Hiring SEO in Seattle: your best pages are in the repo

In Seattle, the pages that win search for a product company are usually documentation, integration guides, error references and honest comparison pages, and most of those live in an engineering repo rather than a marketing CMS. So the first thing to settle when hiring is not the content calendar. It is who owns the docs site, and how an outside team gets a change into it: a pull request, a review, CI, a deploy. Hire people who can work that way and who can read your stack, and brief paid search separately from the start.

This guide covers what makes a Seattle search engagement different, the four kinds of query a developer audience types, the rendering check worth doing before anything else, and how to measure a self serve funnel.

The buyer can read the work, so the proposal has to be specific

Seattle buyers are frequently engineers, product managers or technical founders. That changes the hiring process in your favour: you can evaluate the actual work rather than the pitch. Ask for a diagnosis before a plan, and read what comes back. A firm that has looked will name things like a route rendering its main content client side, a docs subdomain with a stale canonical, versioned pages competing with each other, a sitemap listing URLs that return a redirect, or a help centre on a third party domain that gets the traffic your product pages want.

A firm that has not looked will describe its process. In this city that gap is easy to see, so make the first paid deliverable a written diagnosis and judge the relationship on it.

Your best pages live in the repo

For product led and developer facing companies, the highest intent pages are rarely blog posts. They are:

• Quickstarts and install guides, one per language or framework, which is how people decide whether to try you.
• API and configuration reference, which captures the long tail of exact parameter and method searches.
• Error and troubleshooting pages, one per message people actually see, which are among the most searched strings in any developer product.
• Integration pages, one per tool you connect to, which pick up demand from the other product's audience.
• Comparison and migration pages, written fairly, which is where evaluation traffic goes.

All of that usually sits in a static site generator in a repo, behind code review. So ask every firm on your shortlist: can your team open a pull request against our docs repo, follow our style guide, and pass our checks? Some can and will give you a sample PR. Others need a writer embedded with your own engineers instead, which also works, but you should know which arrangement you are buying before you sign.

Settle ownership at the same time. Name the person who approves a docs change, and agree that search requirements, titles, headings, internal links, canonical behaviour and redirects, sit in the definition of done for any docs change rather than being retrofitted twice a year.

The four kinds of query a technical audience types

Query type	Example shape	The page that answers it
Error	The literal message, copied and pasted	A page per message, with cause and fix, indexable
How to, with a stack named	A task plus a framework or language	A quickstart or recipe for that exact combination
Evaluation	Your product against another, or a category term	A fair comparison page and a pricing page that states the limits
Reference	A method, parameter, status code or limit	Reference docs that are crawlable and not behind a login

Write these in that order of commercial value for your business, not in order of search volume. An error page with forty searches a month can convert better than a category post with four thousand.

Check the content is in the HTML before anything else

Modern front ends are the most common technical problem in this market. Google can render JavaScript, and its JavaScript SEO basics set out the conditions. The practical check takes five minutes per template: fetch the URL with JavaScript disabled, or use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and read the rendered HTML. The main content, the headings and the internal links should be there.

Two more that bite docs sites specifically: versioned documentation where every old version is indexable and competing, which is solved by canonicalising to the current version, and a docs or help subdomain whose internal links never point back to the product pages.

Measuring a self serve funnel

Product led companies rarely have a form fill to count, so the reporting has to change shape. Agree these before work starts:

• Sign ups and activated accounts from organic search, not sessions.
• The docs to sign up path, as its own funnel, since many of your best readers enter at a reference page.
• Performance grouped by template or section: docs, blog, product, integrations. A sitewide number hides which part is working.
• Clicks and impressions on the pages that map to your pricing and comparison queries, in Search Console.
• Branded search volume, which is the cheapest read on whether awareness is moving.

If you need this in a warehouse, Search Console offers a bulk data export, which is worth setting up early so a year from now you have the history.

Search and paid search are two briefs

Many Seattle companies buy both at once, and the pools of agencies overlap. Keep the briefs separate anyway, because they are judged on different horizons. Paid search does specific jobs well for a product company: defending your brand terms, buying competitor and category terms while your own pages are still young, testing which message converts before you commit it to a page, and covering launches and events. Organic work compounds and is read quarterly.

One supplier for both is fine when the reporting stays split. What you want shared is the data: the search terms report tells your content team which phrasing converts, and your organic query data tells the paid team where to stop paying.

Questions for the first call

• Tell me what is wrong with our docs site before you tell me your plan.
• Can you open a pull request, and will you show me one from another client with permission?
• Who writes for developers on your team, and what have they shipped?
• How would you report this if we have no leads, only self serve sign ups?
• What do we keep if we leave: content, accounts, dashboards, documentation of the work?

Red flags

Google says it plainly in its guidance on whether you need an SEO: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a 'special relationship' with Google, or advertise a 'priority submit' to Google."

Others in this market: a proposal to move your docs into the marketing CMS so the agency can edit them, a monthly quota of blog posts aimed at terms your buyers never type, keyword density targets, link packages, a refusal to work inside your review process, and reporting that leads with sessions in a company that sells seats.

This page covers hiring search help in Seattle, with a bias toward product and developer facing companies. For local service businesses with a storefront, the map results and reviews matter more than anything here. For paid media, brief that separately.

What gets asked about Hiring SEO in Seattle

Should documentation live on a subdomain or a subfolder?

A subfolder keeps everything on one hostname and is simpler to measure and to link internally. Subdomains work when the infrastructure demands it, as long as the internal linking between docs and product pages is deliberate in both directions.

Do we need an agency, or a technical writer?

Many Seattle companies get more from a technical writer who understands search than from a retainer. A sensible pattern is a consultant for the diagnosis and the standards, then a writer in your own repo producing pages against that plan.

Should our docs be indexable if they are for customers only?

The public parts should be. Reference and troubleshooting pages are how new users find you, and gating them hands that traffic to forums and third party tutorials.

How long before we can judge the work?

Judge the diagnosis in month one. Rendering and indexing fixes often show up in weeks. Docs and comparison content is judged over two to three quarters, by section, against the baseline you recorded at the start.

One question worth adding to the shortlist call

Ask each firm what happens when a developer asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google's AI Overviews which tool to use for the job your product does. Those five answer differently. They name different products and cite different sources, and they run no shared ranking, so a strong position in one says nothing about the others. For technical questions they lean heavily on documentation, package registries, issue threads and community posts, which means the reference pages your engineers maintain are doing more work than your marketing site. Most firms have not been asked this yet, so the answers tell you who is current. Be wary of anyone selling a promised place inside an AI answer, the same way you would treat a ranking claim. You can check your own standing by asking the questions your users would ask, leaving your product name out of the prompt so the answer is not steered. AI Knows Us keeps that check running on a schedule.