Five things to check before you pay anyone for SEO

SEO is unusually easy to sell badly. The work is invisible, the results take months, and the reports can be made to look excellent regardless of whether anything happened. Here are five questions worth asking before money moves.

1. What will you actually do this month?

A real answer sounds like a list of tasks: fix these page titles, rewrite these three pages, clean up this duplicate content, build out these location pages, sort out the site speed on mobile. A bad answer is a category — “on-page optimisation”, “technical SEO”, “content strategy” — with no object attached to the verb.

You do not need to understand the tasks. You need them to be specific enough that someone could confirm they were done.

2. Do they guarantee rankings?

Nobody controls Google’s results, so nobody can guarantee a position in them. An agency that promises page one either does not know that, or is counting on you not knowing it — often by ranking you for a phrase nobody searches, such as your own company name plus your town.

The honest version of this promise is about effort and reporting, not outcomes: here is what we will do, here is how we will measure it, here is when you should expect to see movement.

3. Who owns the accounts?

This is the one that catches people. Your Google Business Profile, Google Analytics, Search Console and any ad accounts should be registered to your email address, with the agency added as a user. Not the other way round.

If the agency owns them, leaving costs you your entire history — and the reviews attached to a Business Profile you do not control are not really yours either. Ask before you start. Fixing it afterwards ranges from tedious to impossible.

4. Is the site worth optimising yet?

Ranking work on a site that is slow on mobile, missing page titles, or serving spam it does not know about is money poured into a leaking bucket. Any competent firm will look at the foundation first and tell you if it needs work — even though that is the less profitable answer, because it delays the recurring fee.

If nobody has mentioned your site’s technical condition at all, that is worth noticing.

5. What does the report actually count?

Impressions, keyword counts and “visibility scores” go up reliably and mean very little on their own. The numbers that matter to a small business are the ones attached to money: calls, form submissions, direction requests, bookings, sales.

Ask for a report that leads with those, and ask what the number was before they started. A report without a baseline is a picture of nothing.

One more thing

If you are a local business, the highest-return hour you will spend on SEO has nothing to do with an agency. It is filling out your Google Business Profile completely — correct hours, correct categories, real photographs, every service listed — and then asking satisfied customers to review you. For a plumber or a dentist, that single profile usually outperforms everything else combined.

Our own SEO plans are on the services page, with what is included and what it costs. If the honest answer for your business is that you do not need us yet, we will say so on the call.