What should I ask or look out for when hiring someone for SEO?

Yes, you should definitely watch out for anyone who promises fast results and top rankings. Ask them about their previous clients and contact those clients of theirs regarding their experiences.

Which reminds me, there was this Entrepreneur article about this. It's quite dated, but it's still relevant today. It might help you out with finding SEO specialists although the writer made this with SEO agencies in mind.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/253204

Best of luck to you!

Learn a little about SEO yourself and you can ask specific questions about your business. How would they optimize title tags on a certain page etc.

Promising first page or quick results isn't really a deterrent. We've gotten first page results and quick results for clients.

Here are a couple basic questions to see if they know their stuff:

- What's your process of doing on-page optimizations?

You're looking for specific things. Like: scrape your website with screaming frog, add alt text to images, check keyword density on pages, add lsi (latent search intent) related keywords to pages, research the top pages ranking for your keywords and run a cora report to see what they're doing and how etc.

- What's your process for off-page optimization?

Again, you're looking for specific things. Like: outreach marketing for the content we write, claim and optimize social media profiles, claim and optimize directory listings, clean up directory listings, clean up social media profiles, recover dead links, search for unlinked mentions, reverse engineer competitor links etc.

- What's the latest Google update your prepared clients for? What Google update hit your clients the hardest? How did you help them recover?

Also, you're going to look at their fee as an indicator. It's usually a good tip-off to what you're getting. Anything below 2k per month I'd stay away from. There's hardly enough money for them to properly do what they need to and turn a profit.

You can read about the search engine, algorithm, SEO technique and SEO tools
I will suggest a site
searchengineland.com is the best site for SEO learners
and you can learn about SEO basic to this sites

Both that you mentioned are huge red flags. Those promising first page or fast results may get you there, but it won't last. I would look at the content strategy used by the companies as content will become the foundation of your overall SEO efforts.

Benjamin Ehinger

If someone promises you "first page" results tell them you get to pick the keyword phrases and the search engines they are found in. It's easy to get first page listing for keywords and phrases that get little or no traffic.

Also, newly indexed sites and pages will often rank well for a short period of time then plummet into the SERPs abyss on page 483 where it does you no good. You want to have your rankings hold up over time (which will require some ongoing attention and/or lots of traffic to your site).

Pure numbers of back links aren't so important as links from authority sites in your niche and high traffic sites that are household names.

Above all, keep performance as the main determining factor for continued payment from you to the SEO company. Make their performance standards measurable, with reachable goals, but make them stretch by increasing expectations over time (which should happen naturally).

Make the SEO company specify, up front, exactly who pays for what so you don't get stuck with unanticipated invoices.

The very best to you,

Steve