Solved: What to look for when hiring first full-time SEO?

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🚀 Executive Summary

TL;DR: Companies often misstep by seeking a ‘magician’ SEO promising unrealistic results, rather than an engineer whose skills align with specific company stages and needs. The solution involves identifying the correct engineering archetype—Auditor for immediate technical fixes, Architect for building a sustainable program, or Growth Lead for business-level scaling—to establish a robust organic growth machine.

🎯 Key Takeaways

Hiring an SEO should prioritize systems thinking and process-oriented skills, akin to hiring an engineer, rather than focusing solely on desired outcomes like ‘300% traffic increase’.
The ‘Technical SEO Auditor’ archetype is best for short-term projects and emergencies, using tools like Screaming Frog and Google Search Console to diagnose and fix critical issues such as crawl budget, indexation problems, and schema markup errors.
The ‘SEO Strategist & Architect’ is the ideal full-time hire for building a foundational, long-term SEO program, focusing on developing roadmaps, content strategy, and integrating SEO best practices into the development lifecycle.

Hiring your first SEO isn’t about finding a wizard who promises #1 rankings overnight. It’s about identifying the right engineering archetype for your company’s specific stage and needs, whether that’s a quick-fix auditor or a long-term systems architect.

Stop Trying to Hire an SEO Unicorn. Hire an Engineer Instead.

I remember a project years ago, ‘Project Phoenix’, where we hired a ‘rockstar’ backend dev. This guy’s resume was incredible—FAANG experience, talked a big game about microservices and event-driven architecture. Two weeks in, and our staging environment was a graveyard. He was brilliant, sure, but he couldn’t work with our existing CI/CD pipeline, refused to write documentation, and treated our established processes like personal suggestions. We weren’t hiring a solo artist; we were hiring a team member. We burned a month and a ton of political capital before we let him go. I see companies making this exact same mistake every single day when they try to hire their first SEO.

The “Why”: You’re Interviewing for a Magician, Not a Systems Thinker

Here’s the root of the problem. Most tech companies, especially engineering-led ones, treat SEO as a black box. It’s some dark art performed in the marketing dungeons. So when we write the job description, we ask for magic. “Increase organic traffic by 300%,” “Achieve #1 rankings for target keywords,” “Manage all aspects of our digital presence.” We’re asking for the *result*, not the *process*. It’s the equivalent of a job description for a DevOps engineer saying, “Make sure the site never goes down.” Useless, right? It tells you nothing about the candidate’s ability to build a resilient, scalable system. A good SEO hire, like a good engineer, is a systems thinker. They don’t just promise results; they build a machine that produces them.

So, let’s break down who you should actually be looking for. It’s rarely the mythical ‘full-stack’ SEO who can do everything. It’s usually one of these three archetypes.

The Quick Fix: The Technical SEO Auditor

This is your contractor, your specialist, your “break-glass-in-case-of-emergency” hire. This person lives and breathes tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console. Their job isn’t to write a single blog post. Their job is to crawl your site, find all the broken plumbing, and give your engineering team a precise, prioritized list of fixes.

What they fix: Crawl budget issues, indexation problems, broken redirects, schema markup errors, poor site architecture, and slow page speed.
When to hire them: When you’ve just launched a new site, completed a major migration, or have seen a sudden, unexplained drop in traffic. You hire them for a 1-3 month project, not a permanent role.

Pro Tip: An auditor is a “hacky” but effective fix for immediate pain. They will point out that your server logs on prod-web-04 are showing a 50/50 split of 200s and 404s from Googlebot, but they won’t build the long-term content strategy that prevents it from happening again.

The Permanent Fix: The SEO Strategist & Architect

This is the full-time hire most companies are actually looking for. This person is less of a pure technician and more of a systems architect. They understand the technical side, but their real value is in building a sustainable, scalable content and SEO *program*. They work with developers to get technical fixes implemented, with writers to create content that ranks, and with product managers to ensure new features are SEO-friendly from day one.

Their interview shouldn’t be about “how would you rank us for X?” It should be about process. “Walk me through your process for building a content strategy from scratch.” “How do you prioritize a backlog of 50 SEO tasks with limited engineering resources?”

Look at the difference in the job description:

<!-- BAD JOB DESCRIPTION: ASKING FOR MAGIC -->
- Achieve #1 rankings for our core product keywords.
- Double organic traffic in 6 months.
- Be an expert in all aspects of SEO (technical, on-page, off-page, local).

<!-- GOOD JOB DESCRIPTION: ASKING FOR A PROCESS -->
- Develop and own the roadmap for our organic growth strategy.
- Conduct keyword research and content gap analysis to build a robust content pipeline.
- Work with engineering to translate audit findings into actionable user stories and ensure SEO best practices are part of our development lifecycle.

The ‘Nuclear’ Option: The T-Shaped Growth Lead

This isn’t really an “SEO” hire. This is a business hire. You bring this person in when SEO is no longer a marketing channel but a core pillar of your company’s growth model. This person might have a deep specialty in SEO, but they also have working knowledge of PPC, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), and email marketing. They own a business metric, like ‘New Monthly Recurring Revenue from Organic’, not a vanity metric like ‘traffic’.

You don’t hire this person to fix your title tags. You hire them to build a multi-channel engine that turns strangers into customers, where SEO is a critical, integrated component. This is a senior role for a company that has already validated its product-market fit and is ready to pour gasoline on the fire.

Which One Do You Need?

To help you decide, I’ve broken it down into a simple table. Be honest about what stage you’re at.

Archetype	Best For…	Primary Skill	Potential Pitfall
The Auditor	Short-term projects, technical emergencies, pre/post-migration analysis.	Diagnostic & Technical Analysis	Won’t build a long-term strategy; they find problems, they don’t always build the machine to prevent them.
The Architect	Building a foundational, long-term SEO program from the ground up. Your first full-time hire.	Process & Systems Thinking	Can get bogged down if they don’t have buy-in from both engineering and content teams.
The Growth Lead	Scaling a proven acquisition model; integrating SEO into the larger business.	Business Acumen & Strategy	Overkill for an early-stage company. They’ll be optimizing a leaky bucket if the foundation isn’t there.

So, before you post that job description for an “SEO Ninja Rockstar”, take a step back. Are you dealing with a server on fire that needs an emergency patch (Auditor)? Are you trying to build a new, scalable service from the ground up (Architect)? Or are you trying to orchestrate multiple services to achieve a major business outcome (Growth Lead)? When you define the problem like an engineer, you’ll hire one.