SEO is a market where the buyer usually can't evaluate the work directly — which is exactly the kind of market where bad actors thrive. The good news: dishonest agencies are remarkably consistent in how they pitch, and competence leaves fingerprints too. This guide gives you both patterns. Yes, we sell SEO; read this anyway and hold us to it.
Red flags that end the conversation
Any one of these predicts a bad outcome reliably enough to walk away.
- Guaranteed rankings (“#1 on Google in 90 days”) — Google explicitly warns that no one can guarantee rankings; this pitch is either ignorance or deceit
- A “special relationship with Google” or proprietary secret methods — neither exists
- Cold outreach claiming they “found critical errors” on your site — a volume scam, not a diagnosis
- Link quantities at commodity prices — purchased links violate Google's spam policies, and the penalty lands on your domain, not theirs
- One price for every client regardless of market — your competition determines the work; a flat universal package ignores it
- They won't tell you what they'll actually do — “trust the process” is not a scope
- Their own site is slow, thin, or invisible in search — the shoemaker's children test
Questions that reveal competence
Ask these in the first call and listen for specifics.
- “What would you do in the first 90 days, concretely?” — strong agencies describe audit, priorities, early fixes; weak ones describe their package tiers
- “How do you measure success, and what do the first months' reports contain?” — look for leading indicators and business metrics, not vanity dashboards
- “Who does the work?” — know whether strategy and content are done by the people pitching you or outsourced anonymously
- “When would you tell me SEO is the wrong investment?” — honest practitioners have an answer; sellers don't
- “Can you walk me through a situation where you failed and what you changed?” — confidence without scar tissue is a red flag of its own
What an honest proposal looks like
It starts from your situation — market, competitors, site history — rather than a rate card. It names the levers it will pull and why those levers for your case. It scopes deliverables concretely. It sets expectations about time honestly, including what won't have happened by month three. And it treats reporting as accountability, not theater: you should be able to verify every claim in your own Search Console.
Finally: insist on owning your own accounts — domain, analytics, Search Console, Business Profile. Agencies that hold your accounts hostage are planning for the end of the relationship better than you are.