Hired someone for SEO and now I’m stuck… what tasks should I give them?

General
1

I run a business selling fine jewellery directly to customers, and I’ve got a bunch of blogs. My main goal is to bring in more organic traffic to my product pages.

What specific things can I ask the person I hired to do? Any ideas would really help me out.

2

Shouldn’t you have planned this out before you hired them?

3

ever said:
Shouldn’t you have planned this out before you hired them?

Exactly. You’re setting this person up to fail before they even get started.

4

ever said:
Shouldn’t you have planned this out before you hired them?

This is spot on. Hiring someone without a clear plan is risky. How do you even know they can handle the tasks you’ll give them if you didn’t decide on those tasks beforehand?

5

Why hire someone if you don’t know what you need from them? Did you at least include clear responsibilities in the job description?

6

PaulWritesToday said:
Why hire someone if you don’t know what you need from them? Did you at least include clear responsibilities in the job description?

They mentioned hiring a full-time employee, not a contractor.

7

@ever
If you hire someone full-time, you should have a list of tasks ready for them. Otherwise, you’re treating them like a contractor without giving proper guidance.

8

PaulWritesToday said:
@ever
If you hire someone full-time, you should have a list of tasks ready for them. Otherwise, you’re treating them like a contractor without giving proper guidance.

Right, but clearly that isn’t what happened here…

9

@ever
Exactly.

10

Did you hire someone who specialises in SEO or just a virtual assistant?

11

EvansBrown11 said:
Did you hire someone who specialises in SEO or just a virtual assistant?

It’s a full-time virtual assistant.

12

EvansBrown13 said:

EvansBrown11 said:
Did you hire someone who specialises in SEO or just a virtual assistant?

It’s a full-time virtual assistant.

Don’t expect a VA to handle everything involved in SEO. They’re not trained for that. You’ll need someone experienced to build a strategy, set goals, create processes, and monitor progress.

A VA can handle repetitive tasks once you’ve set up those processes. If you know SEO yourself, great. If not, you might need to bring in an expert for the heavy lifting.

13

This question makes me wonder about the hiring process. What was the job description? Did you look for a marketer, an SEO expert, or just someone who could write? Or did you hire someone with no experience at all?

A lot of people think SEO is easy after watching a few videos online, but it takes real effort to get it right. If you’re okay with learning the basics and training them on simple tasks, that’s fine. But you can’t expect someone with no experience to manage the entire SEO process.

You could start with content writing. Have them write short articles and then longer ones as they improve. If they’re good at writing naturally with keywords, that’s a win.

If the person you hired has experience, shouldn’t they have suggested what they can do by now?

14

Here’s a basic plan:

  1. Get tools set up for tracking like Google Analytics, Search Console, and free versions of SEMrush or Ahrefs.
  2. Fix technical issues: clean up errors, improve site speed, and make sure sitemaps and robot.txt are in order.
  3. Do keyword research and competitor analysis to focus on what works.
  4. Check your on-page SEO. Ask them to create a list of pages with missing metadata, alt tags, and proper formatting.
  5. Review the structure of your site and adjust menus or categories if needed.
  6. For off-page work, focus on getting quality backlinks from trusted sites. It’s better to have a few great backlinks than thousands of bad ones.
15

Why would you hire someone to do a job you don’t fully understand? How will you manage them or measure success?

You could have hired an agency instead of a full-time employee and saved some money.

16

MysteryMaverick said:
Why would you hire someone to do a job you don’t fully understand? How will you manage them or measure success?

You could have hired an agency instead of a full-time employee and saved some money.

They hired a VA for an SEO expert’s job. That’s like hiring someone fresh out of school to be a doctor and wondering what tasks to give them.

17

Is your VA actually trained in SEO? If not, you’ll spend a lot of time teaching them, which defeats the point of hiring a VA.

VAs are great for simple, repetitive tasks. Give them clear instructions and training videos to follow. But if you want someone to take charge of your SEO, you need an experienced specialist.

It might be better to sort out your SEO plans first and hire when you know exactly what’s needed.

18

Does the person you hired have any knowledge of SEO, or are you expecting them to learn everything from scratch?

19

A VA isn’t an SEO expert. The best they can do is basic on-page SEO tasks while learning as they go.

20

A lot of us are saying the same thing—you should have had a plan before hiring someone full-time for SEO.

If they know what they’re doing, let them create a plan and set some goals. If they don’t, then you’ve got a bigger issue to deal with.