How to Hire an SEO Provider: Questions to Ask and Red Flags to Avoid

Sooner or later, every small business owner gets the email. Google even quotes the classic version on its own help page: “I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…” It is followed by a package, a price and a promise. Hiring someone to do SEO can pay off, but Google itself says “some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye”, and the person who suffers when it goes wrong is you, not the agency.

Google publishes its own guidance on hiring an SEO, and it is refreshingly direct. We checked it in October 2026 and built this checklist around it. We sell SEO ourselves, so hold us to the same standard.

Do you need an SEO at all?

Google’s page begins with a warning: hiring one is “a big decision that can potentially improve your site’s visibility and save you time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation.”

It also says something many agencies would rather not: “If you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself.” Its suggested starting point is Google’s own SEO starter guide, which “describes much of what your SEO will do for you” and helps you spot a technique that is not recommended.

When does hiring make sense? Google’s example is timing: “a great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign (the earlier, the better), or planning to launch a new site.” If that is you, read how to redesign a website without losing your SEO first.

What a good SEO actually does

Google lists the legitimate services a provider can offer: reviewing your site’s content or structure, technical advice (hosting, redirects, error pages, JavaScript), content development, managing online business development campaigns, keyword research, SEO training, expertise in specific markets and geographies, and optimising for generative AI. Notice what is not on the list: guaranteed positions, secret submissions or bulk link packages.

Questions to ask before you sign

Google suggests asking a potential SEO these questions:

1. Can you show examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
2. Do you follow Google Search Essentials?
3. What kind of results do you expect, in what timeframe, and how do you measure success?
4. What is your experience in my industry, and in my country or city?
5. How long have you been in business?
6. How will we communicate, and will you share every change you make to my site, with the reasoning behind your recommendations?

Google also says to check references: ask past clients whether the SEO “provided useful service, was easy to work with, and produced positive results.” And watch whether the provider is curious about you: they should ask what makes your business different, who your competitors are and how customers find you.

We would add three of our own, which are not from Google:

• Who will actually do the work, and who will I speak to?
• Which accounts will you need, and will they stay in my business’s name? (Our domain, hosting and login checklist shows what to keep.)
• What happens to everything if we stop working together?

Red flags Google names

These come straight from Google’s page:

• A guaranteed ranking. “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” Beware of anyone who claims a “special relationship” with Google or advertises a “priority submit”. If an SEO guarantees that their changes will give you first place, Google’s advice is blunt: “find someone else.”
• Secrecy. “Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.”
• Emails out of the blue. Google says to be “wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that email you out of the blue”, and jokes that it receives these spam emails too.
• Requests for a link. “You should never have to link to an SEO.”
• Link schemes and mass submissions. Avoid anyone who talks about “link popularity schemes or submitting your site to thousands of search engines”.

The point that matters most is responsibility. Google says: “Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire.” If a provider creates deceptive content for you, “your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index.”

Backlink packages deserve their own warning

A backlink package is a simple pitch: pay a fee, receive a set number of links. Google’s spam policies call this link spam and list examples such as “Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links”, “Using automated programs or services to create links to your site” and “Low-quality directory or bookmark site links”.

There is a nuance. Google says buying and selling links is “a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes”, and it is not a violation as long as the links are qualified with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". Those links are labelled as advertising, so they are not meant to carry ranking credit. So if a provider sells sponsored placements for the traffic, that is a different conversation. If the pitch is that the links will lift your rankings, it is the practice Google’s policy targets.

Google’s Search Console help on sites labelled as dangerous makes the risk explicit. It lists this among the reasons a site can be flagged: “You might have hired someone to manage your content or search performance, and this person engaged in practices that violate Google’s spam policies”, with link purchasing as its example. The same page says material might violate Google’s policies “whether or not you intended to”.

What about “AEO” and “GEO” services?

The newest pitch is optimising for AI answers. Google’s guide to generative AI features addresses it directly: “optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.” It also says you don’t need to create “new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search”, and that creating llms.txt files “will neither harm nor help your site’s visibility or rankings in Google Search, as Google Search ignores them.”

That covers Google Search only, not every AI product. Still, ask exactly what a provider will do and whether it follows Google’s guidance. Our guide to being recommended by AI search covers the fundamentals.

Protect yourself from day one

• Start with read-only access. For an audit, Google says to “only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don’t grant them write access)”. Our Search Console guide shows where those permissions live.
• Expect realistic estimates. An audit should estimate the improvement and the work involved. Our guide to how long SEO takes helps you judge a promised timeline.
• Ask for changes in writing. Google says that if an SEO has FTP access, they “should be willing to explain all the changes they are making to your site.”

Where to go from here

Ask two or three providers the same questions, and prefer the one who answers plainly, even when the answer is “it depends”. If you want to see how we would answer them, tell us about your business and we will walk through it, or read more about our SEO service. For the wider choice between a freelancer, an agency and an in-house hire, see our comparison of the three.