What to check before you sign with an SEO company

There are more than fifty agencies serving the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky market. Some are very good. The market also has a long history of people taking a few hundred a month from small businesses and doing close to nothing, because it is a service where the customer usually cannot tell.

Here is how to tell.

1. Ask what it costs, and see what happens

Fewer than ten of the fifty odd agencies serving this market publish a price anywhere on their own site. Everybody else wants a call first.

That is not automatically a red flag, some work genuinely needs scoping. But if you ask directly on the first call and still cannot get a number, that is telling you something about how the rest of the relationship will go.

2. Ask what happens if it does not work

The answer you want is honest and slightly uncomfortable: no guarantees, here is what I will do, here is how you will be able to tell whether it worked.

The answer you should walk away from is a guarantee of first page rankings. Nobody controls Google's algorithm, so nobody can promise that, and anybody who does is either lying to you or does not understand their own job. Both are disqualifying.

3. Ask who will own your accounts

Your domain, your hosting, your Google Business Profile, your Analytics and Search Console. All of those should be in your name with the agency added as a manager.

Ask specifically: "if I leave in six months, what do I have to do to get everything back?" The right answer is nothing, because you already own it. Any other answer is the agency describing the leverage it plans to have over you.

4. Ask what happens in month one, specifically

A real answer sounds like: audit the site, take a baseline measurement, fix the structured data and title tags, sort out the Google profile, clean up the directory listings.

A vague answer sounds like: onboarding, discovery, strategy development. Those are things that happen around work rather than work.

5. Ask how long before you see anything

Honest ranges are four to six weeks for Google Business Profile movement and three to six months for organic rankings in a competitive trade, sometimes longer.

If somebody tells you thirty days, they are either about to do something risky or they are managing you rather than informing you.

6. Ask what they will not do

Anybody who has done this a while has things they refuse to do, and a good one will tell you: no writing reviews, no buying links, no keyword stuffing your business name, no locking you into a twelve month contract if the work is not landing.

Somebody who says yes to absolutely everything is either desperate or has not thought about it, and neither is what you want handling your website.

The contract itself

Two clauses matter more than the rest. There should be language saying rankings are not guaranteed, which protects both of you and is a sign of a grown up agreement. And there should be something about what happens when you leave, ideally thirty days notice and a clean handover.

A twelve month lock in is not automatically bad, but ask why. If the answer is "because SEO takes time" then fine, that is true. If the answer is uncomfortable, that tells you they expect you to want out.

And ask them to look at your site first

Anybody serious will happily tell you two or three specific things wrong with your website before you have paid them anything. If they cannot, or they will only do it after you sign, they either have not looked or they do not want to give anything away, and neither is a good sign.

I do exactly that for free, and you are welcome to take the report to somebody else. Let me know if you want one!