How to brief your SEO consultant

Hiring an SEO consultant is one thing.

Getting good work out of them is another.

Most of that gap lives in one place: the brief.

When the brief is vague, the consultant guesses.
When they guess, they fall back on generic SEO.
When they fall back on generic SEO, you get content and activity — not meaningful movement in leads or revenue.

A good brief doesn’t have to be long or fancy.

It just has to give your SEO consultant the context they’ll never get from tools alone: how you make money, who you actually want to work with, and what “good” looks like inside your business.

This guide walks through how to brief your SEO consultant properly.

Step by step.

Why the brief matters more than you think

Most SEO relationships go wrong long before a single keyword is researched or a page is touched.

They go wrong when the consultant is asked to “grow organic traffic” with no further direction.
Or when they’re handed logins and a vague goal like “rank higher on Google.”

Here’s what happens then:

they target keywords that look good in tools, not in your P&L
they write content for people who will never buy from you
they chase traffic at the top of the funnel instead of bottom-of-funnel searches
they optimise a site that might not even reflect your current offer or pricing

None of that is malicious.
It’s just what happens when the SEO knows more about your website than they do about your business.

A strong brief fixes that. It:

anchors their decisions in your real priorities
stops them wasting time on vanity metrics
helps them decide what not to work on
gives them a way to measure success that isn’t just “more traffic”

Think of the brief as the bridge between “SEO work” and “business outcomes.”
If that bridge is weak, the work will be too.

What to decide before you even write the brief

Before you send a single line to your consultant, there are a few decisions to make internally.
These don’t have to be perfect — but they do need to be honest.

1. Which services or products matter most?

You can’t optimise everything at once.
And not everything is equally profitable.

Decide:

your top 3–5 services or products by profit
any offers you plan to phase out in the next 6–12 months
experiments you’re running that SEO shouldn’t support yet

This stops your consultant from pouring effort into low-value offers just because they’re “easier to rank.”

2. Who are your best-fit customers?

Not all customers are equal either. Some are cheap but stressful. Some are high-value but a terrible fit. Some are both profitable and easy to serve.

Describe your best-fit customers clearly:

industry / sector
company size or budget range (if B2B)
location(s)
job titles involved (for B2B)
any people or segments you want to avoid attracting

When your consultant knows who you want more of, they can ignore everyone else in their strategy.

3. What role do you want SEO to play in acquisition?

SEO is rarely your only channel. It sits alongside paid, referrals, outbound, events, partnerships, or marketplaces.

Be clear on what you actually want from it:

Do you want SEO to become your main lead source?
Do you want it to reduce paid spend over time?
Do you want it to support sales by educating buyers?
Do you want it purely for brand and credibility?

Your consultant will make different decisions for “we want 10–15 extra leads a month from SEO” than for “we want SEO to carry 60% of our pipeline in two years.”

4. What’s a realistic time horizon for results?

If you quietly expect SEO to fix everything in 8 weeks, you’ll be disappointed no matter how good the consultant is.

Agree internally:

what timeframe you’re willing to invest over (6, 12, 18 months)
how you’ll judge progress each quarter
what “good enough to continue” looks like at 3, 6 and 12 months

Once you’ve settled these things, you’re ready to write a brief that actually helps.

The essentials every SEO brief should cover

A useful brief doesn’t need to be a 30-page document.
If you cover the essentials below in 3–6 pages, your consultant has everything they need to think clearly.

1. Your business in one page

Give them a grounded summary:

what you sell
who you sell it to
how you make money (one-off vs retainer vs product)
your rough price ranges (doesn’t need to be exact)

You can add a short history if it matters (e.g. recent rebrand, merger, pivot), but keep it focused on what’s true today.

2. Your sales process and how leads become revenue

This part is almost always missing in SEO briefs — and it’s one of the most important.

Explain, step by step, what happens when someone is interested:

do they book a call, demo, visit or trial?
who speaks to them first?
how long is a typical sales cycle?
what’s your close rate from qualified enquiry to customer?

Then share what your best leads usually look like:

what they tend to ask
what they already understand
what they’ve usually tried before

Your consultant will use this to design content and pages that feed into, not fight against, your real-world sales path.

3. Your current marketing mix

SEO doesn’t live in isolation. It works better when your consultant understands the full picture.

what you’re doing with paid search / paid social
email marketing and nurture sequences (if they exist)
offline channels (events, print, outbound)
any partnerships that bring in leads

Also mention what’s been working and what hasn’t, even if the data is imperfect.

4. Your goals — in plain numbers

Instead of saying “grow organic traffic,” talk in terms like:

“We want 10–15 extra qualified enquiries per month from organic in 12 months.”
“We want organic to contribute £X/month in new business by the end of next year.”
“We want to reduce dependence on Google Ads over 18 months while maintaining lead volume.”

If you don’t know your numbers yet, say that honestly. A good consultant will help you firm them up.

5. Your priority services and audiences

List:

your top 3–5 services or products (with a short description of who they’re for)
which ones you’d like to grow most in the next 6–12 months
any services you want to de-emphasise or retire

If you serve different segments, note which segments you care about most.

6. Where you operate (and where you don’t)

For local and regional businesses, this is huge.

Give:

a list of locations you serve (cities, regions, neighbourhoods)
any areas you explicitly don’t want enquiries from
which locations are strategically most important

This stops the consultant chasing traffic from places that look impressive in reports but don’t convert.

7. What’s currently working — and what isn’t

Be brutally honest here.

Which pages actually bring in leads today?
Which blog posts people mention on calls, if any?
Which traffic sources bring the best enquiries?
What do you suspect is broken or underperforming?

Your instincts are useful context, even if they’re not perfect.

8. Constraints and non-negotiables

Every business has them. Better to state them upfront:

copy that must remain for compliance or legal reasons
systems that can’t be changed for now (e.g. CMS, booking flow)
brand boundaries (tone, words to avoid, topics you won’t touch)
internal sign-off realities (e.g. content must be approved by legal)

If your consultant knows these early, they won’t build a plan you can’t implement.

How to share your data without overwhelming them

“We’ve attached Analytics, Search Console, CRM exports, and ten screenshots from various tools.”
That’s one way to do it.
It’s also one way to bury the signal under noise.

Your SEO consultant doesn’t need every scrap of data in the first week. They need the data that helps answer a handful of key questions:

where is organic traffic coming from now?
which pages drive conversions?
what’s broken or underutilised?

1. Give them access, not just screenshots

Add them (properly) to:

Google Analytics (or GA4 / alternative)
Google Search Console
Google Business Profile (for local businesses)

Screenshots go out of date fast. Access lets them explore properly.

2. Share one page with your most important numbers

Keep it simple:

average monthly leads from all channels
average monthly leads from organic (if you know)
conversion rate from enquiry to sale
average order value or contract value

If some of these are approximate, say so.
Approximations are better than silence.

3. Highlight key pages and forms

Tell them which URLs represent:

your main service pages
your enquiry / booking / contact pages
any important landing pages used for ads

They’ll cross-reference these with Analytics and Search Console to understand how SEO can support or fix them.

Red flags to avoid in your brief

Some things look harmless in a brief but quietly sabotage the work.

1. Vague goals like “rank number one for [big keyword]”

This tells the consultant nothing about your business model or what success really is.
It also pushes them toward ego metrics instead of useful ones.

Better: describe the kind of leads and revenue you want from organic, even if it’s rough.

2. Asking for “quick wins only” when you really want long-term gains

Short-term and long-term SEO aren’t the same thing.
Quick wins often mean squeezing more out of what you have today. Long-term growth means deeper changes.

If you write “quick wins only” but secretly expect a new pipeline in six months, you’re setting everyone up to fail.

3. Over-specifying tactics before you’ve shared context

“We need 4 blogs a month and 10 links.”
Maybe.
Maybe not.

Lead with context and outcomes. Let your consultant respond with the tactics they think will get you there. You can push back later if it doesn’t feel right.

4. Hiding constraints around time or content approval

If content has to pass through three stakeholders and legal, tell them.
If development capacity is limited to 5 hours a month, tell them.

Otherwise, they’ll build a strategy that only works in theory.

How to run the actual kickoff conversation

The brief is not a replacement for a real discussion.
It’s the starting point.

A good kickoff call should feel less like a presentation and more like a working session.

1. Ask them to summarise your business back to you

“Can you talk me through how you understand what we do and who we’re trying to reach?”

This is the quickest way to see whether the brief landed.
If they can describe your world clearly, you’re on solid ground.

2. Walk through priorities, not pages

Spend more time talking about:

which offers matter most
who you want more of
what a “good lead” looks like

The technical details can come later.

3. Agree how you’ll judge success together

Pick a small set of metrics and checkpoints:

leads or sales from organic
conversion rate of key pages
visibility for bottom-of-funnel terms
local visibility for key locations (if relevant)

Then agree how often you’ll review them — monthly, quarterly, etc.

4. Clarify who does what

Decide:

who they’ll contact for content questions
who signs off changes
who handles development work
who owns reporting on your side

Ambiguity here is how tasks slip and projects stall.

Final thoughts

A good SEO consultant can’t fix a bad brief.
They can work around it, but they’ll always be guessing.

If you give them clear context, honest constraints and real business goals, you tilt the whole project in your favour.

Your brief doesn’t need to be perfect.
It just needs to do three things well:

explain how your business actually works
spell out who you want to attract and what you want more of
show where SEO fits into the bigger picture

Do that, and you give your consultant the one thing tools can’t provide:
a clear reason for the work.

That’s when SEO stops being “stuff done to a website” and starts behaving like what you really hired it for — a way to bring in more of the right customers, at a cost that makes sense.