The red flags that should end the meeting, the questions a good SEO agency can answer without flinching, and how to read a proposal properly.
If you are reading this, there is a fair chance you have already paid an agency for SEO and have little to show for it. Perhaps you got a monthly PDF full of green arrows while the phone stayed quiet. Perhaps the rankings really did move — for keywords no customer has ever typed. Either way, the next contract you sign carries the weight of the last one.
This is a guide to vetting an SEO agency, written by one. That is a conflict of interest and you should read it as such. Several of the questions below are uncomfortable for us to answer, and some of them have cost us work. They are here anyway. An agency that cannot survive its own checklist is not worth hiring.
Red flags that should end the meeting
Not every warning sign is fatal. Most of these are.
Guaranteed rankings, or a guaranteed spot on page one
Nobody outside of Google has access to Google's ranking systems. An agency that promises you position three for a specific keyword is either lying or guessing and hoping you forget by month six. The only honest guarantee in this business is about the work performed, not the position achieved. What a credible pitch sounds like: here is exactly what we will do, here is what we expect it to produce and why, and here is what would tell us in ninety days that it is not working.
Watch for the sleight of hand, too. Ranking number one for your own company name is trivial and means nothing. Any guarantee that quietly depends on obscure long-tail phrases is a guarantee about nothing.
Ranking reports full of keywords nobody searches
It is easy to rank first for something like affordable seo company for dentists in south dakota with financing. It is easy because roughly nobody types it. When you see a ranking report, take five keywords at random and ask two questions: how many people search this each month, and what would a customer arriving on that phrase actually be worth to me? If the agency cannot answer, the report is decoration.
Vanity metrics with no lead data
Impressions are up. Sessions are up. Domain authority is up. None of these pay a payroll. Traffic that does not convert is a cost, not a result. The report you should be receiving leads with enquiries, calls and form submissions, and uses rankings and traffic as supporting evidence for why those numbers moved. If nobody can tell you how many leads SEO produced last month, nobody is measuring the thing you are buying.
Refusing to say who does the work
Ask who writes the content, who does the technical work, and where they sit. Subcontracting is not automatically bad — plenty of good agencies use specialist freelancers and say so. Evasiveness is the problem. If the person who sold you the contract is not the person doing the work, that is fine, as long as you are told, and as long as you can name the person who will be on the call in month four.
A long lock-in with no exit
SEO is slow, so a minimum term is defensible; you cannot judge the work in six weeks. A twelve-month contract with no termination clause is a different animal. Look for a stated notice period, a defined offboarding process, and a written answer to what you keep on the way out.
Vague answers about where links come from
Ask exactly where a link will come from and what the outreach looks like. If the answer involves a network of sites the agency happens to own, or a price list, you are renting your rankings. Bought and networked links get devalued, and when you stop paying they often disappear — sometimes taking your rankings with them. Ask to see the last twenty links they built for another client. Then go look at those pages.
Talk of a proprietary algorithm or secret method
There is no secret. The work is legible and boring: make sure the site can be crawled and indexed, fix what is broken in the site's technical foundations, build pages that genuinely answer what people are searching for, earn links and mentions from real places, and measure enquiries. Mystery is usually a wrapper around either a thin process or a shortcut you would not approve of if it were explained.
Case studies with no names and suspiciously round numbers
A national e-commerce client saw a 400% traffic increase. No name, no dates, no starting point, no mention of the rebrand or the paid campaign running at the same time. A real case study names the client with their permission, shows the baseline, gives a timeframe, and is willing to say what did not work. Round numbers are a tell. Real data is lumpy.
The questions to ask — including the ones we do not enjoy
Who exactly does the work, and where? Names, roles, seniority. Who is my day-to-day contact, and are they the person actually doing the work or a layer between me and it?
What happens if I leave? Do I keep the content that was written for me? The pages that were built? The tracking setup? Is any of it hosted on a system that is theirs rather than mine? Get the answer in the contract, not in an email.
Do I own my Google Analytics, Search Console and Google Ads accounts? The correct answer is yes, in writing, under your own Google account, with the agency added as a user. An agency creating those accounts under its own roof can leave with your entire history — years of data you cannot rebuild. An Ads account managed inside an agency's manager account is normal, provided the account itself is yours.
What will the first ninety days actually be spent on? Onboarding, research and optimization is a non-answer. A real one is specific: crawl the site, find out what is and is not indexed, fix the blockers, map real search queries to the pages that exist, get conversion tracking working so we can tell a lead from a bounce, then start on content. That first pass is what an SEO audit exists to produce, and you should get to read it.
Can you show me a real deliverable, not a sales deck? An actual audit document. An actual content brief. An actual monthly report, redacted if it has to be. Sales decks are written by people who are good at sales decks. The deliverable tells you whether the work itself is specific or generic.
What would make you tell me SEO is the wrong investment? This is the most useful question on the list, and the one most likely to be dodged. There are honest answers to it: if you need leads within six weeks, SEO will not save you. If almost nobody searches for what you sell, there is nothing to capture. If your margins cannot carry six to twelve months of spend before returns, the timeline will break you. If the site has fundamental problems you are not willing to fix, paying for content on top of it is throwing money at a broken foundation. Sometimes the right answer is paid search, or direct outreach, or fixing your sales follow-up before you buy more leads. An agency that has never turned down a poor fit is an agency that will happily take yours.
What do you need from me? Any agency that answers nothing, we handle everything is telling you that your content will be written without access to anyone who actually knows your business. It will read like it, too.
How to read the proposal
Read it with a pen and circle every vague noun. On-page optimization — of which pages, how many, changing what? Content creation — how many pieces, chosen how, written by whom, reviewed by whom? Link building — from where, and what does the outreach actually consist of? Specificity is not a stylistic preference. It is the difference between a plan and a placeholder, and a placeholder is what you get billed for when nobody has decided what the work is.
Then check the reporting section. If the proposal promises to report on rankings and traffic and never mentions enquiries, the agency has quietly chosen a scoreboard it can win on regardless of whether your business gains anything. Ask that the monthly report leads with leads.
A thin, honest scope usually beats an impressive one
Two proposals land on your desk. The first offers twenty blog posts a month, fifty links, five new landing pages, a full technical overhaul and social media, for a surprisingly modest fee. The second offers, for the first ninety days: fix crawling and indexing, rebuild six service pages around what people actually search for, install conversion tracking, then review the evidence and decide what comes next.
The second one looks thin. The second one is far more likely to work. Volume at a low price has to be produced cheaply somewhere, and you will find out where when you read the content. Ongoing search engine optimization done properly is a small number of decisions made carefully, repeated, and adjusted when the data says so.
What we will not tell you
We will not tell you what we can achieve for your business before we have looked at your site, your market and your numbers, because anyone who does that is guessing in front of you. What we will tell you is what we would look at first, why, and what would make us say the money is better spent elsewhere.
Take this list to every agency you are considering, including us. Ask the awkward ones. Watch less for the polish of the answer than for whether the person across the table is comfortable saying I do not know yet. That is not weakness. In this field, it is usually the first sign that someone is telling you the truth.
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