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.