How to choose an SEO company: the questions, the red flags, and what a good proposal contains

Choose an SEO company by asking who will do the work, whether you can see the Search Console data yourself, what happens in month one, how long the contract is and what you keep, and what they refuse to do. A company that answers all five plainly is worth talking to. A company that answers any of them with a guarantee, a percentage, or a slide deck is not, whatever its case studies say.

Ten questions, and the answers you want to hear

1. Who will actually do the work on our account? You want a name, and ideally the person on the call. "Our team" means an account manager between you and someone you will never meet.
2. Can we have access to Search Console and Analytics from the start? Yes, and shared, is the only acceptable answer. Every number in a report should be checkable against Google's own screen.
3. What happens in the first month? Technical fixes and the profile, because those show fastest. A company that starts with "content" or "link building" has not looked at your site.
4. How long is the minimum term and what do we keep if we leave? A short minimum with an honest reason for it, then monthly. You keep the pages, the profile, the property and the reports; a company that keeps any of them is holding your business hostage.
5. What will you refuse to do? Bought links, bought reviews, templated town pages, keywords stuffed into a business name. The answer should be immediate and specific.
6. Which of your clients can we look at, and what are the caveats? Real accounts with the flattering parts qualified. A results page with only wins is a sales page.
7. How will we know at month six whether it is working? A named set of numbers and dates. Impressions for named searches by month four, traceable enquiries by month six.
8. What is the price and what moves it? On the page or in the first email. A price that needs a discovery call is a price that depends on what they think you can pay.
9. Do you outsource the writing? No, or a named person, is fine. "We have a content team" usually means a marketplace or a machine.
10. What would you tell us not to buy? A good company says something: ads instead of SEO if you need enquiries this month, a new site before SEO if the current one cannot be edited, nothing at all if nobody searches for the service.

Eight red flags that end the conversation

What a good proposal contains

A proposal should be readable by the owner in ten minutes and should commit the company to specifics. It names the searches the work will target, with the current impressions and position for each from your own Search Console. It says what happens in month one, in a list. It puts dates against expectations: what should have moved by month three, what by month six. It names the person doing the work. It gives the price, the minimum term and what you keep. And it says what it does not include, because a proposal that includes everything is a proposal that has not thought about your business.

What it should not contain is a ranking guarantee, a promise about traffic percentages, or a keyword list of two hundred terms. Two hundred keywords is a company that has not chosen; the first six months of any account are about six to ten searches, and the proposal should be able to name them.

Three things to check before you sign

• The company's own website. Is there a named person, an address, a registration number, a privacy policy that reads as if a person wrote it? Run it through a speed test. A company whose own site takes six seconds on a phone is not the company to fix yours.
• A real report. Ask for one from an existing client with the details removed. It should be short, in plain English, with Google's numbers, and it should say what they refused to do that month. A forty-page PDF of graphs is a report designed not to be read.
• The Search Console arrangement. Confirm in writing that the property will be shared with your Google account from the first week, and that the Google Business Profile and any ads account are owned by you.

Our answers to the ten questions are on the home page, because a company that publishes this guide should be willing to be judged by it. Ask them of us and of everyone else you speak to, and compare the answers rather than the case studies.

Agency, freelancer or in-house

The size of the company matters less than whether the person doing the work is the person you can speak to, and whether the work is measured against Google's numbers. A large agency can be excellent if your account is large enough to get a senior person's attention. A freelancer can be excellent if they cover the technical side as well as the writing. In-house makes sense at a scale most small and mid-sized businesses have not reached. We are a one-person company by design, and the trade-offs of each are set out honestly in the guide on agencies, freelancers and in-house.