How To Hire an SEO Company
Most businesses that have been burned by SEO were not sold a bad service. They were sold a vague one, with no way to tell whether it was working. These are the questions that make vagueness impossible.
Ask What They Will Actually Do This Month
A real answer names pages, changes and deliverables. A bad one lists categories — "on-page optimisation, content, link building" — which describes the whole industry and commits to nothing.
You should finish the conversation able to say what will exist at the end of the month that does not exist now.
Ask How They Will Report It
The report should lead with leads, calls or revenue. If it leads with impressions, keyword counts or a proprietary score, ask what a good month looks like in dollars. The answer tells you a lot.
Rankings matter, but as an input. Ranking first for something nobody searches is a screenshot, not a result.
Ask Who Owns What
Your domain, your hosting, your Google accounts, your analytics, and anything they build. All of it should be in accounts you control, with them given access — not the reverse. We have spent real time recovering domains for businesses whose previous agency registered everything in its own name.
The Promises That Should End the Meeting
- Guaranteed number one. Nobody controls Google. A guarantee means either meaningless terms or a tactic that carries a penalty.
- A guaranteed number of links per month. Guaranteed links are bought links, and the risk lands on your domain, not theirs.
- Results in 30 days. Paid ads, maybe. Organic search, no.
- A secret method. There are no secrets, only whether the unglamorous work gets done consistently.
Ask What They Would Not Do
This is the most useful question and the least asked. An agency with real standards has an answer ready — things they refuse because of the downside to the client. An agency that cannot think of anything they would turn down will sell you whatever you ask for, including the thing that hurts you.
A Fair Way To Start
Buy a small piece first. An audit, or one month of clearly defined work. You will learn more about how an agency operates from one real deliverable than from three sales calls, and it caps what a bad decision costs you.
One More Thing
If you are evaluating agencies — including us — and want a straight read on what someone else is proposing, we will give you one.