Your 50-Page Audit Is Worthless. Let's Hire an Architect Instead.

Before you write a single job description, understand this: 'Technical SEO' is a blanket term hiding three completely different animals. After years of building the Specialist Network — and making every possible hiring mistake — I've mapped the taxonomy.

1. The Developer-SEO (The Surgeon) They dream in Python. They can fix server-side rendering issues blindfolded. They'll optimize your Core Web Vitals until they're museum-quality.

The problem? They often can't tell you *why* it matters. I once watched a Developer-SEO spend 40 hours shaving 0.1 seconds off a page that generated exactly zero revenue. Beautiful code. Complete waste of money. They're surgeons who forgot to ask if the patient wanted the operation.

2. The Auditor-SEO (The Inspector) This is the most common species — and the most dangerous. They're brilliant at running crawls. They love checklists. Their audits are comprehensive, color-coded, and utterly useless.

Ask them *how* to fix an issue, and they point at the dev team. Ask *why* it matters for revenue, and they mumble about 'best practices.' They create work. They don't solve problems. They're building inspectors who've never held a hammer.

3. The Systems Architect (The Unicorn) This is who you're hunting. They understand code enough to speak developer. They understand marketing enough to prioritize by revenue impact. They see your website as a living ecosystem, not a list of errors.

When I scaled AuthoritySpecialist to 800+ pages, I didn't need someone fixing every warning. I needed an Architect who could design an internal linking structure that automatically distributed authority to new content. That's the difference between hiring for *repair* and hiring for *leverage*.

I've developed a visceral hatred for the standard 'audit my site' interview test.

It puts candidates on the defensive. It incentivizes them to nitpick irrelevant issues just to appear thorough. And it tells you nothing about strategic thinking — only about their ability to operate a crawler.

So I flipped the script. I call it 'The Competitive Intel Gift.'

Here's the setup: I give candidates the URL of my biggest competitor. One instruction: 'Find me a technical weakness in their architecture that we can exploit.'

Now they can't just list errors. They have to think like a general, not a janitor.

A mediocre candidate returns with a list of the competitor's broken links and missing alt tags. Useless.

A great candidate returns with something like: 'Competitor X has a flat URL structure for their blog — no topic clusters, no hub pages. Their domain authority is higher, but their topical authority is scattered. If we restructure your site using a hub-and-spoke model around your core topics, we can outrank them with half the backlinks.'

That answer reveals everything: strategic thinking, understanding of architecture versus brute-force link building, and — critically — the ability to turn technical SEO into an offensive weapon rather than a defensive checklist.

This single test has predicted success better than any portfolio review or reference call I've ever conducted.

The SEO industry has a dirty secret: The 'Audit-to-Action Gap.'

I've personally witnessed companies pay five figures for audits that are still sitting in Google Drive folders two years later. The recommendations were probably good. They just never touched production.

This is why, when I hire, I've stopped caring about how many issues someone can find. I only care about one metric: Implementation Velocity — the speed at which a recommended fix actually goes live.

In interviews, I ask one question: 'How do you ensure your recommendations get implemented?'

The wrong answer: 'I send a detailed report to the dev team with priorities.'

Translation: 'I create work and wash my hands of it.'

The right answer: 'I write the JIRA tickets myself with acceptance criteria. I join sprint planning to explain business impact. I provide code snippets so developers aren't starting from scratch. I test the deployment within 24 hours and document the results.'

At AuthoritySpecialist, we don't celebrate finding problems. We celebrate shipping fixes. A mediocre strategy executed this week beats a perfect strategy executed next quarter. Every time.

You need a Technical SEO who is part diplomat, part project manager, and completely unafraid to be the annoying person in Slack who won't let a ticket die.

There's a seductive myth in hiring: If you run an e-commerce site, you need an 'e-commerce Technical SEO.' SaaS? Find a 'SaaS SEO specialist.' B2B? You get the idea.

I call this the Niche Trap, and I've stopped falling for it.

Here's the reality: Googlebot doesn't care if you sell sneakers or enterprise software. It cares about status codes, canonical tags, render trees, and crawl efficiency. The technical layer is industry-agnostic.

More importantly, Technical SEOs who over-specialize develop dangerous tunnel vision. They copy-paste playbooks from their last client without analyzing your unique architecture. They've seen one pattern and assume it's universal.

The sharpest technical minds in my network? They've broken things across 3-4 different verticals. They've handled a massive news publisher's real-time indexing demands, a lead-gen site's conversion tracking complexity, AND a Shopify store's duplicate content nightmares.

That cross-pollination creates first-principles thinking. They're not pattern-matching — they're problem-solving.

When evaluating portfolios, I now prioritize *scale* over *niche*. Managing a 100-page site is fundamentally different from managing a 100,000-page site — regardless of what those pages sell. Someone who's handled a million-page news archive will run circles around a 'specialist' who's only touched boutique e-commerce stores.

If a candidate promises you a 100/100 PageSpeed score, end the interview immediately. Thank them for their time. Move on.

This is controversial, but the 'Green Score Obsession' is amateur hour. In production environments, pushing from 90 to 100 often requires gutting functionality that drives revenue — chat widgets, tracking pixels, high-resolution product images, third-party reviews. You're not optimizing; you're amputating.

Seasoned Technical SEOs understand 'Commercial Latency' — the negotiation between speed and functionality. They aim for 'fast enough to pass Core Web Vitals without destroying conversion rate,' not 'perfect lighthouse score on a site no one can use.'

Red Flag #2: The Algorithm Blame Game When explaining a traffic drop, if their only analysis is 'Google rolled an update, we need more backlinks,' they're not a Technical SEO. They're a generalist wearing a technical costume.

A real expert digs into server logs to see if Google changed *how* it crawled the site during that update. They correlate crawl patterns with ranking changes. 'The algo changed' without log file evidence is intellectual laziness.

Red Flag #3: The Plugin Pusher If their solution to every problem is 'install this WordPress plugin,' run. Plugins add bloat, create conflicts, and introduce dependencies on third-party developers who may abandon the project.

The best Technical SEOs want to *remove* code, not add it. They're minimalists, not collectors.