Choosing an agency · 11 min read
How to choose an SEO agency without relying on the sales deck
Most SEO buying decisions are made on the quality of a pitch, which is the one thing that has no relationship to the quality of the work. This is how to read a proposal, interrogate a case study, find out who will actually do the work, and check the contract before the deck.
Written by Zubair Afzal, FounderUpdated
Start here
Decide what you are actually buying before you meet anyone
Most agency selections go wrong at the very start, because the buyer never defined the job. Three agencies then arrive with three different interpretations of what is wrong, and the pitch that sounds most confident wins. Confidence is not a signal. It is the cheapest thing in the room.
There are really only two purchases here, and they should be made in that order. The first is a diagnosis: someone competent looking at your site, your market and your data, and telling you what is holding you back. The second is delivery: someone doing the work the diagnosis calls for. Buying twelve months of delivery from an agency that has not yet done the diagnosis is how businesses end up paying for content when the problem was a redirect chain, or paying for links when the problem was that four pages were competing for the same query.
So write a one-page brief before you talk to anyone. What the business sells, what a good lead is worth, what you think is wrong, what has already been tried, what your internal capacity is, and what you would consider a result. Send the same page to every agency. You now have a comparison that is about them rather than about how each one framed the question.
The proposal
Four things a proposal has to tell you
If a proposal cannot answer these four, it is a brochure. Ask for the answers in writing before you compare prices.
What the work actually is
Named deliverables, not categories. "Technical SEO" is a category. "A crawl and log-file review of the product templates, with a prioritised fix list handed to your developers by week three" is a deliverable. If you cannot picture the artefact you receive, nobody has committed to producing one.
What order it happens in
A plan that describes month one and month six differently. Sequence is most of the skill in SEO: fixing indexing before writing content, resolving pages that cannibalise each other before building links to them. A proposal where every month looks the same is a retainer, not a plan.
Who does it
Names, seniority and how much of their week you get. Ask which parts are subcontracted and to whom — writing and link acquisition are the two most commonly passed on. Subcontracting is not automatically a problem. Not being told is.
How you will know
The baseline, the metric definitions and the reporting access. What is the starting number, recorded when, from which property? Which conversions count and how are they defined? Can you open the raw data yourself at any hour without asking? If the only view of performance is a slide the agency makes, you cannot audit your own account.
A method
How to run the evaluation in six steps
Write your own brief first
One page, sent to everyone, describing the business and the problem as you understand it. This is the single highest-leverage thing a buyer can do, and almost nobody does it.
You get: A one-page brief every agency answers
Shortlist on evidence, not on their own rankings
An agency ranking well for "SEO agency" tells you it is good at marketing itself in a market it understands perfectly. That is a weak proxy for whether it can market a fabrication business or a dental group. Shortlist on relevant work, on how they write about their field, and on who they employ.
Pay for the diagnosis
Buy a scoped audit or a discovery engagement from your top one or two. It costs a fraction of a year of retainer, and it is the only way to see the actual quality of thinking rather than the quality of the pitch. Agree in advance that the output is yours.
You get: A findings document you keep either way
Interview the person who will do the work
Insist on it, and hold the conversation without the salesperson leading. Ask them what they found hardest about a recent account, and what they would do differently. Practitioners answer this specifically and salespeople answer it in themes.
Read the case studies against the table below
Take one case study and ask every question in it. You are not trying to catch anyone out; you are testing whether the agency has the underlying numbers and is comfortable showing them. Hesitation at "what was the starting number" is itself the answer.
Read the contract before you read the deck again
Term, notice, deliverable definition, account ownership, content and link ownership at exit, what happens if the named person leaves, and what happens if you pause. Negotiate these while you still have leverage, which is now.
You get: A signed scope you could enforce
The shape of a fair deal
What a reasonable engagement looks like from both sides
These are the terms we think any competent agency should be willing to accept, and the ones a buyer should push back on.
Reasonable to expect
- Named deliverables with a stated cadence, so that "ongoing SEO" means something specific each month.
- You own every account: analytics, Search Console, ad accounts, the Business Profile, the domain, the DNS and the CMS.
- A named practitioner on the account and direct access to them, not only to an account manager.
- Reporting tied to conversions you care about, with the raw platform data open to you at any time.
- A notice period you could realistically use, and a written handover of documentation, dashboards and content.
- A clear statement of what is subcontracted and to whom.
Reasonable to refuse
- A minimum term longer than the time it takes to see whether the work is landing, with no exit for non-delivery.
- Deliverables described only as hours, points or "campaigns", with no output attached to them.
- Assets built inside accounts the agency owns and does not transfer at the end.
- A method described as proprietary in a way that means you cannot see what was done to your own site.
- Link acquisition priced per link with the sources unnamed.
- Automatic renewal with a notice window shorter than the reporting cycle.
Proof
How to read a case study critically
| Dimension | What is usually shown | What to ask next |
|---|---|---|
| A percentage uplift | "Organic traffic up 340 per cent" | Up from what number? Forty visits to a hundred and seventy-six is 340 per cent and commercially irrelevant. |
| A traffic chart | A line rising over twelve months | Is that brand or non-brand? Brand search rises whenever a company does any other marketing at all, including the marketing you paid someone else for. |
| A ranking screenshot | Position one for a named keyword | Checked from which location and device, on what date, and does anybody actually search that phrase? |
| The date range | A start point and an end point | Why does the chart start there? A start chosen at a seasonal trough flatters everything that follows it. |
| Attribution | "We did SEO and revenue grew" | What else changed in that window — a site rebuild, a new product, a price change, a paid campaign, a competitor going under? |
| The relationship | A logo and a quote | Is that client still with you? For how long, who ran the account, and are they still at the agency? |
Questions
What buyers ask us at this stage
How long should an SEO contract be?
Long enough for the work to be judged fairly, short enough that you are not trapped if it is not landing. In practice that usually means an initial term of three to six months and a rolling arrangement with thirty to sixty days notice after that.
What matters more than the length is what happens inside it. A twelve-month term with monthly deliverables you could name is safer than a three-month term where nothing is defined.
Should I pay for an audit before signing a retainer?
Often yes. A paid diagnosis is the cheapest way to test an agency before committing a year of budget, and it gives you a document you keep regardless of who you hire.
Check two things before you agree: that the output is yours to take elsewhere, and that the fee is not simply a discount lever to get you into a retainer.
Is a larger agency safer than a small one?
Not inherently. Size changes the risk rather than removing it: a larger firm gives you process continuity and cover when someone leaves, and a smaller one usually gives you direct access to the person doing the work.
The question that matters in both cases is the same. Who specifically works on your account, how much of their week do you get, and what happens if they leave?
How do I compare two proposals with completely different scopes?
Do not compare the proposals. Write your own one-page brief first, send it to everyone, and compare how each agency responds to the same problem.
If you did not do that, ask each of them to price the other one’s scope. The explanation of why they would or would not do it that way is more revealing than either document.
What should I own when the engagement ends?
Everything the work produced and everything it ran on: the analytics and Search Console properties, the ads accounts, the Business Profile, the domain and DNS, the content, the site itself, and any documentation or dashboards built for you.
Put it in the contract as a list rather than as a principle. Handover disputes are almost always about something nobody thought to name.
Put us through the same process
If you are running a shortlist, use this page on us. Bring the brief, ask who does the work, and ask what we would not do for you. We will answer all three on the call.
If we don't deliver the work we agreed to deliver for reasons within our control, you don't pay for the undelivered work. Read our guarantee
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