How to hire a truly great in-house SEO person

(one that is a perfect match for your industry and business)

With so many ways that poorly performed SEO can limit the growth of your website’s rankings, getting just the right person is imperative for all businesses.

These days everyone seems to call themselves an SEO expert as there is such an overload of readily available information online. Everyone with a marketing degree is able to read some blog posts and claim themselves to be “SEO savvy”. 

The trouble here though is that in order to cause really great ranking results for your business, you need someone with the precise skills and experience needed to produce the specific results that you’re looking for. 

Usually, this involves finding someone who can reverse engineer what is working in your Industry and successfully bridge the gap between where you are – and the outcome (yes Google weighs certain ranking factors over others depending on the industry that you’re in).

The 1st area that you need to consider:

Many “SEO savvy” candidates applying for your job posts will only know the generic, commonly publicised (which usually means outdated) methods that can be read about online.

To give some perspective: If you could hire the exact person who you knew created and executed the SEO strategy of your highest-ranking competitor, this would be the ideal scenario (and the opposite of the person outlined above).

In order to ensure that you’re getting value, you need to ensure that you’re getting someone whose skills and experience are a good match for what you’re trying to accomplish in your SEO (more specific tips on this in a little bit).

 Enter the 2nd area that you need to consider:

Often times when someone has been involved with a business that has achieved rapid ranking growth, they will automatically claim to have almost single handily caused the growth. We see this with junior marketers – rite up to CEOs and consultants. 

The reality is that far more times than not when a business achieves great ranking success, it is actually due to a wide range of factors. These are things like: Brand signals, groundwork performed by multiple previous team members/agencies and the overall work of all parties involved in building content/links etc. 

While there is always a most direct and efficient route to dominating your most sort after rankings, companies usually see slow steady growth (at best) due to their SEO team taking a shotgun approach. I.e: plugging away - performing all of the methods that they’ve read about online without understanding which ones are actually producing the results and which are just keeping them busy.

As the Founder of Marketing Juice (and through my previous roles as CEO, GM, Head of Marketing, Marketing Manager etc.), I’ve worked with close to 100 in-house SEO people/teams.

I’ve seen far more ineffective examples than I have teams who produce optimal results and value for their employers. 

With this in mind, we set about putting some interview questions and resources available for our clients to use (all of which I’ve shared here for you).

Since then, we’ve had the privilege of grooming many bright marketers into really great SEO specialists/analysts/managers etc. for our clients and I’m about to share our best advice on the subject.

Here are the standard interview questions below for you to ask candidates.

12 questions to ask when interviewing SEO marketers: 

1. Please provide 3 SEO case studies: List the URL’s of 3 site’s you have optimised. List the most impactful, overarching tasks that you performed, over what period of time and what the results where.
2. Take a look at our website and tell us 3 onsite optimisation tactics we can implement to improve it.
3. Which keywords do you think we should go after and why?
4. Should you start as our SEO specialist/Manager etc, what do you expect to achieve in the first 3 and 6 months?
5. How do you stay on top of SEO trends?
6. How will you manage performing tasks in-house vs outsourcing to an agency?
7. What makes a website search engine-friendly?
8. How do you define success when it comes to SEO?
9. Regarding your previous SEO job, what did an average day look like?
10. What is your opinion on proper link building?
11. What’s the ideal speed for a site to load a web page?
12. How has Hummingbird and the Latest Mobile updates affected search?

Here are our 4 best tips for hiring a great SEO person: 

Tip #1:

Find someone who you know has caused enormous ranking growth in your industry (or an industry attached to yours) and have them verify the candidates answers to the questions above. Specifically, you’re looking to ensure that they’re answers are in line with your business’s SEO goals. 

Our clients come straight to us once they’ve got a short list of candidates who they like so that we can validate their answers to the questions above. 

Tip #2:

Look for subject matter passion. It takes a love and absolute passion for SEO to keep on top of current trends and essential pieces of information. The best SEO specialists and managers I know all have this one trait in common – they absolutely nerd out on SEO.

Tip #3:

Ensure that candidates have excellent verbal/written communication skills and are proficient in copywriting. This is a crucial skill set/quality as so much of SEO and link building relies on being able to communicate well and craft great content.

Tip #4:

Be clear on the responsibilities and job title. SEO job titles can range from “SEO Specialist” through to “SEO Manager” and the responsibilities and salary for each are quite different. 

Very different answers will be expected from the 12 interview questions depending on which job title and responsibilities you opt for.

Why have we given you our best advice for finding an in-house SEO person?

If you’re looking to hire an in-house SEO person, we want to help you find the right one. 

Why?

Our most successful SEO consulting happens when there is a competent SEO manager working in-house.

The right in-house SEO person communicates well with both the CMO and the SEO consultant or Agency. They follow through on our recommendations and fulfils the plans we’ve jointly made. 

A proper in-house SEO analyst or manager makes the client-consultant relationship a real partnership — so you (the client) wins. 

That is why we’re sharing our best advice with you. But we want to help even further: 

If you would like me or one of my team members to help you verify candidates against your business’s SEO goals, you can schedule an introductory call with us by sending me a message.

Ready to take your SEO to a whole new level?

Hiring an in-house SEO analyst is not a replacement for the breadth and depth of industry knowledge that a decent SEO agency brings. 

We gained over 5,000 #1 rankings for clients over the last 18 months, spanning across some of the most competitive industries online (cryptocurrency, finance/banking, pharmaceutical, legal, HR just to name a few). 

We can show you precisely how to outrank your competition and can verify up to 4 of your preferred candidates, send me a message for more details.

Nathan Wade

Founder

Marketing Juice

www.MarketingJuice.com.au