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Where to find qualified SEO help for a small business?
Posted by on December 6, 2025 at 7:19 pmI'm involved with a small business (in a very competitive industry) that has a well-established website/domain almost 20 years old. Just over a year ago, they updated their aging (12+ year old) WordPress site, took an expected SEO hit after migrating to the new site, and expected a slow recovery. However, they didn't see a recovery at all, and their rankings further declined in August/September. They need help.
Where are the best places to help them look for qualified SEO help? They have had mixed results with Upwork and disastrous results with "agencies" – in the past.
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1 Reply
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Try this in Perplexity, Gemini or ChatGPT:
Give me the best advice for hiring an SEO, what to ask them and what reports to look for exclusively from [reddit.com/r/seo](http://reddit.com/r/seo) – or 80% of the synthesized content will be outside of Reddit.
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I think they had the wrong expectations. If everything was done correctly, they shouldn’t have taken a big hit and there shouldn’t be a “slow recovery”. Things should have stayed pretty close to the same.
Something wasn’t done right. Tough to guess what without being involved in the process. There might be something technically wrong with the site now or something was done poorly with the new design.
It might be possible to figure it out comparing it to archived pages on the Wayback Machine or if the old site files were kept.
As for where to look, you will find good SEOs and bad SEOs on every platform, here included
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Better you hire a specialist and not an agency. Tbh
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RIP to your inbox. Ignore those.
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My office has a seo team quite pro.. I can refer one invdiv lead if you want..
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RIP your inbox lol
But in all seriousness, best to find someone with experience in the industry and have case studies to back them up.
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I know a guy. He’s super genius with migrations and botched migrations. And might be able to help. He’s worked with small business and enterprise level so he knows his stuff. He’s currently helping me with several site migrations as I wouldn’t trust anyone else. He will give you the truth about your situation. Let me know if you need his info. 👍
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If you sincerely are looking for SEO help, you could check out this subreddit. There are many SEOs here that offer help. Click on their names, check out their website. Check their previous comments. You can get a pretty good feel for someone’s writing style here, and, the advice will most likely follow that format.
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Do not wait for recovery – a non-recovering migration is usually fixable technical debt. Run a Wayback-to-live diff with a crawl and short log sample, then apply an LLM to auto-flag redirect gaps, template regressions, and internal link loss so you can ship 3-5 high-ROI fixes in 30 days. Hire a specialist with migration wins in your industry and pay for a standalone diagnostic before any retainer; source via r/SEO referrals or trusted dev shops, ignore cold DMs. This is where lean AI + solid SEO chops outperform bulky agencies for SMEs.
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