SEO · Choosing an agency
Promised rankings get the attention. The flag I’d actually walk away over is an agency that keeps your Google accounts under its own login.
Nobody can promise first place
Long contracts protect the agency
You should own every account
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Most lists of SEO red flags start with promised rankings. That’s a fair warning, and I’ll come to it. But the red flag I’d walk away over is quieter: an agency that won’t give you admin access to your own Google accounts.
Your Google Search Console, Google Analytics and Google Business Profile belong to your business. They hold years of data about how customers find you, and the Business Profile is often where the phone calls come from. If the agency set them up under its own Google login and “lets you see the reports”, you don’t own your marketing. You rent it. When you want to leave, you’ll discover how much power that gives them, and some agencies use it.
The fix is simple. Your company owns each account, under a Google login the company controls, and the agency is added as a user. Any honest agency will agree in one email. If they hesitate, or suddenly discover a company policy that says it’s “for security”, you’ve learned what you needed to know.
Promised rankings. Google’s own page on hiring an SEO says plainly that no one can guarantee a top spot, and that if someone promises first place you should find someone else. Rankings depend on Google and on your competitors, neither of which the agency controls.
Secret methods. “Our proprietary system” is usually a link network or a content mill. Google’s guidance is to be careful with anyone who won’t clearly explain what they plan to do. A good agency can tell you in plain words what it will change on your site in the first ninety days.
Talk of links by the thousand. Paid links and link schemes break Google’s spam policies. If the pitch includes a number of backlinks per month, you are being sold a risk with a monthly fee.
No questions about your business. If they don’t ask which services make you money, where your customers are and how leads reach you, they’re going to optimize for whatever is easiest to rank.
Long lock-ins. A 12-month minimum with no exit is mostly there to protect the agency from the conversation at month six. SEO does take months, which is a fair reason to give it time. It isn’t a reason to be unable to leave if nothing is happening. I’d rather earn the renewal every month, which is why our SEO service is month to month and you can cancel after any month.
The agency owns the content. Check who owns the pages and articles they write. If it’s them, you could lose the work when you leave.
Vague deliverables. “Ongoing optimization” isn’t a deliverable. Pages, fixes and reports with dates are. Our article on SEO contract terms lists the clauses I’d read first.
The report is where the problems hide in plain sight. If it’s full of rankings, traffic and “visibility scores” and never mentions inquiries, calls or sales, it is measuring the agency’s activity rather than your result. When it celebrates a jump in traffic, ask how much of it is people searching for your company by name, because they were going to find you anyway; clicks from searches without your name, shown on their own, are the honest number.
Then ask where each figure comes from. Every number should come from something you can open yourself (Search Console, Analytics, your CRM). If it only exists in the agency’s own dashboard, you’re taking their word for it.
If you’re unsure about an agency you already have, book a free 30-minute call with us. We’ll look at what you have and say what we’d change first, no obligation, even if the answer is that your current agency is doing fine.
A regional security-equipment supplier came to us after paying an SEO vendor for months. The reports talked about ranking improvements, and nobody at the company could tie them to qualified inquiries. What the vendor had actually produced was thin location pages and a large number of low-value directory links.
We went through Search Console, the analytics, the actual leads and the pages that brought them in. Several pages were competing with each other for the same product terms, while the commercial pages that mattered had weak descriptions and poor internal linking. We consolidated the overlapping pages with appropriate redirects, improved technical indexing, wrote content around the questions real buyers ask, and set up tracking for form and phone leads through to sales qualification.
I won’t put a revenue figure on it. I’d only report revenue the business can verify from its own order attribution; where it can’t, we report leads and conversions. For a program like this, the measures I’d judge it by are cost per qualified inquiry and the sales pipeline it produces.
It helps to know what the opposite of a red flag sounds like. A decent agency, pitching a 25-person landscaping company, would say something like this. In the first month we’ll fix what stops Google reading the site properly and set up lead tracking for forms and calls, so we both know the starting point. In months two and three we’ll rewrite the five service pages that bring in most of your revenue and build out your Google Business Profile. From month four we’ll add pages for the towns you want more work in, each with something real to say about the work there. Each month you’ll get non-brand clicks, the positions of those service pages and the number of inquiries from search, with the reasons behind any change.
Notice what’s missing: no promised positions, no link counts, no mystery. Just work you can see and numbers you can check. It’s rather dull, to be honest, and that’s the point. The agencies with the most exciting pitches are often the ones with the least to show at month six. For a sense of what that work costs, see how much SEO costs a small business.
Before signing with anyone, ask three things in writing. Will my company own the Search Console, Analytics and Business Profile accounts, with you as a user? Can I leave after any month with notice? How will you report leads from search, not just rankings? A good agency answers yes, yes and specifically. For a longer list, see questions to ask an SEO company.
And if you’re with an agency now and don’t know who owns your accounts, find out this week. In Search Console, open Settings, then Users and permissions, and look for your own name next to “Owner”. It takes two minutes. It is a pretty big deal.
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Yes. Google’s own guidance on hiring an SEO says no one can guarantee a top ranking and that you should find someone else if they promise one. Good agencies talk about the work they’ll do and how they’ll measure leads, not positions they can’t control.
Not always, but they mostly protect the agency. SEO takes months to show results, which is a fair reason to commit for a while; it isn’t a reason to be unable to leave if nothing is happening. A month-to-month contract with a clear plan for the first six months is a fairer arrangement.
User access you granted to your Search Console, Google Analytics and Google Business Profile, plus whatever website access they need to make changes. You stay the owner of each. For an initial audit, Google suggests giving read-only Search Console access.
Ask in writing for ownership of each account to be transferred to a Google account your company controls. Most agencies will do it. If they won’t, you can verify Search Console yourself through your website or DNS, and Google has a request-ownership process for Business Profiles, but it’s slower. Analytics has no such shortcut, so ask before the relationship ends.
