Bad SEO contracts leave a very specific kind of regret. It often hits at around the four month mark. By this point, you have lost significant money, rankings have not changed, the reports show meaningless graphs, and the person you pitched the deal to has become unreachable. Locked contracts become a big problem, and the work gets done, but nothing changes. 

There is no guarantee that you will choose the right company but answering these questions will help you identify the companies that are definitely wrong.

Who will actually work on this?

It is not the person presenting to you. It is not the Managing Director who pops into the first meeting to make

himself

herself look important. Who is sitting down on Monday morning to work on your account? In SEO, the thinking that goes into things like keyword selection, content, and technical decisions varies a lot. You want an expert who has 8 years experience, not someone who finished a course last spring. Ask for names and meet them if you can. 

How do you build links – be specific.

At best, responses this vague are an issue. There is still an enormous volume of low quality link building sold to unsuspecting businesses, and when Google finally acts, the impact is not trivial. You want to hear about editorial relevance, relationships with publishers, who links to them vs. who they link to. If they talk about volume, or if there is an opaque about process, consider this.

What does a report actually tell me?

Is it reportable? What constitutes reporting? Some agencies send a spreadsheet of rankings every month and consider this reporting. Rankings moved, awesome, but did traffic increase? Did the right users hit the site? Did they do anything? An SEO marketing agency worth its salt links activity to a commercial outcome, not just a movement in rank. Ask for an example report from a current client. Even a redacted one.

Have you done this for anyone like us?

It’s great to have experience with the same industry, but that’s not a deal-breaker. What you’re really probing for is whether they’ve tackled similar challenges, a competitive market, a greenfield site, bouncing back from an algorithmic hit, etc. By themselves, references are almost worthless. Anyone can get a client to say something nice. It’s a lot harder to fabricate case studies with actual numbers before and after the intervention.

What do you do with content?

This one reveals a lot. SEO and content are essentially the same discipline now, and an SEO marketing agency treating them separately is going to struggle in any sector where the competition knows what they’re doing. Who writes it? Do they brief it properly or just throw topics at a writer and hope? How do they handle subjects that need genuine expertise, technical products, regulated industries, anything where accuracy matters? Push on this one.

What are reasonable timeframes?

No one should be giving you deadlines for picking up certain positions. That’s not how this industry works, and anyone saying that is either working with uncompetitive keywords or is fundamentally misrepresenting what SEO is. But, and this is important, saying “SEO takes time” should not be a justification for not committing to anything ever again. A good SEO marketing agency should be able to provide a time frame along with the state of your website and the market you are in. If you are avoiding the questions you are being dishonest, not evasive.

What if something goes wrong?

Algorithm changes, unnoticed technical issues for six weeks, or a content strategy that completely flopped, all of these things are bound to happen. The important question is not if an agency fails, but how do they deal with failure. Who finds the issue? How quickly do you get informed? How do you keep updates coming? Overall, this will probably be the most important conversation you will ever have, but most people do have it until it’s too late.

One last thing, notice how the questions land. An SEO marketing agency that addresses all of this confidently and without defensiveness is probably worth a deeper conversation. An agency that deflects, goes vague, or starts saying these are odd questions, that says something too.