Welcome to our guide where we share our tips on how to find a freelance SEO Consultant/Expert for hire. You are probably here because you are wondering what to look for in your effort to find and hire a freelance SEO Consultant. Have you asked yourself the following question?

What does a Search Engine Optimization Consultant do? Or how to find the top professional SEO Freelancer?

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Do you already know what you want for your firm?

 

If you are a company owner who knows what they want and is ready to start exploring a collaboration with an independent SEO Specialist, you may fill in my contact/questionnaire form in order to ask me for an SEO quote.

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This is Joanna Vaiou, an SEO Professional services company owner. I am in the SEO space since March 2009. To learn more about why people choose to work with me, you may visit my “Why” information section.

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Here, I am sharing a resourceful free guide and overview article for the USA and global companies interested in hiring SEO freelance consultant specialist services to manage their SEO.

How to Hire a Freelance SEO Services Consultant

One option is to find someone with great reviews from online job sites like Elance, Freelancer, Upwork, etc.

Alternatively, you can go to your country’s Google search engine and start typing keywords like:

1. SEO Expert + “your city”
2. SEO Specialist + “your city”
3. SEO Consultant + “your city”, (or + “your country”, or without the localization identifier which makes it even more difficult for someone to rank on the 1st page of Google).

Next, hit the search button and start contacting all the companies and individual freelancers who rank with their websites on the first page of Google SERP for the aforementioned keywords.

The above is always a good sign that they know what they are doing.

If they can rank themselves for the competitive keywords in their industry, they can probably work and bring results for your company in your industry.

Why Hire an SEO Freelancer?

If you are a company owner that does not have an SEO Specialist in-house to run your SEO and want to assign it to a trustworthy, reliable, reputable external SEO Specialist to take the reins, the best choice is to find and hire one. Before you do so, I recommend you do the following in order to avoid costly mistakes.

Learn SEO to Arm Yourself

Before hiring a professional SEO services specialist/consultant remotely, please educate yourself enough about how SEO works.

What does SEO stand for in business?

SEO Expert Interview Questions

Are you wondering what questions to ask your future SEO specialist in order to get the right feedback and make a well-informed decision?

The process of searching and hiring SEO Freelancers can end up a living nightmare.

There are tons of options to choose from.

Finding and hiring the best SEO Consultant/Specialist shouldn’t be complicated.

What should I ask my freelance SEO Consultant?

• What is your opinion about the current condition of my website?

Since you are hiring someone for the specific tasks of SEO, it is very important to ask their opinion regarding your website and its current status.

Even though you might be thinking that your website has never looked better, they probably won’t be on the same page as you.

So, by asking for their opinion, even you will be able to get an understanding of the changes which would need to be made on your website.

In addition, you will also be able to know more about their wisdom behind their opinion, thus widening your horizon of knowledge.

• How long have you been in the SEO business/industry?

One surefire way of finding the best SEO Freelancer is by asking how long they have been in the industry.

This is because a capable and experienced SEO Person would have years of experience to fall back on.

In addition, you would also be assured about the fact that they have witnessed different kinds of trends in their era.

Thus, by integrating all this in your project, they would be able to meet your expectations and even surpass them.

• Would it be possible to look at your portfolio?

To gain a better understanding of the kind of services that they seem to provide, one of the best options would be to look at their portfolio.

This would allow you to understand if they are indeed suitable for your company or not.

In addition, you can also do comparisons regarding the pricing strategy that they seem to employ.

By understanding the differences and the causes behind them, you will be able to judge which one would be worth your money.

These questions will help you make the smartest choice when it comes to choosing the right Search Engine Optimization Specialist to optimize and boost your company’s numbers and presence.

In more detail, take our following tips into account before recruiting a freelance Search Engine Optimization Consultant (Strategist or Specialist) online.

SEO Case Studies

Protect yourself and ask the freelance SEO expert you are interviewing to show you some proof of work for at least 3 projects that have delivered results.

Please keep in mind that in order to make the best decision, it is in your best interest to have at least basic SEO knowledge so you can evaluate better what each freelance SEO consultant presents you.

Access my guide next:

SEO Training for beginners – learn SEO free guide.

Look at the following two (2) SEO Performance Case Study of mine for example that I send to my interested potential new clients as a first step.

How much does it cost to hire an SEO specialist?

When hiring a freelance Organic Search Engine Optimization consultant or Specialist the first thing on your mind will be the cost.

The following factors define the SEO Pricing that SEO freelancing experts will offer to you to run your SEO:

1. The level of proved Expertise, Trustworthiness, and Authoritativeness of your freelance SEO Specialist.
2. Your industry.
3. Your products’ type (high-end, low-end).
4. Your services type (high-end, low-end).
5. The strength and resources of your competition on Google (in your industry)
6. Your company’s SEO goals.
7. Your target Ideal Audience (Local, National, International).
8. Your business model and how you make money.
9. The country you buy SEO services from (SEO offers from India will very likely differ from the SEO offers from the United States of America).
10. The type of SEO services you buy (one-off, monthly-ongoing, consulting only, etc).

As a business owner, you think about profit and loss from any decision you make.

Therefore, if you have any experience with shopping around for the best freelance SEO consultants, you understand how time-consuming the process can be.

You will find an option for every imaginable price range that will promise similar quality results.

You get what you pay for. So be very careful with those who promise you fast results for low-end prices.

Since a very large portion of your company’s success depends on choosing the right SEO consultant/expert, you can’t afford a bad choice.

So, in an attempt to make matters easier for you, we have listed below some of the most common pay structures which are employed by Expert SEO Freelancers.

This is regardless of the current size of your company.

• Hourly

If you think that you can do your job and bring the desired results for your website and brand on Google, with just a few hours with a specialist, this pricing option is for you.

Expect to pay $80 – $150 or more per hour to have consulting meetings with your SEO Consultant or have them work hourly on your project on specific tasks. According to the level of experience and years in business the freelance SEO expert has, hourly rates will vary.

The image below is from AHREFS Top SEO Software Company.

 

• Monthly Retainers

The monthly pricing model is undoubtedly one of the most common pricing strategies that the top SEO specialized companies employ.

SEO is an ongoing process. You may think your company can undertake the challenge of SEO with a one-off deal.

In this case, you will most likely end up disappointed.

By adopting this pricing model, you will enjoy a significant amount of cost savings as you will always have the support of your SEO specialist to adjust their optimization and marketing strategies when things and rules change at Google.

Having an SEO expert by your side will ensure that the best and latest best practices will be applied to your brand’s properties in order to sustain and increase the visibility of your company on Google, despite the frequent Google algorithmic updates.

• One-Off Pricing (per project)

If you want to do a one-time optimization, doing a complete OnSite SEO audit can come at a one-off cost.

There, you can optimize all aspects and factors that have to do with the code, the site architecture, the content (text and images), and the user experience details on your website.

The cost of hiring an SEO Consultant for a one-off OnSite SEO project depends on:

1. The size of your website (the more pages you have on your site, the more time and human resources will be required to improve their stats).
2. The number and type of technical errors (the harder the technical errors your website is to fix, the more expensive it will be to fix them as the level of expertise and experience of the technically responsible person must be top).
3. The level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness the SEO freelancer has and how they evaluate themselves and their work.

Prices can rack up from few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars (i.e for large enterprise websites that require multiple team members with their own expertise each to improve the website’s health and organic status as a whole).

For one SEO off-priced project like this, you will need at least a team of 3 experts to work together:

• A web development specialist (someone very tech-savvy).
• An SEO Strategist (the person who will lead the whole team of different specialties).
• An SEO copywriter that will create from scratch or optimize the content on your website on demand, as per the SEO Strategist’s guidelines.

A one-off SEO Optimization service can include the following services:

1. Technical SEO Audit
2. Existing Content audit
3. Keyword Research
4. Goals Setting per Page
5. New Content creation to assist the keyword goals
6. On-page SEO
7. Logfile analysis
8. Core web vitals fixed
9. Image SEO optimization

With the above, you can expect to improve your website’s health on Google and improved Google rankings and organic traffic to your site.

The project-based pricing can work best for you if you already have an established site and you are close to the 1st page for some of your money keywords.

If you have a new website with zero authority you can expect to go from nowhere to the top 100 organic results for tour target keywords.

This way, you would not need to deal with the additional hassle of keeping records of monthly payments.

Takeaways

The best way to choose a professional SEO services consultant is to look at the quality of work and the results they are delivering.

Don’t be shy.

Ask them to show you.

If you show them you are serious, they will have no reason to hide their results.

Personally, when I reply to my SEO Inquiries for my SEO services with an SEO Offer, if the potential new client can afford it, I offer them a video meeting where I show them my SEO Client administrative dashboard and the results that we experience through the years of our collaboration.

As long as you do your own due diligence and set clear expectations on both ends, SEO will reward you and help you build your brand’s targeted visibility, authority, trustworthiness, sales revenue, and reputation online.

Contact me for a Freelance SEO Services Quote

If you are ready to speak with a top freelance SEO Consultant who can show you around the actual results they bring to their partnering companies, with a proven success record and love for setting realistic expectations by educating you around SEO, fill in my SEO Questionnaire here, so I can review your business request, as soon as possible.

SEO Expert – SEO freelancer – Freelance SEO Specialist & Consultant

Joanna Vaiou