SEO expert

An SEO expert is someone who makes websites easier to find: in Google, and recently also in AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. The work consists of three layers that need each other: the engineering of the site, the content that answers customer questions, and the authority that decides who gets believed.

Anyone looking for an SEO expert is really choosing between three forms: a freelancer, an agency or someone on the payroll. This page lays out what the craft involves, which form fits when, and how to recognise a good expert. Even if you do not end up with us.

The romantic image is someone turning dials until you rank first. The reality is more investigative: reading data in Search Console and analytics, finding out which questions customers ask and who answers them today, tracking down technical problems, planning and reviewing content, and checking every change afterwards for effect. The measurement is half the craft; without it, every change is a guess.

A fourth layer has been added: following how AI models talk about your brand. How often you get named, which sources they cite, and who owns the answers in your category. In one of our clients' markets, 172 brands compete for a single important question in AI answers; without an expert measuring it, you would not even know that contest exists.

A freelancer fits when you have one well-defined problem and keep the reins yourself: guiding a migration, an audit, setting a strategy. The vulnerability: one person rarely masters engineering, editing and data work at the same level, and during holidays or after departure everything stands still.

An in-house expert fits from the moment SEO is your main channel and there is daily work, usually at larger webshops and platforms. Expect to need a team rather than one person, for the same reason. For most small and mid-sized businesses an agency sits in between: several disciplines for less than one full-time salary, with continuity when someone drops out. We laid out the build-or-buy trade-off on our page about outsourcing SEO.

In the first conversation, pay attention to the questions you get asked. A good expert asks about your margins and your best customers before keywords come up: which service earns the most, which enquiries you would rather stop receiving. Skip that, and the optimisation targets traffic, and traffic without context produces busyness instead of revenue.

Beyond that, quality shows in verifiability. Ask for concrete results per client, in enquiries and revenue. Ask how reporting works and whether all accounts and data remain your property. And ask what happens when something does not work: a good expert has failures to tell you about, because someone who never sees anything fail is not really measuring.

The search market is splitting: AI summaries now sit alongside the classic results list, and a growing share of questions goes straight to chatbots. An expert who only plays the old game becomes a little less valuable every quarter. The average Google position of Influentials went from 35 to 7 in eight months, but just as important: they appear in half of the AI answers to the most important question in their market.

So always ask a candidate how they measure and improve AI visibility. Anyone without a concrete answer is optimising for the playing field of five years ago. How we work both sides is described under organic growth.

It depends first on the form: a freelancer charges by the hour or per project, an agency usually works with a monthly fee, and an employed expert costs a salary plus the tools and training around it. Within each form, experience, the competition in your market and the size of your site set the price.

We work with a fixed monthly fee without lock-in, based on what your situation requires rather than a standard package. The starting point is a conversation in which we dig into your visibility in Google and AI search engines; after that you receive a proposal with a concrete number, and you are free to compare it against a freelancer or another agency.