How To Hire An SEO Company: Directly From Google

Hiring the right SEO company can potentially improve your website's visibility, save your team time, and uncover opportunities for long-term organic growth. Hiring the wrong company, however, can waste money or even damage your website's search performance and reputation.

Google maintains its own guidance on how to determine whether you need an SEO and what to consider before hiring one.

What Is an SEO?

SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or can refer to a "search engine optimizer," meaning a professional who performs SEO work.

Deciding to hire an SEO is a significant decision. Many SEO companies, agencies, and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

• Review of your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development, including hosting, redirects, error pages, and JavaScript
• Content development
• Keyword research
• Management of online business development campaigns
• SEO training
• Expertise in specific markets and geographies
• Optimization for generative AI search experiences

Google also makes one point particularly clear: paying Google for advertising does not improve your organic rankings.

Do You Need an SEO Expert?

An SEO expert is someone trained to improve your visibility in search engines.

Some businesses can handle basic SEO work internally. Google's SEO Starter Guide provides a useful introduction to the fundamentals and can help business owners understand what an SEO professional should be doing.

However, you may want to consider hiring an SEO professional if you need help with technical problems, competitive search markets, content strategy, website migrations, or a detailed audit of your existing website.

If you're considering a website redesign or launching a new site, involving an SEO early can also help ensure the website is built with search visibility in mind from the beginning.

A good SEO can also improve an existing website.

Choosing an SEO Company

Before beginning your search for an SEO company, become an educated customer and understand the basics of how search engines work.

Google provides an in-depth explanation of how Google Search crawls, indexes, and serves pages, along with its current Search documentation and best practices.

Google's old "Webmaster Guidelines" terminology has now largely been replaced by Google Search Essentials and its broader Search Central documentation.

You should also be prepared to implement the recommendations your SEO provides. SEO improvements frequently require changes to website content, development, structure, internal linking, and other elements.

If you are not prepared to make those changes, hiring an SEO may provide limited value.

Questions to Ask an SEO Company

Google recommends evaluating potential SEO providers carefully.

Useful questions include:

• Can you show examples of your previous work and share success stories?
• Do you follow Google's Search Essentials and spam policies?
• Do you offer other marketing services that complement organic search?
• What results do you expect, and over what timeframe?
• How do you measure success?
• What experience do you have in my industry?
• What experience do you have in my country or city?
• What experience do you have with international websites?
• What are your most important SEO techniques?
• How long have you been in business?
• How will we communicate?
• Will you tell me what changes you make to my website?
• Will you explain your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

Be cautious of any SEO company that guarantees a specific ranking, particularly a guaranteed number-one position.

Google does not allow companies to pay for better organic rankings, and no legitimate SEO provider controls Google's ranking systems.

Make Sure the SEO Is Interested in Your Business

A strong SEO company should want to understand your business before recommending a strategy.

Your SEO should ask questions such as:

• What makes your business or service unique and valuable to customers?
• Who are your customers?
• How does your business make money?
• How can search visibility support those goals?
• What other advertising and marketing channels are you using?
• Who are your competitors?

If an SEO provider begins recommending tactics before understanding your customers, competitors, business model, and objectives, that should raise questions.

SEO should support business goals, not exist solely to increase rankings or traffic.

Check the SEO Company's References

Check references before hiring an SEO company.

Ask previous clients whether the provider:

• Delivered useful recommendations
• Communicated clearly
• Was easy to work with
• Explained its work
• Produced meaningful results
• Followed through on commitments

Past performance does not guarantee future results, but references can help you understand how the company operates and what it is like to work with them.

What Is an SEO Audit?

Before committing to a larger SEO campaign, consider asking for a technical and search audit of your website.

An SEO audit is a comprehensive review of a website that identifies issues and opportunities affecting organic search performance.

Google recommends that a prospective SEO should be able to explain:

• What needs to be changed
• Why those changes are necessary
• What outcomes may reasonably be expected
• How much work will be involved

You may need to provide the SEO with access to Google Search Console.

At this stage, avoid giving unnecessary ownership privileges. Google provides different Search Console user and permission levels, so access can be limited based on what the SEO actually needs.

If an SEO guarantees that the recommendations from an audit will put your website in first place in Google, find someone else.

SEO Competitive Analysis

An SEO audit should consider both your website and the competitive environment in which it operates.

Whether your intended audience is local, national, or global, understanding your competitors can help determine the level of investment and strategy required to compete organically.

A competitive analysis may examine:

• Competitor rankings
• Content coverage
• Keyword targeting
• Website structure
• Backlink profiles
• Local visibility
• Search intent
• SERP features

This context helps explain not only what is wrong with a website, but also what must improve for it to compete.

What Is Delivered in an SEO Audit?

Conducting an extensive SEO audit is often the first step in understanding areas of improvement for a website.

A thorough analysis should examine both on-page and off-page SEO components. From your backlink profile to title tags, internal links, indexation, technical performance, and content, relevant variables should be assessed to determine what may be limiting search visibility.

Anyone can use a "Free SEO Report" tool to get a basic overview of potential problems.

The difficulty is interpreting those findings correctly.

For example, simply having text in a title tag does not mean the title properly targets the page's search intent.

Likewise, a low page-speed score does not automatically mean compressing a few images will solve the underlying problem. Performance issues may involve scripts, third-party integrations, JavaScript, server configuration, or other technical factors.

A website should therefore be reviewed by an experienced search professional who understands how individual technical and content issues affect the larger SEO strategy.

What You Should Receive After the Audit

At Conversion Pipeline, an SEO audit can include a detailed technical document outlining website issues that need to be addressed.

Depending on the website, findings may cover:

• Broken internal links
• Crawl and indexation issues
• Redirects
• Titles and meta descriptions
• Heading structure
• Internal linking
• Canonicalization
• Structured data
• Page performance
• Content issues
• Technical SEO problems

For larger audits, the technical findings can be extensive, so we may work directly with the client's development or technical team to review implementation requirements.

We can also provide an executive-level explanation of the findings that translates technical SEO terminology into clear business language.

The objective is for both technical teams and decision-makers to understand what the audit uncovered, why the problems matter, and what should be implemented to improve organic search performance.

A strong SEO audit should not simply provide a list of errors. It should explain priorities, expected impact, and clear recommendations for what to do next.