The Pattern We Keep Seeing
Here's a familiar scenario: engineering-led company writes an SEO job description asking for "#1 rankings" and "300% traffic growth." They hire someone who talks a good game. Three months later, nothing's shipped, and the hire can't explain their process beyond "best practices."
The problem isn't the candidate. It's that you're interviewing for results instead of systems.
Three Archetypes That Actually Work
The Technical Auditor: Your Emergency Responder
This is a contractor, not a permanent hire. They live in Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, and server logs. Their job: find what's broken, document it precisely, hand your engineering team a prioritized backlog.
What they fix: Crawl budget issues, indexation problems, broken redirects, schema errors, site architecture.
When you need them: Post-migration, after a traffic drop, or when launching a new site. Think 1-3 month engagement, not a permanent role.
Notably: An auditor won't build your long-term content strategy. They'll tell you why prod-web-04 is returning 404s to Googlebot - but preventing that requires the next archetype.
The SEO Architect: Your Full-Time Hire
This is who most tech companies actually need. Less pure technician, more systems builder. They work with developers on technical fixes, with writers on content that ranks, with product managers to make features SEO-friendly from day one.
The interview question that matters: "Walk me through your process for building a content strategy from scratch." Not "How would you rank us for X keyword?"
Good job descriptions ask for:
- Ownership of the organic growth roadmap
- Keyword research and content gap analysis
- Translation of audit findings into engineering user stories
- Integration of SEO into the development lifecycle
Bad job descriptions ask for:
- "#1 rankings for core keywords"
- "Double traffic in 6 months"
- "Expert in all aspects of SEO"
The Growth Lead: When SEO Becomes Business Strategy
This isn't really an SEO hire - it's a business hire. You need this when organic isn't just a channel, it's a core growth pillar. They have SEO depth but also working knowledge of PPC, conversion optimization, and how these systems connect to revenue.
Most companies aren't here yet. If you're reading this trying to make your first SEO hire, you're hiring the Architect.
What This Means in Practice
2026 shifts the requirements slightly. AI integration matters - your hire should be shipping tools, not just executing tasks. Entity-based strategies, semantic SEO, and intent clustering have replaced keyword stuffing. But the fundamentals persist: technical audits, schema implementation, E-E-A-T signals (author bios, citations, reviews).
The real question: Are you hiring someone who can build a system, or someone who promises magic? One works. The other burns political capital and wastes three months.
Worth noting: The same principle applies to evaluation. Certifications (HubSpot, Semrush, Moz) tell you someone took a course. What matters is whether they can explain their process for diagnosing a 40% traffic drop or prioritizing a backlog with limited engineering resources.
We've seen this pattern enough times to know: treating SEO like engineering hiring - focusing on systems thinking, process, and architectural decisions - produces better outcomes than chasing the mythical full-stack unicorn who "does everything."
The trade-off is clarity. You won't get someone who promises overnight rankings. You'll get someone who builds a machine that produces sustainable results. For most tech companies, that's exactly what they need.