You do not need to become an SEO expert to tell a competent agency from a bad one. You need about thirty minutes and a method that does not depend on you understanding the technical work. This is that method, timed, in the order that finds the most problems fastest.
Set a timer if it helps. The point of the time limit is not speed — it is to stop you doing the thing most buyers do, which is read the proposal four times and never look at anything outside it.
Before the clock starts: how did they find you?
One question costs no time at all. Did you approach them, or did they approach you?
Google’s own guidance on hiring an SEO puts unsolicited outreach first on its list of warning signs: “be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that email you out of the blue.” Google’s reasoning is practical rather than moral. Agencies that are good at getting clients through search, referral and reputation are not the ones cold-emailing strangers about a site they have not looked at.
This does not disqualify anyone by itself. Plenty of legitimate firms do outbound. But if the relationship started with an unprompted email or a phone call claiming a problem with your Google listing, start from suspicion rather than neutrality, and spend the thirty minutes below more carefully than you otherwise would.
Minutes 0-8: look at their own website
Open the agency’s site with the proposal closed.
Check their claims against their own pages. An agency selling you content should have content worth reading. One selling technical SEO should not have a site that takes eight seconds to load on your phone. This is not a purity test — plenty of good agencies neglect their own marketing — but it is free evidence, and it is evidence they chose to publish.
Find the people. Is there an about page with real names, photos, and roles? Can you find any of those people on LinkedIn, with a history that matches? “Our team of 50 specialists” with no names is RF-15 territory: undisclosed white-label or offshoring. The concern is not that work is subcontracted — plenty of good work is — it is that you cannot assess who is accountable for your account or where your data goes.
Find the address and the entity. A real registered business with a real address is a low bar, and a surprising number of outfits do not clear it. If you are in the US, the state’s business registry is a two-minute check.
Read their case studies for numbers. Look for named clients, a starting point, a timeframe, and an outcome measured in leads or revenue rather than rankings. “Increased traffic by 400%” from a base of nothing is not a result. Case studies in your industry or your city are worth more than impressive ones from a different category.
Verify three things, two minutes total. Open the state or national business registry and confirm the entity exists under the name on the proposal. Search the agency’s name plus “reviews” and look at a third-party profile — Google, Clutch, Trustpilot — rather than the testimonials on their own site. And if they have shown you a ranking as proof, search that term yourself in a private browsing window from your own location. Rankings are personalised, so what they see is not necessarily what your customers see, and the gap is occasionally the whole pitch.
Check whose website they optimise. Some agencies build you a second site on a domain they own, or a set of landing pages on their own platform, and rank that instead of your site. It works until you leave, at which point the traffic was never yours. Ask directly: will the work be done on my domain, in my hosting account, on my content?
Minutes 8-15: six questions, asked in writing
Send these by email, not on a call. You want the answers in a file, and you want to see how they behave when there is no salesperson in the room to steer.
- Who specifically will do the work on my account, and is any of it subcontracted? You are looking for names and an honest yes or no.
- Can I see a real monthly report you send an existing client, with the names redacted? The single most informative artefact in this whole process. More on it below.
- What are the last five links you built for a client, and how did you get them? Real answers name real sites and a real tactic — a supplier listing, a local sponsorship, a piece of digital PR. Evasion, or an answer built around “high DA” scores, points to RF-03: bought or networked links, which Google treats as spam and which you pay to clean up later.
- Who will own the domain, the website, the analytics, the Search Console property, and the Google Business Profile? The answer should be “you do, in your own accounts, from day one.” Anything else is RF-09 or RF-14, and those are the clauses that cost the most money on the way out.
- What happens if I cancel in month two? You are testing for a long minimum term, a silent auto-renew, or a document with no cancellation clause at all. See contract terms you should never sign.
- What would make you tell me not to hire you? An experienced agency has an answer ready — the budget is too low for the market, the site needs a rebuild first, the business model does not suit organic search. An agency that can think of nothing is selling rather than diagnosing.
How they answer matters as much as what they say. Direct answers with specifics, delivered without a countdown attached, are the signal.
Google’s own list, for comparison
Google publishes its own questions to ask an SEO, and it is worth putting next to the six above because it is free, it is from the only party that actually controls the rankings, and almost nobody sends it. Google suggests asking:
- Can you show examples of previous work and share success stories?
- Do you follow Google Search Essentials?
- What are your expected results, in what timeframe, and how do you measure success?
- What is your experience in my industry, in my location, and with international sites?
- How long have you been in business?
- How will we communicate, and will you share all the changes you make and give detailed reasoning?
The last one is the most underrated. An agency that will not commit in advance to telling you what it changed on your site is asking you to accept work you cannot inspect — and six months later, when nobody can remember what was done, that is the conversation you will be having.
Two of Google’s questions are worth combining with ours. “What results do you expect and in what timeframe” pins down a forecast you can hold them to, and Google’s own published answer is that changes typically take four months to a year to take effect. Any timeframe materially shorter than that should be explained, in writing.
Minutes 15-22: the sample report
If you only do one thing on this list, do this one.
A real monthly report tells you what the agency believes its job is. Read a redacted sample and ask three questions of it.
Does it reach the phone? Look for organic sessions, calls, form submissions, bookings, orders — outcomes a business owner recognises. A report built from impressions, keyword positions, and domain authority is RF-06. Domain authority in particular is a third-party vendor score that Google does not use; a report leading with it is reporting on a number that does not exist inside the search engine.
Does it say what was done? The work that month, listed plainly, against what was planned. A report of results with no record of effort cannot be checked against the deliverables you are being sold.
Could you understand it without help? If it takes a call to interpret, it was built to require the call. You should be able to read it on a Sunday evening and know whether the month was good.
If they will not show you any report, even redacted, treat that as an answer.
Minutes 22-27: references, used properly
Ask for two clients: one who has been with them more than a year, and one who left. The second request is the useful one, and the reaction to it is informative on its own.
When you get someone on the phone, skip “are you happy” and ask these:
- What did they do in the first ninety days?
- Has your enquiry volume changed, and how do you know?
- When something went wrong, what happened?
- Who do you talk to, and how often?
- Did anything in the contract surprise you later?
That last one finds auto-renews, notice periods, and ownership problems faster than reading the contract does, because the reference has already lived through them.
Minutes 27-30: compare three quotes on a level field
Get three quotes. Two gives you no baseline; four is more reading than the decision needs.
The mistake is comparing monthly prices. Prices are not comparable until the scope is, so normalise first. Put the three side by side on one page with these rows:
| Row | What to write down |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee | The number, plus any setup fee and any platform fee |
| Articles | How many, how long, who writes them |
| Links | How many, how obtained |
| Technical work | Named tasks, or “unspecified” |
| Local / GBP work | Posts, reviews, citations — or nothing |
| Reporting | Which metrics, how often |
| Minimum term | Months |
| Notice to cancel | Days |
| Ownership | Yours or theirs |
Two things fall out of this table immediately. First, the cheap quote usually gets cheap by removing something — and once the rows are filled in, you can see which something. Second, quotes with “unspecified” in three rows cannot be compared at all, which is itself the finding (RF-02, vague deliverables).
On price, two published figures give you a rough centre of gravity. The Ahrefs SEO pricing survey of 439 SEO service providers put the average monthly retainer at $2,917, with agencies averaging $3,209 and freelancers $1,349. Clutch’s SEO pricing data, drawn from the SEO companies listed on its platform, reports an average monthly cost of $3,199. Both skew toward larger clients than a single-location local business, so treat them as orientation rather than a rule — see how much SEO should cost for the caveats. The useful question is not “is this above or below average” but “does the scope in the table justify the number next to it.”
The things that should end the conversation
Some findings do not need weighing against anything else:
- A guaranteed ranking position (RF-01)
- The agency owning your domain, site, content, or Google Business Profile (RF-09, RF-14)
- A twelve-month term with a silent auto-renew and no cancellation clause — the combination is the problem, not the individual terms
- Bulk link packages priced per link far below anything a real placement costs (RF-03)
- A price that expires this week (RF-12)
Everything else is a negotiation. Raise it before you sign; almost none of it is fixable afterwards.
One last habit
Write down, before you talk to anyone, what you want more of: calls, bookings, quote requests, online orders. Then check that the number you wrote appears somewhere in each proposal and each sample report. It is a crude test and it eliminates a surprising proportion of agencies, because a document that never mentions the outcome you are buying was not written about your business.
Thirty minutes of this will not make you an expert. It will keep you out of the contracts that are genuinely bad, which is most of the value available here. If you would rather have the document itself read line by line — every clause quoted, every flag named, a plain recommendation — order a proposal audit.
Sources
- Google Search Central, “Do you need an SEO?” — Google’s published questions to ask an SEO, its warning-sign list including unsolicited outreach, and the four-months-to-a-year timeline.
- Ahrefs, “How Much Does SEO Cost?” — survey of 439 SEO service providers; average monthly retainer $2,917, agencies $3,209, freelancers $1,349.
- Clutch, “SEO Agency Pricing Guide” — platform data across its listed SEO companies; average monthly cost $3,199, general SEO hourly $100-$149.