How to Choose an SEO Agency
Most bad hires are decided before anybody has been spoken to. This page covers what to settle first, which qualities actually predict how an engagement will go and the one question that reveals more than any other. We are an agency ourselves. Every criterion here is one we could fail.
Decide What You Actually Want First
Most bad hires start with a business that had not decided what outcome it wanted. An agency cannot fix an undefined objective. Every criterion further down this page depends on you having one.
What an undefined objective sounds like. More traffic.
Wanting more visitors is not an objective, because visitors are not the thing your business needs. It is the nearest available proxy for something you have not yet articulated.
What a usable objective sounds like. Specific and commercial.
More enquiries for a particular service, in a particular area, of a kind you can actually fulfil. That is answerable and it lets an agency aim at something rather than everything.
Why it changes who you should hire. Different objectives need different suppliers.
Somebody wanting local enquiries in one town needs a different firm from somebody competing nationally. Without the objective, you are comparing suppliers against no standard and will pick on price or on how much you liked them.
The questions to settle internally. Four of them.
What work you want more of, what you do not want, where you can genuinely serve and whether you have capacity to take it. A business that cannot answer those is not ready to brief anybody.
Why nobody tells you this. It slows the sale.
An agency asking you to go away and decide has delayed its own contract. That is precisely why an agency that does it is worth listening to.
The Qualities That Actually Predict Anything
Four qualities, each given with the reason it predicts something. All four are deliberately things that size, longevity and awards do not supply.
Specialism in your kind of business. Not your industry necessarily.
A firm used to businesses of your shape, meaning local service, national retail or long business sales, understands what a result even looks like for you. Industry familiarity matters less than that, which block three covers.
Willingness to explain the work. The strongest single predictor.
Somebody who explains what they will do, in terms you follow, is somebody whose work you will be able to check. Anybody treating the method as proprietary has given you no way to hold them to anything.
Clarity about what is included. Because vagueness is deliberate.
Scope described precisely enough to check afterwards. Where it is not, underdelivery becomes deniable, which is not an accident of drafting.
The ability to say what they will not do. The one nobody asks about.
An agency with no answer either has no standards or has not thought about it. Both are worth knowing before you sign. Block five is why.
What is missing from that list. Size and awards.
Neither predicts what you will receive. A large firm may put a junior on your account and an award tells you somebody entered a competition.
Sector Experience, Weighed Fairly
Experience in your trade genuinely helps. It can also mean the agency is running the same approach everywhere regardless of the business. Telling those apart is worth a few minutes.
What it legitimately buys you. A shorter run-up.
Knowing what your customers search, what the seasonal pattern looks like and which competitors matter saves weeks. That is real and it is worth paying something for.
What it can conceal. A template with your name on it.
An agency with forty clients in one trade may be running one plan forty times. That is efficient for them, it produces very similar sites and it is exactly why several firms in a trade end up looking identical.
How to tell the difference. One question.
Ask what they would do differently for you compared with their other clients in your trade. Somebody applying judgement answers immediately. Somebody running a playbook talks about their process.
When to disregard it entirely. Unusual businesses.
If your business does not resemble the others in its trade, sector experience may actively mislead. Somebody who asks good questions beats somebody who assumes they already know.
Ask Who Does The Work
The person selling to you is frequently not the person delivering. The work may be handled by a junior, by a different team or by another firm entirely. A straight answer to this question predicts a great deal.
Why it predicts so much. It surfaces three things at once.
Who will actually be doing it, how the firm is structured and whether they answer awkward questions directly. That last one is worth as much as the answer itself.
What a good answer sounds like. Names and specifics.
Who does the writing, who does the technical work, who you will speak to and how those relate. Somebody who knows their own operation gives that without hesitating.
What subcontracting means here. Not disqualifying.
Some firms sell the work and have another firm deliver it entirely. That is a normal arrangement and a well run one can be better than an agency doing it badly in-house. The objection is to concealment rather than to the model, which is covered in what is white label SEO, a page where we disclose that we provide that service ourselves.
What a poor answer sounds like. Reassurance about the team.
Being told the team is excellent, that everybody works together or that it depends on the project. None of those answers the question. The deflection is the information.
Beware The Person Who Never Says No
An agency agreeing to everything is either not listening or intends to do less than it promised. Being told that something you asked for is a bad idea is a positive sign. It is the opposite of how most buyers read a meeting.
Why total agreement is a warning. Your requests are not all sensible.
You are not a specialist, which is why you are hiring one. Some of what you ask for will be misdirected. A specialist who agrees with all of it has stopped applying the judgement you are paying for.
What a good disagreement sounds like. Reasoned and specific.
Not a refusal. An explanation of why the thing you asked for would not achieve what you want, with an alternative attached. That is what expertise sounds like when it is present.
How to test for it deliberately. Ask for something questionable.
Raise something you half suspect is a bad idea and see what happens. The response tells you more than any credential.
The related signal. Refusing to guarantee anything.
An agency declining to promise a position is being accurate rather than unconfident. It is frequently mistaken for weakness. Our red flags page covers the signs that are not actually warnings.
Price Is Not The Filter Though It Tells You Something
Choosing on price alone is how businesses end up with the arrangements this cluster warns about. Price is still evidence, provided you read it as evidence of what is being sold rather than of quality.
What a very low fee tells you. Arithmetic.
A monthly fee below the cost of a few hours of skilled time cannot be buying skilled time. What it usually buys is automated or high volume output. That frequently has to be undone later.
What a high fee does not tell you. That it is better.
Expensive buys more hours or more senior hours. It does not buy knowledge unavailable elsewhere. There is no secret method at the top of the market that justifies a multiple.
What price actually varies with. Four things.
How competitive your market is, the state of your site, how much content is needed and whether you are competing locally or nationally. Our pricing page sets out the bands and states our own figures.
How to use price when comparing. Normalise first.
Two quotes are rarely for the same work. Establish what is included and roughly how much time each represents before comparing anything, because the cheaper number is meaningless without that.
What A Good First Conversation Sounds Like
The clearest signal available to a non-specialist is the balance of the conversation. Somebody who should be doing this work asks more than they tell.
The ratio to notice. Questions against claims.
A first conversation dominated by what they offer is a presentation. One dominated by what your business does, who buys from you and what you want more of is a diagnosis.
What they should want before quoting. The site and the numbers.
Access to look at what you have, plus a sense of what your enquiries are currently worth. Anybody quoting a fixed figure without either has priced a package rather than your situation.
Why a quote given without looking is a warning. It cannot be based on anything.
The four things that drive price in the previous block are all invisible from outside. A number produced before examining them was decided by their price list.
What they should ask that surprises you. Commercial questions.
Margin, capacity, what you do not want and what happens to an enquiry after it arrives. Those determine whether the work can succeed and an agency not asking is planning to guess.
What you should leave with. Understanding.
You should be able to describe what they would do and why. If you cannot, either it was not explained or there is nothing specific to explain.
Take The Vetting Seriously
Everything above is orientation. The actual checking happens across four pages. A couple of hours spent on them is the cheapest insurance available on a decision that runs for years.
The questions to ask. With good and poor answers attached.
Questions to ask an SEO agency gives each question with what a good answer sounds like, since a bare list is useless if you do not know the subject.
The warning signs. Ordered by severity.
Red flags when hiring an SEO agency is arranged so you can tell a fatal problem from an untidy one. It also includes the signs commonly mistaken for warnings.
Reading the proposal. The one document you can study.
How to evaluate an SEO agency proposal covers reading past the presentation, which is where most proposals do their persuading.
The order that works. Questions first, then checking.
Ask the questions in a conversation, then use the proposal and the record to check what you were told. The full series is on the hiring an SEO agency guide.
We Are One Of The Options
This page is published by an SEO agency. We would like to be considered. This page is not written to make that the conclusion.
Why it is repeated here. This is the page that decides.
The understanding pillar carries the full disclosure. It is restated on this page because this is where a reader is actually choosing, which is the moment our interest is largest.
What we have not done. Written criteria only we pass.
Every quality in block two is one an agency can genuinely fail, including us. Sector experience, disclosure of who does the work, willingness to be told no. Criteria designed so that only we qualified would be obvious to you and would poison the rest of the site.
What following this advice might conclude. Somebody else.
A reader working through these pages may reasonably decide a freelancer, a consultant or another agency suits them better. That is a legitimate outcome of a page written to be useful rather than persuasive.
What we would ask. Apply it to us too.
Put the same questions to us that you put to anybody else, then hold us to the same answers. If we cannot survive our own guide, you should know that before signing anything.
Hold us to
our own
criteria.
Ask us who does the work, what we would decline to do and what we would do differently for you than for our other clients. We will want to see the site and understand what an enquiry is worth before quoting anything, because a number given before that was decided by a price list.
What we commit to in writing:
Our prices are published rather than quoted on request, so you can compare us against anybody else before speaking to us.
Every guide.
One practice.
What an agency is, whether to buy at all, which model suits you, how to vet one, what things cost, what should be in a contract and how to work with them afterwards.
