Hiring an SEO specialist starts with naming your actual problem: a site search engines struggle to crawl and understand, or pages nobody has a reason to rank. Then run an audit exercise on a real site with planted issues and ask for the fixes ranked by impact against effort. Anyone promising specific positions by a date is guessing.
Agency-side consultants have seen dozens of sites and know which fixes actually moved something, which is exactly the pattern recognition an in-house team lacks. In-house specialists from content-heavy or retail sites bring depth on one property and usually know how to work with developers. The rarest and most useful profile is the developer who drifted into technical work on crawling, rendering and site structure, because they can implement rather than only recommend. This field has a very loud public layer, so treat published case studies as claims to verify rather than evidence, and always ask what the person personally changed. Describe the stack and the mandate in the [SEO specialist job description](/job-descriptions/seo-specialist).
The technical reality and the route to shipping. Name the content management system, the framework, whether pages are rendered in the browser or on the server, and how often you deploy. Say who writes code, how a change gets into a release, and how much developer time the role can count on. State whether the mandate is technical, content-led or both, whether they own the content calendar or advise it, and what your position is on paid links so nobody arrives with the wrong playbook. List what has already been tried and failed. Specialists judge a role almost entirely on whether their recommendations will ever ship, and if you are also fixing job pages, say whether the [careers page builder](/careers-page-builder) is in scope.
Give them a real site to audit, ideally a staging copy with planted problems: a blocked path in the robots file, a canonical tag pointing at a redirect, duplicate title patterns generated by a template, thin pages produced at scale, and important pages with almost no internal links pointing at them. Ask for a prioritised list with impact against effort, what they would measure, and what they would need from a developer. The signal you are reading for is prioritisation and business reasoning, not detection. Strong candidates ask about the business goal before recommending anything and put the template-level fix above the one-page fix. Weak candidates return an unedited tool export with severity labels attached.
Four stages with a developer involved early. A screen on mandate and stack. The audit review, with an engineer in the room to test whether the candidate can explain a change precisely enough to be implemented. A search-intent conversation: given this query, what kind of page should exist, what does the results page tell you about what readers expect, and what would you not build. Then an expectations conversation about what they would commit to in the first quarter, which should be about diagnosis, fixes shipped and content published rather than positions. Ask about a site migration that went badly, since anyone experienced has one. Keep the [SEO specialist interview questions](/interview-questions/seo-specialist) tied to the audit they submitted.
The applicant pool is wide and quality varies enormously, so the written audit is not optional and it will do most of your filtering. Expect to review many superficially similar profiles before two or three separate themselves. What closes a good specialist is evidence that work will actually ship: your deploy cadence, a developer who will take their tickets, and a content budget. They will also want to know whether leadership understands that organic results build over months rather than weeks. Say it out loud in the offer conversation. The same discipline applies to finding them, so treat your own [candidate sourcing software](/candidate-sourcing-software) searches as a targeted exercise rather than a broad job advertisement.
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