How to Choose and Audit Whoever Does Your SEO

The promises that should end the conversation

A guarantee of specific rankings, or of rankings by a date. Nobody controls what competitors do or how search engines assess pages, and in local search the result changes with where the searcher is standing. There is no single position to guarantee.

Any claim of a relationship with Google, priority access, or a contact on the inside. No such arrangement exists for ranking. Paying for ads buys ads and nothing else.

A proprietary method that cannot be explained. The techniques in this field are publicly documented and largely dull. Secrecy here almost always means either nothing is happening, or something is happening that you would not agree to if it were described.

Large numbers of links delivered quickly. Links at that speed are bought, and the risk of that is taken with your domain, not with the agency's.

Questions that produce checkable answers

Ask what they would do in the first month, and listen for whether a baseline is recorded before anything changes. If no starting numbers are captured, no later claim of improvement can be verified — and that is rarely an oversight.

Ask who writes the content and how many pages a month. This is where most of a small-business retainer actually goes, so a vague answer here is a vague answer about the majority of your money.

Ask what happens if it does not work. The useful version is a stopping rule: what result, by when, would mean this should end. An agency that cannot answer has arranged things so that continuing is always the recommendation.

Ask for two clients in a similar position, and contact them. Not the flagship case study — a business your size, in a comparable market.

Own your accounts, without exception

The domain, the hosting, the analytics property, the Search Console property and the Google Business Profile should all be registered in your name, with the agency granted access as a user.

This is the single most common way small businesses end up trapped. When the agency owns the accounts, leaving means losing your historical data, sometimes your domain, and occasionally the website itself — and the conversation about leaving is conducted from a position where you have nothing.

If an agency resists this, that is the answer to every other question you were going to ask. It is not a technical inconvenience; it is a choice about who holds the leverage.

How to audit someone you are already paying

Start with what is publicly verifiable, and do it yourself. Look at your sitemap and count how many pages have appeared in the last three months. Search your main terms from a browser you are not signed into. Open Search Console and look at whether impressions are trending anywhere.

Then read the last three monthly reports side by side. If the sections are identical and only the numbers move, they are generated. If every metric improves every month, they are selected. Both are signals about the relationship rather than about your rankings.

Then ask two questions in writing: what specifically was done in the last thirty days, and how many enquiries came from organic search in that period. The first should be a list you can check against your own website. The second is the only number that matters, and an agency that cannot produce it has not been measuring the thing you are paying for.

Agency, freelancer, or nobody

For a small local business, the highest-return work is often not something you need to buy at all. Completing your Google Business Profile, fixing inconsistent business details, writing a page for each service and asking customers for reviews are all free and account for a large share of the available improvement.

A freelancer suits a business that needs a specific problem solved — a technical mess, a migration, a set of pages written. It is cheaper, more direct, and it ends.

An agency makes sense when the work is genuinely continuous and someone has to own it. It is worth asking honestly whether that is your situation, because a retainer is a recurring cost and the technical work it usually starts with is not recurring.

Read the contract for the exit, not the start

Check the notice period. Twelve-month minimum terms are common and are sometimes defensible given how slowly this works, but they should buy you something — a defined deliverable, not simply an obligation.

Check what happens to the work when you leave. The pages written for you should remain yours. Content published under a licence that ends with the contract is a term worth finding before signing rather than afterwards.

Check whether the reporting is contractual. "Monthly reporting" as a bullet point on a proposal is not the same as an agreed list of what the report contains, and the difference becomes visible in month four.