How to brief an SEO provider

Why the brief matters

Many disappointing SEO relationships start with a vague brief: "We want to rank higher." The provider guesses what matters, reports on what's easy to measure, and both sides end up frustrated.

A good brief takes an hour or two to write and saves months of wasted effort.

What to include in your brief

About your business

• What you sell, to whom and where.
• Your most profitable services or products.
• Your ideal customer and the jobs you'd rather not get.
• Your capacity. If you're fully booked in summer, say so.
• Seasonal patterns.

Goals

Be specific about outcomes, not rankings:

• More enquiries for a particular service.
• More enquiries from a particular area.
• More online sales in a category.
• Better-quality leads.

Share what you know about current performance, even roughly: how many enquiries a month, how many come from Google.

Competitors

List the businesses you lose work to, and any you see in search results for your main services.

Constraints

• Budget.
• Who can approve changes and how quickly.
• Regulatory limits on what you can say, such as rules from the SRA, FCA, GDC or ASA.
• Brand voice and anything you don't want to say.
• Platform limits: what can and can't be changed on your website.

History

• Previous SEO work and who did it.
• Any link building you know of.
• Redesigns or domain changes and when they happened.
• Any manual actions or sudden traffic drops.

Sharing access safely

Never hand over your own passwords. Instead:

• Search Console: add the provider as a user. Keep ownership yourself.
• Google Analytics: add them with the role they need.
• Business Profile: add them as a manager, not owner.
• Website: create a separate login for them with appropriate permissions.
• Domain registrar and hosting: usually not needed. If it is, create separate access rather than sharing yours.

Google's help on Search Console permissions explains the user types. When the relationship ends, remove their access.

Questions to ask providers

• What will you do in the first three months, specifically?
• How will you decide priorities?
• Which tasks are done by people and which are automated?
• Who will I deal with?
• What will you change on my site, and will I approve it first?
• How do you build links, if at all?
• What will reports include, and how often?
• What happens to the work if we stop?
• What's the minimum term and notice period?

Listen for specific, honest answers. "It depends" is fine if followed by what it depends on.

Red flags

Google's own page on hiring an SEO lists warning signs. Common ones:

• Guaranteed rankings. No one can guarantee a position.
• Secret methods they won't explain.
• Owning your accounts or refusing to give you access.
• Cheap link packages or private blog networks.
• Long lock-in contracts without clear deliverables.
• Reports full of jargon and rankings for phrases nobody searches.

Set expectations together

Agree at the start:

• What success looks like at three, six and twelve months.
• Which numbers you'll track.
• How you'll communicate and how quickly.
• What you need to provide: approvals, information, photos, expert input.

SEO usually takes months to show. If both sides agree on early signs of progress, such as better indexing, more impressions and improved pages, you'll avoid frustration in the early months.

Start with a trial period

If a provider allows it, agree a short initial period with clear deliverables, then review together. It gives both sides a chance to check the fit before committing further.

Your part of the bargain

Providers depend on you for:

• Fast approvals of changes.
• Expert input on content. You know your customers.
• Real photos, reviews and case examples.
• Telling them about business changes: new services, new branches, price changes.

The best results come when the business and the provider work as a team.

A worked example

A family-run removals company in Bristol hired an SEO freelancer with a one-line brief. Six months later it had a report showing top rankings for "removals company Bristol Clifton BS8" and no more enquiries.

For the next provider, it wrote a proper brief: more enquiries for long-distance and office moves, which were most profitable; fewer small single-item jobs, which it couldn't fit in during summer; a list of competitors; and its British Association of Removers membership, which it wanted highlighted. It added the new provider as a Search Console user and agreed monthly reports showing enquiries by service.

The work that followed was focused on the right services, and the business could judge it on enquiries rather than rankings.

Questions