Navigating the complex landscape of SEO agencies and consultants can be treacherous. The SEO industry lacks formal barriers to entry, standardized certifications, or universal quality indicators, making it exceptionally difficult to distinguish between qualified professionals and charlatans.
This guide will help you identify red flags, ask the right questions, and set realistic expectations when hiring SEO help.
The SEO Industry’s Charlatan Problem: No Barriers to Entry
Unlike regulated professions with formal credentials, licenses, or malpractice consequences, the SEO industry has no meaningful barriers to entry. Anyone can declare themselves an SEO expert regardless of knowledge, experience, or ethics.
This structural problem explains the industry’s persistent quality issues. Without formal accountability mechanisms, the market has difficulty distinguishing qualified professionals from opportunists. The problem is compounded by the delayed feedback loop in SEO, where poor practices might not show negative consequences for months.
To protect yourself in this environment, rely on your own knowledge to evaluate potential providers rather than claimed expertise or years in business.
Finding a Good SEO Agency: Why You Need to Understand SEO First
The paradoxical challenge of hiring an SEO agency is that you need to understand SEO fundamentals to effectively evaluate potential providers. Without this knowledge, you lack the framework to distinguish between legitimate strategies and nonsensical jargon.
Before engaging agencies, invest time in understanding basic SEO concepts like authority, relevance, penalties, and competitive analysis. This foundational knowledge enables you to ask informed questions and evaluate responses critically. The most dangerous position is complete ignorance, which makes you vulnerable to agencies that excel at sales presentations while delivering superficial or outdated SEO practices.
Lucky you! I have written a full SEO 101 series of articles to equip you with this knowledge.
The Power of “Why”: Essential Questions to Ask Any SEO Agency
The most revealing questions you can ask potential SEO providers all begin with “why.” These questions penetrate beyond tactics to test understanding of SEO fundamentals:
- Why are we focusing on these particular keywords?
- Why do you recommend this specific approach over alternatives?
- Why has our competitor achieved better rankings, and what specifically are they doing differently?
- Why would search engines value the signals your strategy aims to create?
- Why would this approach work in our particular competitive environment?
Good professionals can explain the reasoning behind their recommendations and connect tactics to strategic objectives. Those who cannot articulate why particular approaches matter often have only a superficial understanding of SEO.
In my experience, red flags include excessive focus on on-page factors without addressing authority building, guarantees of specific rankings, emphasis on metadata optimization as a primary strategy, or reliance on “secret techniques” they cannot explain.
Cookie-Cutter SEO Packages: The Red Flag of Bad Agencies
One of the most revealing indicators of a subpar SEO agency is the offering of standardized packages. These “Bronze, Silver, Gold” or “Basic, Premium, Enterprise” packages signal a fundamental misunderstanding of how SEO works. Effective SEO strategy must be tailored to your specific competitive landscape, industry, and objectives.
Cookie-cutter packages typically include arbitrary numbers of blog posts or backlinks without considering their relevance or quality. This one-size-fits-all approach cannot possibly account for the vastly different competitive environments across industries and keywords.
High-quality agencies develop custom strategies based on thorough competitive analysis rather than selling pre-packaged solutions.
This is precisely why I do not offer “SEO Packages”.
Why SEO Success Timeframes Depend on Competition
One of the most common questions clients ask is “how long until we see results?” The honest answer is always: it depends on your competition.
In low-competition niches, significant ranking improvements might appear within weeks. In highly competitive spaces, meaningful progress might require months or even years of consistent effort.
Reputable agencies will analyse your competitive landscape before providing timeframe estimates rather than making universal promises.
Be wary of any agency that guarantees ranking positions. Such promises indicate either dishonesty or naivety about how search engines function and the competitive nature of SEO.
Why 30-Day Rolling Contracts Are the Only Ethical Option
I’m not a fan of long-term contracts for SEO services. Since SEO results cannot be guaranteed, agencies that lock clients into 6–12-month contracts are essentially transferring all risk to the client while securing their own revenue regardless of performance.
The only truly ethical approach is the 30-day rolling contract model, where clients can terminate services with 30 days’ notice if they’re unsatisfied with progress. This arrangement creates proper accountability, ensuring the agency must continually demonstrate value to retain the client’s business.
Legitimate agencies confident in their abilities welcome this arrangement, while those requiring long commitments often rely on contractual obligations rather than results to retain clients.
Guess which contract model I use?
The Reality of SEO Pricing: Why Cheap Always Means Ineffective
The pricing spectrum for SEO services reflects a harsh reality: cheap SEO is always ineffective SEO. This isn’t a matter of profit margins but of economic reality. Effective SEO requires significant expertise, time, and resources – all of which come at a cost.
Agencies offering SEO at suspiciously low prices typically deliver one of three things: templated work with minimal customization, spammy techniques that risk penalties, or simply the illusion of SEO without substantive work.
Quality SEO typically requires a minimum investment of several thousand dollars monthly for competitive industries, with costs scaling based on competition levels and objectives.
Understanding this economic reality helps you set appropriate budgets and avoid the costly mistake of investing in ineffective services that may ultimately damage your search visibility rather than improve it.
Just be careful here. Cheap SEO being bad doesn’t necessarily mean that expensive SEO is good. It may be good. Rather, good SEO is necessarily expensive. Understanding SEO allows you to evaluate whether what agencies and consultants propose to you is good or not.
What Makes Good SEO Expensive?
Quality SEO requires significant investment for several reasons:
- Competitive research demands expertise and specialized tools
- Legitimate authority building is resource-intensive and increasingly difficult
- Ongoing analysis and strategy refinement need experienced professionals
These requirements create a price floor below which effective SEO simply isn’t economically viable. Agencies charging below this threshold must cut corners, typically by templating work, using spammy techniques, or simply not performing the promised services.
Cheap SEO often causes more harm than no SEO through penalties, wasted resources, and opportunity costs. A penalty can set your search visibility back months or years, making proper investment in quality services the more economical choice despite higher upfront costs.
Yep, you guessed it. My services are not cheap!
Wrap Up
Hiring SEO help remains challenging, but by understanding these fundamental issues, you can significantly improve your chances of finding a legitimate provider. Focus on agencies that emphasize competitive analysis, offer flexible contract terms, explain their reasoning transparently, and charge rates that reflect the true economics of quality SEO work. Most importantly, invest in your own understanding of SEO fundamentals so you can effectively evaluate the advice you receive and hold providers accountable for results.
This is where I’m supposed to tell you that you should hire me… Nope! Read all my SEO 101 articles before you contact me… Please! I only work with clients that really understand SEO. Fortunately, if you read my articles, you will qualify, because SEO is not rocket science! Also, there aren’t that many articles to read, so it won’t hurt. Put it like this, if you contact me, and you don’t mention that you have read all my articles (which I have put a lot of effort into), I may not reply, or if I do, I will simply ask you to read all my articles.