What the job involves day to day
Diagnosing why pages are not indexed, deciding which queries to pursue, briefing and editing content, fixing template-level issues with developers, reporting on impressions and revenue, and increasingly auditing how a brand is represented in AI answers.
The four modern profiles
Technical SEO (crawling, rendering, log analysis, Core Web Vitals). Content SEO (intent research, briefs, editorial quality). Analytics SEO (attribution, forecasting, Search Console and BigQuery). AEO/GEO specialist (entity coverage, schema, citation tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity).
Skills worth hiring for
The ability to read a crawl and explain the business impact in one sentence; comfort with spreadsheets and APIs; enough HTML and JavaScript to talk to engineers credibly; and editorial judgement. Certifications matter far less than a portfolio showing before-and-after Search Console data.
SEO jobs and salaries
Compensation varies widely by market and seniority - a specialist in a mid-size market typically sits well below a senior technical SEO at a large ecommerce company. Rather than quoting a figure that ages badly, check current listings on the major job boards for your city and level; in-house roles usually pay more predictably than agency roles at the same title.
Choosing an SEO agency or service
Ask three questions: what will you fix in the first 30 days, what does reporting look like, and who owns the content? Walk away from guaranteed rankings, undisclosed link networks, and month-to-month retainers with no deliverable list. Local providers in cities such as London, Edmonton or Toronto compete mainly on communication, not on secret techniques - the underlying method is public.
Local SEO services versus general SEO
If your customers are within driving distance, the work is different: Google Business Profile completeness, review velocity, local citations and location pages. A general SEO retainer that ignores your Business Profile is misallocated spend for a local business.