Hiring for SEO roles - a guide

Most companies do a poor job of hiring someone to fill an SEO role because they don’t know what they want that person to do.

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From my years in and around SEO, most companies do a poor job of hiring someone to fill an SEO role because they don’t know what they want that person to do or have unrealistic expectations for SEO.

Therefore, the first step in hiring for any SEO role is to assess your REAL SEO needs. From my experience, sometimes this process results in choosing not to hire anyone at all or to hire an agency. Either of those outcomes is far preferable to an unnecessary or poor hire.

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I recently discussed the decision to hire an SEO manager for a company that had failed in its SEO efforts with multiple agencies. Examining their expectations from SEO showed that their hoped full-time hire would fail too, and failed hires are much worse than failed agency relationships.

(This business was a B2B SaaS company and had fired two previous agencies for not hitting their numbers. The lack of a clear SEO funnel and opportunity for success is why I am not always bullish on the fit for SEO in B2B. )

Therefore, I always believe a sober needs assessment is required before creating a job description or conducting interviews for SEO.

Assess your needs

In doing a needs assessment, consider the following questions:

• What are your primary business goals, and how can SEO support them? Is there an SEO user who is a part of your or your competition's buyers' journey, and are you missing out on that user because of a lack of SEO resources?

• What are the current strengths and weaknesses of your website's SEO performance? Are there technical gaps where an SEO is not a leading engineering partner's thought leader? Does the content team lack SEO guidance? How much guidance do they need?

• What specific SEO tasks do you need help with (e.g., keyword research, content optimization, link building, technical SEO)? Some areas of SEO focus might already exist on the team, so you want to complement, not replace.

• What is your budget for SEO? When you look at the all-in costs of an employee, it may turn out that an agency or even no SEO support is the better use of financial resources.

By clearly defining your SEO requirements, you'll be better equipped to find the right candidate to meet your needs.

Determine the level of expertise required

Once you've identified your SEO needs, you can start to build a profile of the ideal candidate. Look for someone with the following skills and experience. The specific focus areas of SEO can be very different, and there’s no need to have someone who can do everything if you already have that on the team. Having a subject matter expert is better than a jack of all trades.

• Technical SEO expertise: Identifying and addressing technical issues impacting your website's search engine visibility. A technical SEO expert should have excellent technical skills and be able to converse freely with engineers. A technical expert is probably overkill if your site does not have thousands of pages requiring that level of expertise.

• Keyword research and content optimization: The ability to conduct user research and translate that into SEO strategies and content. If you don’t have customer advocacy teams, this person could/should also do that.

• Link building: I believe this should be someone with sales and partnership capabilities rather than SEO, so an SEO manager who has done sales in a past role will be perfect.

• Analytics and reporting: The ability to track, analyze, and report on the performance of your SEO efforts and, most importantly, be able to communicate insights.

• Adaptability and continuous learning: The ability to stay up-to-date with the latest SEO trends and algorithm changes and adapt their strategies accordingly.

Additionally, consider the level of experience you're looking for, whether it's an entry-level SEO specialist, a mid-level SEO manager, or a seasoned SEO consultant. I have seen many job descriptions asking for someone with 10 years of experience, but they can do just fine with someone more junior.

Write the job description

Considering your SEO needs and candidate profile, create a detailed job description that outlines what you want the person to be successful at rather than what you want them to do.

Leave the actions to them unless you know what they should do during the day. Hiring for SEO is competitive, so don’t make your role look like they will be micromanaged and have unrealistic expectations. If you want the best candidates, the smartest SEOs will want a great canvas to paint a masterpiece and make that come across in the job description.

Some other job description tips:

• Skip education requirements: some of the best digital marketers I know didn’t attend college. Making education a requirement unnecessarily limits your pool

• Don’t copy another company’s job description. Most people write terrible JDs. Don’t poison your process from the start.

• Don’t outline which tools they need to use. The best marketers will learn your tools, but even better, you should clarify that if they like a particular tool, you will pay for it.

• Remote vs. in-office. Even if you are fully remote, I would build in some in-person time for SEO, so ensure you have that in the JD. SEOs who influence the product need to be able to build relationships by meeting their stakeholders in person.

Interviewing

I have been on the panel for many SEO interviews and have been interviewed multiple times for SEO roles. Every company will have its interview processes, but based on my experience, these are things you should add.

• Writing test. In many cases, content is an integral part of SEO, and if budget or time is limited, an SEO leader can jump in and write content (or use AI) independently. Test a candidate’s written communication abilities by giving them a short writing assignment.

• Presentation abilities. SEO should have a line of sight to company leadership and you want to know how they might perform in an executive briefing. Have them present an idea in slides.

• Don’t ask dumb questions that sound like they came off a quiz. I have been asked in interviews what my favorite SEO element is or my thoughts on the algorithm. This is all irrelevant.

• Use case studies. Ask the candidates to solve real-world challenges

• Include engineers in an interview process to test their technical abilities AND see how they interact with someone very technical.

Communicate clearly with the candidates throughout the evaluation process and provide timely feedback. There are a limited number of fantastic SEO candidates, so don’t lose out on a great one because you didn’t get back to them in time.

Hiring the right SEO leader can be a game-changer for your business. It can help improve your online visibility, drive more traffic to your website, and ultimately boost your bottom line. Hiring the wrong one can lead to frustration and declarations that SEO doesn’t work.

You may not be an SEO expert, but the knowledge you can gain by preparing for this hire will go a long way to making a successful hire.

Can I help you?

If you are looking for a new role OR hiring for SEO, please reply if I can connect you to great people in my network.

Also, post your job or resume on SEOjobs.com

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