How to Choose the Right SEO Consultant for Your Small Business

If you want to hire someone to do SEO for your small business, you might not be sure how to choose the right one, and I want to help you figure out how to choose the right SEO consultant for your small business. There are lots of consultants out there; they likely offer similar services at varying price points. Sometimes it's hard to know what you're getting when you hire someone, especially if you're not super familiar with what you're hiring them to do. If you've ever found yourself wanting to hire a consultant or agency but worried that you will make a mistake, I hope today's post will help you.

 

I've been in SEO for over 15 years and marketing for more than 25. I've worked with a lot of consultants and agencies over the years, and I can tell you there's a big difference between them. I've worked with great ones, and unfortunately, I've also worked with terrible ones (or cleaned up the messes that bad consultants made for clients).

 

Let's walk through what an SEO consultant should do for your business, what to watch out for when hiring someone, what work they'll likely do, how much it might cost, and what types of questions to ask to make sure you're hiring someone who will be a good fit for your business.

 

What Does an SEO Consultant Actually Do?

A good SEO consultant will help you determine how visible your business is online, if you have the right content on your site, and if you're attracting the right traffic. When I start working with SEO consulting clients, I often run a series of baseline reports so that I can understand what's working and what's not working with their business.

 

Your SEO consultant will likely ask for access to your website analytics so they can review your website's performance data and better understand what's happening right now.

 

They'll likely also ask you for the keywords you're trying to rank for right now (if you know) so they can determine if what you're doing is working and if the keywords you're using are the right ones. If you haven't done any SEO work on your site on your own or used someone to do it for you, they will likely skip this step, and that's OK.

 

They may ask for access to your Google Search Console account so they can see how your site is being crawled and indexed by Google. They could also run a crawl to find any broken links on your website, and they might run a backlink report to see how authoritative your website is in Google's eyes and which sites are linking to you.

 

The benefit of hiring an SEO consultant for your small business is that they should have the background to know which numbers matter to your business, how to understand them, and, more importantly, what to do to help your business do better.

 

Once the consultant has reviewed the data, they should use that to craft an SEO strategy for your business. This strategy could include adding new pages or blog posts to your website, editing pages you have on the site, selecting new keywords to use for SEO, or changing optimization that someone has already done on your site that isn't working.

 

Red Flags to Watch For When Hiring a Small Business SEO Consultant

A few things should make you pause before signing with anyone:

 

• They guarantee a #1 ranking or a specific ranking position. Nobody controls Google's algorithm, and anyone who's promising you guaranteed #1 rankings is either inexperienced or is going to focus on keywords that no one searches for (sure, you can rank quickly for something no one searches for, but that's not going to help you grow your business)
• They talk about a proprietary process or trade secrets, things they know that other people don't know, but can't or won't explain what needs to be done in language that you understand.
• They can't tell you how or when you'll get updates
• They talk almost entirely about backlinks or technical metrics, with nothing about your content, your customers, or your actual business goals.
• They can't point you to a specific example of results for a business like yours.
• They're very vague about their background, experience, or past clients they've worked with

 

What Services Should Be Included in a Small Business SEO Consulting Program?

Before you hire a small business SEO consultant, make sure you know what they're going to do for your business. You want to be sure it's explained in a way that you understand and written down in a document you can both reference moving forward so that you know you're getting what you've paid for. You want to sign a contract between you and the consultant.

 

They will likely suggest these types of projects for your SEO program:

 

• Keyword research (make sure this is specific and tied to your business and looking at the competitiveness of your niche)
• A technical review of your site (site speed, indexing issues, structure)
• Title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags reviewed or rewritten
• Guidance on your content strategy, not just a list of keywords to sprinkle in
• Some consideration of AI search visibility
• A clear way to track whether it's working, and a documented plan you can reference later

If a proposal is missing more than one or two of these, ask why.

 

Key Qualities to Look For in an SEO Consultant

Beyond the services themselves, pay attention to how they operate:

 

• Do they offer case studies or experience relevant to your industry or business size?
• Do they talk in a way that you understand without a background in SEO? If you can't understand their explanation of what they're doing, that's a problem, not a sign of expertise
• A willingness to explain their reasoning instead of just telling you to trust them or their process
• A track record with other clients they've worked with over the years

Questions to Ask Before You Hire an SEO Consultant

These are the questions you should be asking yourself or them during the research and decision process. You want to make sure you hire the best fit for you, not just the cheapest person.

 

Questions to research or ask before you make a decision:

• Can you show me case studies specific to my industry or business model? (It's not a requirement that they've worked with someone in your niche, but it's good to know that they've worked with businesses that are similar in size to you)
• How do you decide which keywords to target for a business like mine?
• What's included and are there extras?
• How do you measure whether the work is actually succeeding?

Additional questions that can be helpful:

• What would the first 30 days look like if I hired you?
• How often will I hear from you, and in what format?
• What's a realistic timeline before I should expect to see results?
• Do you focus on AI optimization too, or just Google?

If they can't or won't answer all of your questions, then that tells you more than anything. Be careful who you hire. You're trusting them to help grow your business.

 

 

What it Costs to Hire an SEO Consultant

The cost of hiring a small-business SEO consultant will vary. Some charge a few hundred dollars, some charge thousands. It's anywhere from $500-$5,000 or more per month. I know that's a huge difference in costs. I wrote a post on this recently that might help you: how much SEO actually costs for a small business.

 

Your costs will vary depending on their experience and what you need or want done. Some consultants offer one-time projects, and others only take on people with ongoing monthly retainers. I mostly do one-time projects with my clients and get them set up with SEO for Google and AI search. I provide either the SEO foundation for the site or the SEO foundation along with the content strategy for the site.

 

You will likely get quotes in similar price ranges. Be sure to ask what's included in each one so that you can really compare. A word of caution: some will include a certain number of backlinks being built each month. Watch out for those — they seem super valuable; however, the links that someone can guarantee they can build each month generally come from not-so-great places. Often, when companies sell link building as a part of their package, they have lots of websites they control that they can link from. This isn't a great link-building strategy, but I still see it a lot, especially in small business SEO programs.

 

Request Proof of Their SEO Skills

Don't just take someone's word for their results. Ask for:

 

• Case studies
• Reviews or testimonials
• Their background or education in SEO — where did they learn their skills?

 

How Do You Know What's Best for Your Business?

There are different ways to manage your small business SEO program. You can hire someone to get it set up (like an SEO consultant), you can hire someone to manage it fully for you (like a consultant or agency) or you can learn how to do it yourself (in a group program or working with someone one-on-one). What you have to think about is what's going to be the best option for your business.

 

The costs will vary based on how much work you want someone else to do for you. Learning how to do SEO in a group program is the most affordable way to learn SEO from me. I teach small business SEO in Simple SEO Content and work with a small group of entrepreneurs over a 6-month period to teach them how to do SEO and how to create the content strategy for their business to grow.

 

I also offer SEO consulting and one-on-one marketing coaching or consulting.

 

My one-time set up SEO consulting programs include: SEO Foundations – Get Visible Package covers your keyword research, title tags, meta descriptions, copy review, and implementation, for $3,000, one time. My all-in-one package includes all of that plus a full content strategy for your next 12 blog posts, for around $6,000. Both are one-time engagements, not ongoing contracts.

 

If you'd rather learn how to do this yourself with someone guiding you, I also offer 1:1 marketing consulting, or you can join my group program, Simple SEO Content, and learn it alongside other small business owners.

 

FAQ: How Do I Choose the Right SEO Consultant?

Look past the sales pitch and ask for specifics: case studies relevant to your business, a clear list of what's included, honest answers about timeline and cost, and a willingness to explain their process in plain language. If someone can't do those four things, keep looking. If you want my help with your SEO, let's chat.