Hiring an SEO expert can be a difficult task. Shortlisting someone based on their résumé is not the right  approach for selecting someone for your work. Many candidates simply put all the projects they have been a part of on their résumé. This does not  mean that they have done most of the things  in the project. Someone else might have put in all the efforts and he or she could simply be a side member. The best way of recruiting someone is by showing them your website and asking them to suggest changes in order to improve the content and the rankings. You should make them do the changes themselves and not just test their knowledge factually. They should be specific in their approach.

Another thing one could do is hire them for a month or two and monitor their work. Observe their tactics and tricks and see if it works for you or not. All the SEOs on paper look too good to be true. But the key is to ask them about their practical work. Ask them about their own website or their own Google analytics experience.  Most of the good SEOs have their own website up and running. SEO  business is also about experimenting. It’s about finding new methods to produce better results. Through their own work they can show off their strategies.

Many a times, you will need an SEO to manage and monitor your website. But if you are wanting to scale up your traffic by tens of thousands, then you need somebody who has the experience of working on content marketing as well and are specific in  their tasks.

Ask them technical and problem related questions in order to judge their interests and weakness. If they provide you with a step by step, theoretical answer, that means they are referring to something they have read online, and have not worked on it practically.

Last but not the least, you need somebody who can make minute changes in the HTML code without the need of going to a developer every now and then. Everyone looks for someone who can take actions and perform in a  given time frame