develop deep knowledge of a single sector and a single site. They understand the business context better than any agency could. But they can develop blind spots, particularly if they have not been exposed to a wide range of technical environments or content strategies. They may also have learned habits that worked in one CMS or one business model that do not transfer cleanly elsewhere.

Neither background is inherently superior. The question is what your specific situation requires. If you are hiring someone to drive SEO inside a large organisation with complex stakeholder dynamics, agency experience alone is probably not sufficient preparation. If you are hiring someone to manage an agency relationship and provide internal oversight, agency experience is highly relevant.

How to Interview for SEO Competence When You Are Not an SEO Expert

Most hiring managers interviewing SEO candidates are not SEO practitioners themselves. They are marketing directors, CMOs, or founders who understand marketing broadly but cannot evaluate technical SEO claims with confidence. This is a real vulnerability in the hiring process, and candidates who are more polished than they are skilled will exploit it.

The most useful interview technique I have found is asking candidates to walk you through a specific piece of work in granular detail. Not “tell me about a successful SEO campaign” but “take me through exactly what you did on this project, starting from the initial audit, and explain every decision you made.” The quality of the answer tells you several things at once: whether they actually did the work or were a peripheral contributor, whether they understand the reasoning behind their decisions or just followed a template, and whether they can connect their technical work to business outcomes.

Ask about failures. I am consistently more interested in how a candidate talks about an algorithm update that hurt their rankings, or a content strategy that did not produce the expected results, than I am in their success stories. Anyone can narrate success. The ability to analyse failure, identify what went wrong, and describe what they changed as a result is a much better signal of genuine competence and intellectual honesty.

Ask them to critique something specific. Give them a URL and ask them to spend ten minutes looking at it before the interview, then walk you through what they noticed. This is not a trick question. You are not looking for a comprehensive audit. You are looking for whether they notice the right things, whether they can prioritise, and whether they can communicate their observations clearly to a non-technical audience. The ability to explain SEO clearly is not a soft skill. It is a core requirement for anyone who needs to get things implemented inside an organisation.

One question I have used repeatedly that surfaces a lot: “Tell me about a time when your analytics told you one thing and your instinct told you another. What did you do?” The answers are revealing. Candidates who have never questioned their data are either inexperienced or not thinking critically. Analytics tools are a perspective on reality, not reality itself, and any SEO practitioner worth hiring should understand that distinction.

The Skills That Are Actually Hard to Develop

When I think about the SEO practitioners who have been genuinely excellent, there are a few capabilities that consistently separate them from the competent-but-unremarkable majority. These are worth weighting heavily in your evaluation.

Technical curiosity is one. The best SEOs I have worked with are genuinely interested in how things work. They want to understand crawl behaviour, not just fix crawl errors. They want to understand why a page is or is not indexing, not just submit it to Search Console and wait. This curiosity is hard to teach and easy to spot in an interview. Ask them what they have been reading lately, what recent change in search behaviour they found interesting, or what they are still trying to figure out. The answers tell you quickly whether you are talking to someone who is actively learning or someone who is coasting on what they learned three years ago.

Commercial awareness is the other. SEO exists to support business outcomes. Traffic that does not convert, rankings for queries that do not represent commercial intent, and content that attracts visitors who will never become customers are all forms of activity that feel productive but are not. The SEO practitioners who create real value are the ones who understand the difference between a metric that matters and a metric that looks good in a report. I have seen too many agencies, including ones I have run, get caught in the trap of optimising for rankings and traffic when the client needed revenue. The best SEO hires are immune to that trap because they are oriented toward outcomes, not outputs.

Communication is the third. This is particularly important for in-house roles. SEO requires buy-in from developers, content teams, product managers, and senior leadership. A practitioner who cannot explain why a technical change matters, or who cannot make the business case for a content investment, will consistently fail to get their recommendations implemented. Technical excellence without communication skills produces a very expensive backlog of ignored recommendations.

What Salary Ranges Actually Signal in the SEO Market

SEO salaries vary significantly by market, seniority, and sector. But there is a pattern worth understanding: the market for genuinely excellent SEO talent is tight, and businesses that try to hire senior-level expertise at mid-level salaries tend to get mid-level expertise at best.

The candidates who are most in demand, the ones who have driven measurable organic growth in competitive verticals and can demonstrate it with data, have options. They are not desperate to take the first offer. If your salary range is below market and your job description is vague, you are selecting from a pool of candidates who could not get the roles with better packages. That is a structural problem, not a recruitment problem, and it needs to be addressed at the budget level before you start interviewing.

There is also a case for being honest about what the role involves. I have seen businesses advertise for a “Head of SEO” when what they actually need is a practitioner who will also manage a small team, handle reporting, and present to the board quarterly. These are different roles with different skill requirements, and conflating them in the title tends to attract candidates who are stronger on one dimension than the other. Be specific about what the role actually requires day to day, and you will get more accurate self-selection from candidates.

Evaluating Freelancers and Agencies Versus Permanent Hires

Not every SEO requirement justifies a permanent hire. For businesses at an early stage, or those with a specific, time-bounded need such as a site migration or a technical audit, a freelancer or specialist agency may be a more appropriate solution than adding headcount.

The evaluation criteria are similar regardless of engagement model. You still want to see specific examples of relevant work, an ability to explain decisions clearly, and evidence of commercial orientation. What changes is the accountability structure. A freelancer or agency is typically engaged against a defined scope of work, which means the brief needs to be more precise, not less. Vague briefs produce vague work, regardless of how talented the person delivering it is.

When evaluating an SEO agency, I would apply the same scrutiny I would to any other supplier relationship. What is their actual methodology? Can they show you examples of work in your sector or in sectors with comparable complexity? How do they report, and what metrics do they use to define success? An agency that leads with rankings as the primary success metric is telling you something about how they think. Rankings are a means to an end, not the end itself.

The SEO industry has a credibility problem that is worth acknowledging openly. There are excellent practitioners and there are people who have built a business on selling activity that produces the appearance of progress without the substance. The distinction between genuine expertise and performance of expertise is a theme that runs across creative industries, and SEO is not immune to it. The hiring process is your best defence against bringing in the latter.

Onboarding an SEO Hire Properly

Recruitment does not end when the offer is accepted. The onboarding process has a significant effect on how quickly an SEO hire becomes productive, and most businesses underinvest in it.

The first thing a new SEO hire needs is access: to analytics, to Search Console, to the CMS, to historical data, and to the people who make decisions about the site. Delays in access are delays in productivity, and they are almost entirely avoidable with a small amount of preparation before the person starts.

The second thing they need is context. What has been tried before? What worked and what did not? What are the business priorities for the next twelve months, and how does organic search fit into them? A new hire who spends their first month auditing problems that were already identified and deprioritised is wasting time that could be spent on work that actually moves things forward. Give them the history.

Set clear expectations about what success looks like in the first 90 days, the first six months, and the first year. SEO is a long-cycle discipline. Traffic and ranking changes from work done today may not be fully visible for three to six months. If you are measuring a new SEO hire against short-term metrics without accounting for that lag, you will either make a bad evaluation or create incentives for them to prioritise quick wins over work that builds durable value. Both outcomes are bad.

Understanding how SEO fits into a broader strategy is something the Complete SEO Strategy hub addresses in depth. If you are bringing someone new into an SEO role, pointing them toward a structured overview of how the discipline fits together is a reasonable part of onboarding, not a replacement for it.

The community dimension of SEO is also worth considering. The relationship between community engagement and SEO outcomes is an area where new hires can add value relatively quickly, particularly in sectors where brand visibility and trust are important ranking signals. It is worth discussing during onboarding whether this is a channel the business has invested in and whether there is appetite to do so.

The Structural Problem Nobody Talks About

There is a broader issue in SEO recruitment that I think is worth naming directly. Many businesses hire for SEO without a clear view of what they are trying to achieve from organic search, how it fits into their overall acquisition strategy, or what a realistic timeline for results looks like. They hire someone, expect results within a quarter, do not see them, and conclude that either SEO does not work or the person they hired is not good enough.

Sometimes the second conclusion is correct. But often the problem is the absence of a coherent strategy, not the absence of a competent practitioner. An SEO hire cannot compensate for a business that has not decided what it wants organic search to do. They can execute, optimise, and improve, but they cannot define the strategy if no one has defined the business objectives that the strategy should serve.

I have seen this pattern repeatedly across agency and in-house environments. A business hires an SEO manager, gives them a login and a vague mandate, and waits. The SEO manager does work that is technically sound but strategically misaligned because no one told them what the business actually needed. The results are disappointing. The hire is blamed. The cycle repeats.

The fix is not a better interview process, though that helps. The fix is deciding what you need from SEO before you start recruiting for it. That means understanding your current organic performance, identifying the gaps, and being specific about what a successful hire would change in the business within a defined timeframe. That level of clarity makes the job description better, the interview process sharper, and the evaluation of candidates more accurate. It also makes it far more likely that whoever you hire will actually succeed.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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