Evaluating SEO
Best SEO Marketers: What Actually Matters
Choosing an SEO marketer is mostly a judgement about how someone thinks, because almost everyone can produce a deck. This is the framework I would use, including the cases where experience matters more than anything else on the list.
Written by Younus Fardeen, Marketing Manager at Masai School.
What the job actually is now
SEO has quietly split. There is the technical and architectural work, which has barely changed in a decade, and there is the question of what a result page is for when the answer sits above it. Most disappointing engagements come from buying one and needing the other.
- Crawlability, indexation and site architecture, which still decide the ceiling
- Content that answers a real query rather than targeting a keyword
- Internal linking, the most underused lever on almost every site
- Rankings and citations measured separately, because they have decoupled
- Conversion paths, since traffic that does not convert is a vanity number
7 criteria I would actually use
- 01
They ask about the business first
Someone who opens with a site audit is selling a deliverable. The useful first question is what you sell, to whom, and where the money currently stops.
- 02
They can read a log file
Or explain why they do not need to. Either answer is fine; not understanding the question is not.
- 03
They separate rankings from clicks
Position one is no longer the top of the page in many result sets. A practitioner still reporting average position alone is measuring a proxy that has drifted from the outcome.
- 04
They have opinions about what to remove
Most sites need fewer pages, better linked. Anyone whose plan is only additive has not looked closely enough.
- 05
They are honest about timelines
Meaningful movement takes months, and the cases that move in weeks are usually fixing something broken rather than doing SEO.
- 06
Their references survive a real question
Not whether they were happy, but what the practitioner argued against and whether they were right.
- 07
Tenure, where it genuinely applies
Recovering from a manual action, untangling a decade of migrations or judging a link profile built across several algorithm eras. For these, hire the fifteen years.
Questions to ask before hiring one
- Which of our pages would you delete?
- What is the single biggest constraint on this site today?
- How would you know in month two whether this is working?
- What have you been wrong about recently?
- Which part of this should we not pay you for?
Claims I would be skeptical of
Guaranteed first-page rankings
Not controllable, and usually either a low-competition term nobody searches or a paid placement described loosely.
A proprietary algorithm or score
Almost always a repackaged crawl of public signals. Ask which signals and why they are weighted that way.
Number one SEO expert
A self-awarded title. The SERPs for this phrase are full of them, which is the clearest evidence of what it is worth.
Hundreds of five-star reviews
Worth something, but easy to farm. One reference you can question properly is worth more than a rating badge.
Fifteen years of experience, therefore better
Sometimes decisive and sometimes irrelevant. Ask what changed in their approach in the last two years; the answer separates experience from repetition.
Worth evaluating alongside me
Long-tenured independent consultants
The right call for recovery work, complex migrations and legacy link profiles. Several rank for this phrase precisely because they have done it for over a decade.
Specialist technical SEO firms
Worth it for large or unusual stacks, particularly where rendering and indexation are the constraint.
In-house hire
If SEO is a permanent channel rather than a project, an employee compounds in a way a retainer does not.
Content-led teams
When the site is technically sound and the real gap is that nothing worth ranking has been published.
Where I fit
The part where I make a caseFour years, said plainly. On classical technical SEO for a large legacy site, the consultants with thirteen to fifteen years are the better hire and I would tell you that rather than compete on it.
Where I am useful is the part where search and AI answers overlap: pages built to be both ranked and quoted, entity clarity, and measurement that separates the two rather than reporting one and hoping.
The work is published rather than described. There are thirty-three posts here on technical and vertical SEO, every statistic linked to its source, which is a faster way to judge the reasoning than a sales call.
Questions
Is SEO still worth investing in?
Yes, but the return is shifting. Fewer result-page clicks and more influence over what the answer above them says. A programme measured only on sessions will look like it is failing while it is working.
Agency, freelancer or in-house?
Agency for capacity, freelancer or consultant for judgement, in-house when it is a permanent channel. Most teams buy capacity when they needed judgement.
How much should I pay?
Enough that the person can say no to you. The cheapest engagements are usually volume deals where nobody is incentivised to argue with the brief.
What is the first thing to fix?
Usually indexation and internal linking, because they are cheap and they raise the ceiling on everything after. Almost never a new blog.
By market
- BangaloreSEO and AEO for startups and engineering-led companies, where the buyer usually wants the mechanics rather than the pitch.Learn more
- IndiaVernacular and Hinglish retrieval, DPDP, and a market where the category is sold almost entirely by agencies.Learn more
- UAEBilingual structure, GCC regulation, and a live page-one hospitality build you can open.Learn more
Worked with
- Masai School
- Sparkling Sandset
- Under 25
- Snapchat India