Once you’ve narrowed down your selection to three to five firms, ask each of them to submit a written proposal listing what they will accomplish for you, how they will achieve that goal and how much their fee is.

It’s no different than shopping for a home. Buying a house is probably the biggest investment a person makes and choosing a consultant to help with your search engine optimization is just as huge an investment for you. Your website, therefore a large percentage of your business and income is riding on your selection.

In order for some consultants to make an accurate assessment of what services they can provide you with and the fee for doing so, they may need to take a detailed look at your existing site to see the extent of the changes that need to be made. Once they have audited your site, they should be able to present you with an itemized list of the services that your site will require to optimize it and include a fee schedule for each service.

If you will be hiring this firm for a one time optimization that you will then maintain yourself, then the costs should be lower than a firm that will be responsible for regular SEO maintenance of the site.

The last thing you want to do is hire an unethical SEO consultant. A legitimate consultant will sit down, listen to your needs and ideas and let you know which of your goals are achievable and which ones are not.

A disreputable SEO consultant will make grand claims, promising you that they will get you top rankings no matter what your needs are. You know by now that with the variables involved in search engine rankings, no one can make this guarantee. If they do, then they are probably going to use tactics that may get your site banned from the search engines.

A huge red flag is if they promise top rankings in all of the search engines and don’t need to make any changes to your site, you know enough about SEO to know that this would be impossible using legitimate SEO techniques. Throw that company’s name on the scrap heap and quickly move on.