Hire an SEO consultant who answers for pipeline, not rankings

Most guides on how to hire an SEO consultant are written by people hoping to be hired, so everything reads like a reason to hire them. This one is different in two ways: it gives you the questions that expose an executor posing as a strategist, and it tells you plainly when I'm the wrong hire. Both will save you money.

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The four moments people actually hire me

Quoted from the sales calls that started real engagements:

01.

Rankings dropped and leads stopped

A Head of Marketing told me: "we dropped to the second page for our main keywords, and there's been literally three weeks that we haven't received any leads at all." When organic is a revenue channel, a ranking slide is a pipeline emergency.

02.

Nobody in-house owns SEO

"There's no one specialist on SEO." A capable marketing team, a generalist covering five channels, and no one whose job is to know why organic behaves the way it does. Fine while it works. Expensive the day it stops.

03.

A big change is coming

A redesign, a replatform, a rebrand, a merger. The pages producing your leads are about to be touched, and the fear is exactly what one returning client named: "we're going to do something" and lose what works.

04.

Paid is carrying everything

One client was getting 75 to 80% of leads from AdWords while organic stayed flat for years. Every new lead rented, none owned. Hiring senior SEO help was the diversification play, not a traffic hobby.

How to hire well: the four checks

Run these regardless of whether you talk to me. They filter out 80% of bad hires before a contract is signed.

Define the job before the hire

Write down what broken looks like: leads, not rankings. "Organic produces 4 qualified calls per month by Q3" is a job description. "Improve our SEO" is a wish. If you can't define it yet, that definition is the first deliverable to ask for.

Test for strategy, not vocabulary

Anyone can talk crawl budgets. Ask instead: "which of our pages would you cut?" and "how would you forecast what this produces?" A senior consultant answers with a reasoning chain from search demand to your CRM. An executor changes the subject to tactics.

Demand the revenue connection

Ask how they'll report. If the answer is a rankings dashboard, keep looking. The report you want reads: these pages, these leads, this pipeline, this is what we change next month and why.

Check the exit before you sign

The most revealing question: "what happens when you leave?" Consultants who plan their own exit build capability. Consultants who dodge the question build dependency. Ask to see what a handover looks like.

What hiring me actually looks like

One free strategy call, where I tell you honestly whether there's an opportunity worth paying for. If there is, I run the analysis before you commit: your organic performance, your ICP, your pipeline, and a forecast of what SEO should produce, with every assumption visible. One Head of Marketing took that analysis straight to her leadership and told me afterwards: "the way you work, revenue focus, it's been so easy to present that to the leadership."

The engagement itself is fractional: embedded in your team 1 to 2 days per week, senior ownership of the strategy, from €7,500 per month. It runs nine months and then ends by design, with your team running the system. Full detail on both pages, and the broader service overview lives on the B2B SEO consulting page.