SEO Is At Least Three Different Jobs
Search engine optimisation is sold as one discipline and practised as at least three, and hiring for the wrong one is the most common mistake made here.
- Technical: crawling, indexation, rendering, architecture, redirects, performance, migrations. This person reads log files, thinks in templates, and spends most of their time in a queue with developers.
- Content and search strategy: which queries matter, which buying stage they represent, what should exist to answer them, and how the site is structured around that.
- Off-site authority: earning citations and coverage through digital public relations, original research, partnerships and publishing worth referencing.
Diagnose before you hire. If a crawl finds 12,000 URLs and Search Console reports 400 indexed, no content or links help until that is fixed. If the site is technically clean but says nothing about the problem in the words buyers use, a technical audit returns a short list and no growth. The market sells link acquisition most loudly, which is why companies with indexation problems keep buying links.
Reading A Proposal: Deliverables Versus Activities
Read a proposal with one question in front of you: what will exist at the end of each month that does not exist now? Ongoing keyword research and optimisation is an activity, and activities can continue indefinitely without anything changing. A keyword-to-URL map covering the 120 commercial queries in the priority set, delivered in week three, is a deliverable, and can be found wrong.
Does the diagnosis precede the prescription? A proposal naming twelve months of tactics before anyone crawled the site was written before they met you. The right shape is a short diagnostic phase, then a plan derived from what it found.
Is success defined in business terms? Qualified enquiries, pipeline attributable to organic sessions, revenue by landing page group. Rankings and sessions are diagnostics, and a proposal that stops at traffic proposes to be judged on something that pays nobody.
Does it say what they need from you? A proposal asking for nothing has not thought about delivery. Access, developer time, a subject-matter expert and someone who can approve copy are all prerequisites.
The Claims That Should End The Conversation
These are not negotiating positions. They are evidence that the person either does not understand search or expects you not to.
- Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google's ranking systems. The only position anyone can guarantee is a paid one, and that is advertising.
- A relationship with Google, or a contact on the search team. Google Partner status is an advertising programme. It confers nothing in organic search.
- A proprietary algorithm or a secret method. What competent practices have is a documented workflow, which they should be able to walk you through.
- A fixed number of links per month. This prices a quantity when only quality matters, and creates an incentive to place links at volume, which is the behaviour Google's link spam policy targets.
- A retainer that begins with execution and has no diagnostic phase. You are paying for work chosen before anyone looked at your site.
One softer signal deserves attention: an SEO who will say nothing specific about what is wrong with your site during the sales process has either not looked or is withholding the diagnosis to make you pay for it.
What A Competent Audit Actually Covers
An audit is a diagnosis, not a tool export. What it should cover, roughly in this order:
- Measurement first: whether analytics and conversion tracking record reality, since every prioritisation downstream is weighted by those numbers.
- Crawl and indexation: what a crawler finds, what the sitemap declares, what Search Console reports as indexed, and the gaps between the three.
- Rendering: whether content and links exist without JavaScript.
- Architecture and internal linking: depth, orphan pages, whether priority pages are reachable.
- URL and redirect hygiene: chains, loops, parameters, duplicates, the residue of the last migration.
- Core Web Vitals from field data: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP at 200 milliseconds or less, CLS at 0.1 or less, assessed at the 75th percentile — not a Lighthouse screenshot.
- Query coverage: a keyword-to-URL map, cannibalisation, gaps against each buying stage.
What you want is a ranked list of changes, each with an expected effect, an owner and a rough effort estimate — short enough to take to a development manager and negotiate.
In-House, Agency, Or Consultant
| Model | Genuinely good at | Fails when |
|---|---|---|
| In-house | Institutional knowledge, daily access, sitting in sprint planning, compounding context | One person must cover technical, content and authority with no senior review, and it all leaves when they do |
| Agency | Breadth, tooling, several specialisms on one contract, pattern recognition across clients | The senior name in the pitch never reappears and the work goes to a junior carrying a dozen accounts |
| Consultant | Diagnosis, senior judgement, direction, unblocking one hard problem | You need volume execution: nobody writes sixty pages or runs an outreach programme alone |
For most mid-size B2B companies the honest answer is a combination: senior judgement setting direction and reviewing work, with in-house or agency capacity executing it. The common bad outcome is paying senior rates for direction and receiving junior execution.
If your real constraint is development capacity rather than search knowledge — and on corporate sites it usually is — an expensive external SEO will produce recommendations that sit in a backlog. Fix the delivery route first, or hire someone whose actual skill is getting technical work shipped inside a slow organisation.
What The Industry Is Overselling Right Now
The current upsell is AI search optimisation, sold as a separate service. Google states that AI Overviews and AI Mode are grounded in its core Search ranking systems, and that no new files, AI text files, markup or Markdown are required to appear in them. The llms.txt file sold as a deliverable is an independent proposal by Jeremy Howard, not a standard, and no major AI vendor is known to consume it in production.
Treat claims of a distinct AI search methodology as unproven causation. The work that plausibly helps is the work that already helped: pages that answer the question clearly, sound information architecture, and being cited by sources that carry weight.
Two smaller things are oversold. FAQPage markup, which stopped producing rich results in Google Search on 7 May 2026 — Google has not documented it as harmful, so it is neither a win nor a risk, and it should not appear as a deliverable. And content velocity, where pages published per month is the metric, which reliably produces a large site ranking for nothing.
What An SEO Needs From You, Which Is Rarely Budget
Most failed SEO engagements do not fail on skill. They fail because the recommendations could not be implemented, and the retainer was cancelled for lack of results that were never possible.
What to supply in week one:
- Access: CMS authoring, Search Console at full permission, analytics with configuration rights, the crawler allowed through the firewall, server logs if they exist, and staging.
- A development channel: a named developer, a route into the release cycle, an agreed severity path. Without this, an audit is a document.
- A subject-matter expert who answers questions, and someone who can approve copy within a week.
- Sales input: the questions buyers ask, the words they use, the objections that recur.
- A decision about what may change. If a brand team controls the product pages and will not permit edits, say so on day one.
If you cannot supply the development channel, say so during the sales process. A good practitioner re-scopes towards what marketing can change unilaterally. A poor one accepts the retainer and blames the backlog later.
Reporting To Insist On, And When To Judge
Insist on five things: the ranked action list with the status of each item and, where blocked, who is blocking it; Search Console clicks and impressions broken out by query group and landing page rather than as a site total; organic sessions through to key conversions and, where the CRM allows, pipeline; indexation counts against the pages you meant to have indexed; and a dated log of every site change, so effects match causes.
De-emphasise average position across all tracked keywords, and third-party authority scores presented as goals. They move for reasons unconnected to the work.
On timing: technical fixes can show in Search Console within weeks. In B2B the pipeline effect lags the traffic effect by roughly the length of the sales cycle. So judge different things at different times. In quarter one judge process: was the diagnosis specific, did work ship, is the blocker list honest. From quarter two, judge outcomes. If nothing shipped in three months, run the diagnosis on your own organisation before changing supplier, because the next one hits the same wall.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does SEO take to work?
It depends on what was wrong. Fixing a technical fault — pages blocked from indexing, a broken redirect set, a canonical pointing at the homepage — can show in Search Console within weeks. New content competing for commercial queries typically needs two to three quarters, longer on a domain with little existing authority.
In B2B there is a second lag: pipeline follows traffic by roughly the length of your sales cycle, so work that started performing in month four may not show in revenue until month ten.
What should an SEO engagement cost?
Think about what drives the figure rather than the figure itself, since rates move and vary by market. The drivers are the seniority of the person doing the work, whether content production and outreach are included or only recommendations, the size and complexity of the site, how many stakeholders the work must pass through, and whether a diagnostic phase is included.
The useful comparison is not between quoted totals but between what will exist at the end of each month.
Are SEO guarantees ever legitimate?
A guarantee about rankings is not, because no supplier controls Google's ranking systems and outcomes depend on competitors' actions as well as your own. Any promise of a specific position, a traffic percentage on a site nobody has crawled, or first-page placement within a fixed number of weeks should end the conversation.
Guarantees about delivery are legitimate and worth requesting: that a named audit arrives by a stated date, that a specified number of pages is produced, that a named senior person spends agreed time on the account.
Do we need someone to optimise our site for AI search?
Not as a separate service. Google documents that AI Overviews and AI Mode are grounded in its core Search ranking systems and that there are no additional requirements to appear in them — no new files, no special markup, no Markdown. The llms.txt file frequently sold as a deliverable is an independent proposal rather than a standard, and no major AI vendor is known to consume it in production.
What plausibly helps is unchanged: clear pages that answer real questions, sound site structure, and being cited by credible sources.