The short answer to how to choose an SEO agency: interview them the way you’d interview a contractor — ask specific questions, listen for specific answers, and walk away from anyone who guarantees the weather.
SEO is easy to sell and hard to verify. The work happens out of sight, results take months, and a bad agency looks identical to a good one for the first two invoices. Below are twelve questions to ask an SEO agency before you sign anything.
For each: what a good answer sounds like, and what a red flag sounds like. We answer them ourselves near the end — an agency that exempts itself from its own guide is telling you something.
Know which of the four kinds of SEO you’re buying
SEO isn’t one thing. It’s four kinds of work: technical (can Google find, load, and trust your pages?), content (do your pages actually answer what people search?), authority (do reputable sites link to and mention you?), and local (does your Google Business Profile — the free Google listing with your hours, reviews, and map pin — put you in the map pack, the three-business block shown for searches like “plumber near me”?).
Which matters most depends on you: a dental practice in Plano lives and dies by local; a software company selling nationwide barely touches it. Before you interview anyone, decide what a win looks like — calls from your service area, booked appointments, sales of a specific product — so you can judge whether an agency’s plan points at it.
If you haven’t settled whether you want SEO or paid ads first, read our SEO vs. Google Ads comparison before you shop. Plenty of agencies are good at one and merely sell the other.
Questions 1–4: How they’ll approach your site
1. What would you do in the first 90 days, specifically for my site?
Good answer: They looked at your site before the call and can name things: a slow homepage, five near-identical service pages, a Business Profile in the wrong category, no schema markup (the code that tells Google what kind of business and pages it’s looking at). They sequence it: fix what blocks Google first, then build what’s missing.
Red flag: The same 90-day plan they’d hand a roofer in Arlington and a law firm in Fort Worth. If it doesn’t mention your site, it’s a template, and templates get template results. Also: “847 critical errors” in a cold email from a stranger, or refusing to say anything until you’ve paid for an audit. A paid deep audit is reasonable; a paid first impression is not.
2. How do you decide which keywords are worth chasing?
Good answer: They talk about intent — what the person typing that phrase actually wants — and whether it leads to revenue. They’d rather rank you for “emergency AC repair Frisco” than “air conditioning,” because one is a customer and the other is a middle-schooler doing homework.
Red flag: A list of impressive-sounding broad terms, or a keyword list to approve before anyone has asked what your best customers look like.
3. How do you charge, and what does the monthly fee buy?
Good answer: A named list of what setup covers and what each month delivers — pages written, fixes shipped, links earned, the report you’ll get — so you can check the invoice against the work. Retainers vary by market, so judge the list, not the number.
Red flag: A monthly fee with no deliverables attached, pricing per keyword or ranking, or a fee that drops sharply the moment you agree to a longer term.
4. Who actually does the work, and can I talk to them?
Good answer: Names. The person on the sales call may not be the one writing your pages, but you should know who is, where they are, and how to reach them.
Red flag: Vagueness about the team, or an account manager who relays everything to a “fulfillment team” you’ll never meet. That often means the work is subcontracted, and you have no way of knowing to whom.
Questions 5–8: How you’ll know it’s working
5. What will you report, and how often?
Good answer: Monthly, in plain English, tied to your goals: what was done, what moved, what’s next — leads, not just rankings. And you keep direct access to Google Search Console (Google’s free report on how you show up in search) and Google Analytics (who visits and what they do) so you can check their homework.
Red flag: No regular reporting, or a dashboard of vanity metrics (“impressions up 400%”) with no line connecting it to your phone ringing.
6. When should I expect results, honestly?
Good answer: A range with reasons. For most small-business sites, meaningful movement takes three to six months, depending on where the site starts, how competitive the market is, and how fast you approve content; then it compounds. Our month-by-month SEO timeline has the long version.
Red flag: “Page one in 30 days.” Sometimes true for a phrase nobody searches. Never true for one that matters.
7. Do you guarantee rankings?
Good answer: No. Nobody controls Google’s results, and Google’s own guidance on hiring an SEO company says as much. An honest agency commits to its work — what it will do, by when, and how it will tell you — not the outcome.
Red flag: Yes. Either a lie, or a promise about a phrase so obscure that ranking for it changes nothing. Either way, they’ve just told you how they do business.
8. What accounts will you need, and who owns them?
Good answer: They ask to be added as a user on your existing Business Profile, Search Console, and Analytics — accounts you own, that they access. Anything new gets created under your login.
Red flag: They create the accounts under their own login “to keep things simple.” When you leave, your Business Profile and its years of reviews are theirs to hold hostage.
Questions 9–12: The contract and what you own
9. How long is the contract, and how do I leave?
Good answer: Month-to-month, or a short initial term with a clear exit. Giving SEO a fair run is reasonable — but that commitment should be yours to make, not enforced by a lock-in.
Red flag: A twelve-month SEO contract with auto-renewal and a cancellation window you’ll miss. A long lock-in mostly protects the agency from the consequences of not delivering — so ask what, specifically, they need that protection from.
10. If we part ways, what do I keep?
Good answer: Everything. The domain, the site, the code, every page they wrote, every account they touched. Ownership shouldn’t be negotiable.
Red flag: The site lives on their “proprietary platform” and can’t be moved. Content is “licensed” to you while you’re a client. Read the contract for the words guarantee, term, license, platform, and termination.
11. How do you build links?
Backlinks — links from other sites to yours — still signal authority, though Google weights them less than it once did. They’re also where most of this industry’s shady behavior lives.
Good answer: Earned links from real, relevant sites: local press, the industry directories that matter, suppliers and partners, content people actually cite. It’s slow, and they’ll say it’s slow.
Red flag: A “private blog network” (throwaway sites built only to link to whoever pays), a fixed number of links per month, or buying links outright. Google’s spam policies treat paid and manipulative links as a violation, and the consequence — a manual action from Google’s reviewers, or a quiet ranking drop — lands on your site, not the agency’s.
12. What’s your method, and why won’t you tell me?
Good answer: They tell you. There is no secret: technical health, useful content, genuine authority, local signals — every legitimate agency works from the same public playbook; the difference is execution. They won’t do twenty hours of free audit work before you’ve hired them, which is fair.
Red flag: “Proprietary.” “Secret sauce.” Secrecy in SEO almost always means there’s nothing there, or something they’d rather you didn’t see.
SEO agency red flags, collected in one place
If you remember one part of this post, make it this table of SEO agency red flags.
| What they say | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| “Guaranteed page-one rankings” | No one controls Google’s results. It’s a lie or an irrelevant phrase. |
| “Proprietary” or “secret” methods | Legitimate SEO is public. Secrecy hides nothing or something risky. |
| No regular SEO reporting, or rankings-only reporting | You can’t tell whether you’re paying for work or for silence. |
| Twelve-month contract with auto-renewal | Shifts the risk of non-delivery from them to you. |
| They own the site, content, or Google accounts | Leaving means starting over. That’s the point. |
| Link packages, private blog networks, “X links per month” | Almost always means paid or manipulative links, which Google’s spam policies treat as a violation — and your site, not the agency, takes the hit. |
| Cold outreach citing “errors” on your site | Automated fear marketing; thousands of businesses got the same email. |
| “We’re a Google Partner” as an SEO credential | Google Partners is an Ads program. Google has no SEO certification, and its own hiring guidance says it doesn’t evaluate or endorse third-party SEO tools. |
One of these might have an innocent explanation. Three is a pattern.
Things that aren’t red flags (but get mistaken for them)
- “It depends.” That’s the honest answer to most SEO questions. The follow-up is what it depends on — a good agency can tell you.
- They’re not in your city. An agency in Fort Worth can do excellent work for a client in Denver. For local SEO they need to understand your market — a suburb and a downtown are different competitive landscapes — but that’s research, not residency.
- They’re small. A three-person shop where you talk to the person doing the work can beat a sixty-person agency where you talk to an account manager. Size buys capacity, not attention.
- They recommend something other than SEO — or nothing. Ads first for a business that needs revenue in the next sixty days; a rebuild because the current site can’t be fixed; a flat “your market isn’t worth it yet.” An agency willing to sell you less is worth listening to.
- They talk about your website more than your rankings. Speed, structure, and page quality are the foundation. If your site is slow and thin, that’s the first job — checklist work, not magic; our 25-point technical SEO checklist covers most of it.
How AnthroWeb answers the same 12 questions
We do SEO for small businesses from Dallas–Fort Worth — read everything above knowing that. Our answers to the yes-or-no questions:
- Guaranteed rankings? No. What we commit to is the work and the monthly reporting on it — not what Google does with it.
- Contract length and price? Month-to-month, no long-term contracts, and our SEO pricing is published.
- Who owns the site, content, and code? You do — the domain, the content, and the code.
- Reporting? Monthly, in plain English, tied to leads rather than a ranking screenshot.
- Timeline? Three to six months for meaningful movement, then it compounds.
- Method? Public — see question 12. The specifics are on the SEO services page above; our step-by-step project process is public too.
The rest — what we’d do for your site in 90 days — we answer on a call, specifically, after we’ve looked. If we can’t be specific, treat that as the red flag it is.
How to run the process in a week, not a month
- Shortlist three agencies. More than that and you’ll stop listening carefully.
- Send all three the same twelve questions in writing before the call. Written answers are harder to improvise and easier to compare.
- On the call, ask question 1 again, unprompted. You’ll know within two minutes whether the written answer was theirs or a template someone else filled in.
- Ask for proof you can check yourself — a live site they built that you can open on your phone and run through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights test, a written process, a client you can phone. You want evidence they deliver, and say so when something isn’t working.
- Read the contract for five words: guarantee, term, license, platform, termination. Each one should be either absent or clearly in your favor.
- Pick the one whose answers were most specific to you, not most impressive. Specificity is the cheapest signal of competence you’ll get before the invoices start.
That’s the whole method for how to choose an SEO agency: an afternoon of reading, three calls, and a contract read closely.
Key takeaways
- No agency can guarantee rankings; anyone who does is either lying or promising a phrase that doesn’t matter.
- The best single test is the first question: a real agency’s 90-day plan names your site’s specific problems, not a template.
- Reporting should be monthly, readable, and tied to leads — and you should hold your own Search Console and Analytics access.
- Long contracts, “licensed” content, and agency-owned accounts all exist to make leaving expensive; read the contract for guarantee, term, license, platform, and termination.
- “Proprietary methods” is a red flag because legitimate SEO has no secrets — only better or worse execution.
- Buying links or using private blog networks violates Google’s spam policies, and the penalty lands on your site, not the agency’s.
- Google Partner status is an Ads credential, not an SEO one — Google has no SEO certification, so treat it as marketing, not proof.
Frequently asked questions
Prices vary widely with scope and market, so the number matters less than what it buys: named deliverables, real monthly reporting, and no lock-in. Ours are public: ongoing SEO and content is $2,500 setup plus $500 a month, month-to-month, and every plan is on our pricing page.
Yes. Paid links, private blog networks, thin auto-generated pages, and keyword-stuffed content can all trigger penalties under Google’s spam policies, and an agency that owns your accounts can take them with it when you leave.
Ask for a written list of every change made in the last 90 days, then check it against your site and your Google Search Console data. If they can’t produce the list, or you can’t find the changes, you have your answer.
Location matters less than whether they understand your market and answer your questions specifically. A Dallas agency can serve a client in Ohio well; what you should avoid is any agency that treats every market as identical.
Usually not. SEO does take months, but that commitment should be yours to make and revisit, not enforced by a lock-in; a month-to-month agency has to keep earning the work.
Ask us the twelve questions
Send us your site. We’ll answer the yes-or-no questions in writing, look at the site before we talk, and answer the rest on a call — specifically, or not at all. Start the conversation, or email hello@anthroweb.com.