Hiring An SEO Expert

[finnegan]

I have a small niche business and I need to hire an SEO expert to rank me since this is not my specialty.

However, because it's such a small biz, it doesn't make sense to spend a ton of money on someone when the return won't be worth it. Because of that, I need to economize and go overseas.

If I do so, how can I best make sure that this person is not setting my site up for failure by getting me spammy backlinks and whatnot? Is there a list of things to watch out for so I can keep an eye on this person to make sure they are doing the job correctly?

 

[Bazooka]

Why not hire someone from here? Lots of people with good experience. Also, you need to dip your hands in SEO to know if someone is ripping you off or the person being honest with you.

 

[Ryuzaki]

If you want to watch your backlinks, you'll need access to a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, one that crawls and updates regularly. Those are the two I'd recommend.

Otherwise, in terms of things like page speed and user experience, there's tools you can use to measure improvements like Google's web.dev as the main one.

If you want to make sure new content or on-page changes are making a difference, you'll need to be watching your analytics and rank tracking for those pages.

Basically, all the usual SEO tools are the ones you'll need to become familiar with. If you aren't sure what to look out for, you'll need to be catching yourself up to speed on SEO 101 basics. You definitely need to understand what you're paying for so you're even aware of what to look out for. Teaching all of that is beyond any one post. The Crash Course would be a great place to start, by choosing the obvious chapters to read. That'll give you a great frame of reference so you at least know the lay of the land.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

Because of that, I need to economize and go overseas.

You won't save as much as you think outsourcing overseas. The competent people already sell to 'westerners' at 'western' prices...

You definitely need to understand what you're paying for so you're even aware of what to look out for.

And Ryu is 100% right here. If you just go round hiring people you will get ripped off - 99% of this industry is pure garbage. But that's because buyers don't know any different so people can make a lot of money just doing whatever they want for as cheap as possible (or because they don't know any better either).

I've had people tell me how awesome some agency is, how much cheaper they are than me etc. Then they send over a sample of the links they're buying. Most of the folks here would laugh their ass off if anyone tried sending them those links...

It's probably like that in most areas of SEO - here's your first months $500 worth of work. It's audit that they just copy pasted stuff from Semrush onto a template they borrowed from someone on social media etc type stuff is really common out there.