The SEO Staffing Stack Rank and Impact Clock
Internal expert, then a relentless doer surrounded by advisors, then agencies — and 3 to 12 months to prove it
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
How to resource SEO, and how long to give it before you conclude it isn't working. Levesque stack-ranks the options — a real in-house SEO person first, a world-class internal doer surrounded by great advisors second, an agency last — because SEO knowledge is specific, slow to acquire, and must live permanently inside the company. He then gives a concrete impact clock calibrated to whether you already have ranking content.
Origin
Luc Levesque's operating preference across TripAdvisor, Pinterest, Thumbtack and Shopify, and his standing advice to the founders who ask him whether to hire, advise, or outsource SEO.
Core principles
- 01SEO knowledge must end up inside the company, permanently.
- 02Agencies split attention across clients and cannot match internal impact.
- 03An advisor or agency without an internal counterpart has nothing to push against.
- 04Mandate plus incentive beats prior expertise — but prior expertise plus mandate beats both.
- 05The impact clock depends entirely on whether you already have content Google trusts.
How to run it
- 1
Try to hire a real SEO person, internal
First choice is always an amazing SEO practitioner brought fully in-house. They know the business, the keywords, and the customers; the knowledge stays; and you can grow a team and a succession plan around them.
- 2
Fallback: a relentless internal doer, surrounded by advisors
If you can't find the SEO expert, hire an engineer or any world-class doer who wants to learn the channel, give them the explicit mandate to own it, incentivise them correctly, and surround them with great external advisors. Levesque has seen this work repeatedly.
Pro tip The advisors' job here is transfer — the culture and the knowledge should end up inside the company, not rented.
Watch out Do not hand the mandate to someone who doesn't want it; the whole model runs on their relentlessness.
- 3
Last resort: agencies, and only to augment
Agencies come third. They work with multiple companies, so it's harder to get the same impact. If you must use one, use them to augment an internal owner — never as the centre of gravity. An agency or pure advisor without internal talent at the centre will struggle to do a good job.
- 4
Set the impact clock by your starting content
If you already have decent content and pages getting traffic — say ranking around position eight and already on page one — impact can be fast; Levesque has seen hundreds of percent of lift arrive very quickly, sometimes on day one. If you have to build new sections of the site, expect a quarter or more. Twelve months is the ceiling: if you can't see impact in twelve months, something is wrong. The realistic band is three to twelve months.
Pro tip Understand why: Google needs to show new content to users, build trust, collect user feedback, and only then rank it. That trust-building is the source of the delay.
Watch out Don't judge an SEO hire on a 90-day window if you started from zero content — you're measuring Google's trust cycle, not their competence.
In the wild
Asked whether founders should hire an SEO advisor, an agency, or a full-time person, Levesque was unequivocal: start by hiring internally and giving them the mandate and the incentives to own the channel — even if they don't know SEO yet — then surround them with great advisors.
→ His stack rank: amazing internal SEO person first, amazing internal doer plus advisors second, agencies third.
Common mistakes
Making an agency the centre of gravity
Handing SEO wholly to an agency with no internal owner means the knowledge never lands in the company, the agency's attention is split across clients, and impact is structurally capped.
Killing an SEO effort too early
Judging the channel before Google has had time to build trust in new content. If you're building new pages from scratch, a quarter is normal and twelve months is the outer bound.
Building total dependence on one SEO hire
Even the right internal hire is a risk if there's no team growing around them and no succession. The point of going internal is durable, transferable, in-house knowledge.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and growth leaders who have decided SEO matters and now have to choose between hiring, advising and outsourcing — and defend a timeline to the board.
Not ideal for
Companies with no organic search demand, or teams that need traffic this quarter and cannot wait out the trust cycle.
From the transcript
“my advice would be hire get an engineer get somebody who is just a Relentless doer who wants to learn this and surround them with…”
“agencies will be working with multiple companies so it's a little bit harder to get the same impact from an agency it can work sometimes…”
“oh yeah ideally you hire an amazing SEO person you can bring internal second would be somebody amazing who can get things done surround them…”
“I would say 12 months is probably like max if you can't see impact in 12 months is something wrong”
“it's somewhere between you know three to 12 months”
From the episode
Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft
Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor)