How to choose an SEO agency without getting burned

By Shaun Carvill, Managing Director of Clickingmad Ltd, the company behind Click. Published [DATE NEEDED: set at publication].

Choose on evidence. Ask for prices before the pitch, the names of the people who will do the work, references you select yourself, and a sample report you can understand. Ignore the awards wall and the jargon. Any agency that hides its prices, its people or its methods has already told you what you need to know.

Why so many businesses arrive here burned

A steady share of the enquiries Clickingmad has taken since 2000 begin with an account of the last agency. The details vary and the pattern does not: a twelve month contract signed on the strength of a good presentation, reports full of graphs nobody explained, and rankings that improved for terms nobody searches. The owners were not careless. They were buying a service they could not inspect, from an industry that prefers it that way. Twenty five years of hearing these stories has produced a fairly reliable selection method, and this article is it.

The first test costs you nothing

Before you book a single meeting, send each agency an enquiry through its own website and time what happens. Harvard Business Review found the average firm takes 42 hours to respond to an enquiry, and that 23% never respond at all. An agency is selling you visibility and enquiries, so its handling of your enquiry is a free sample of the product. One that is slow when it is trying to win your money will not be quicker once it has it.

Ask the price question first

Nielsen Norman Group research found price is the number one piece of information visitors want, and that firms hiding prices read as evasive. Yet when we reviewed the ten UK agencies dominating page one for agency searches, not one published a price. Ask for a figure in your first email. Most UK agencies charge between £500 and £3,000 a month, so any competent firm can give you a range for a business like yours by return. If the number can only be produced after a discovery call, understand that the number is being built partly from your answers, including the ones about budget. There are legitimate reasons a final quote needs a conversation, since scope varies, but a range never does, and refusing to give one is a choice.

What to check

Six things, all checkable before you sign:

• The names of the people who will work on your account, and whether they are employees or a subcontractor you will never meet.
• A sample monthly report, judged on one test: can you understand it without a translator, and does it show enquiries and revenue rather than rankings alone?
• The contract length, the notice period and any automatic renewal, in writing, before the proposal stage.
• Who owns what if you leave: the content they wrote, the changes to your site, and the Google accounts that hold your data.
• Their own visibility. An agency that cannot rank for its own services in its own city is asking you to buy something it cannot make.
• References you choose from a client list, rather than the two names they hand you.

None of this requires technical knowledge, which is the point. The businesses that get burned are rarely the ones that failed to understand canonical tags. They are the ones that never asked who owned the Analytics account, and found out at the exit that the answer was the agency.

What good looks like in the first meeting

A competent agency arrives having looked at your website and your market, and says at least one thing you did not want to hear. It asks about your margins and your capacity before it talks about keywords, because there is no value in ranking you for work you cannot take on or do not profit from. It gives you a figure in the meeting, or names the day you will have one. And it is willing to say that some of what you have is fine as it is. The agencies to worry about find everything wrong, promise everything quickly, and price everything only after asking what you have to spend.

What to ignore

The awards wall, first. Marketing awards are entered, frequently paid for, and judged by other marketers on the quality of the entry document, so a shelf of them measures the agency's marketing of itself, which was never in doubt. Ignore jargon density: a person who cannot explain the work in plain English either does not understand it or would rather you did not. Ignore client logo strips, which record that a relationship existed, not that it succeeded or survived. And ignore partner badges: the Google Partner badge, for one, reflects advertising spend thresholds, not SEO competence. None of these things are evidence of bad work either, to be fair. They are simply not evidence of anything, and the danger is the hour of a short meeting they can absorb while the real questions go unasked.

The reference questions that matter

When you get a reference on the phone, most people ask whether the agency is any good and receive a polite yes. Ask these instead:

• What were you told would happen in the first six months, and what actually happened?
• Who do you deal with month to month, and is it the person who pitched?
• Do you actually read the monthly report, and could you tell me what last month's said?
• What happened the last time something went wrong?
• Knowing what you know now, would you sign again at the same price?

Then ask the agency for one client who left. Every agency old enough to be worth hiring has former clients, and how it speaks about them tells you more than any case study. If the departed client says the work was decent but the business outgrew the plan, that is a normal ending and a good sign. If the agency cannot produce a single former client willing to take a call, consider what that suggests about the endings. I have sat in pitches, years ago and on the agency side, where the confident answer to a hard question was a subject change, and I have watched buyers accept it. The reference call is where subject changes go to fail.

The contract terms that do the damage

Most of the damage I see was signed for on day one: twelve month minimums with automatic renewal, ninety day notice periods, and clauses under which the content you paid for remains the agency's property. None of this is standard practice anywhere but in the contracts of agencies that expect you to want to leave. Fair terms exist and you can hold out for them: a rolling monthly agreement or a short initial commitment, a notice period measured in weeks, and everything produced for you belonging to you from the day it is made. Ours work that way, not out of charity, but because a client who stays by choice is easier to do good work for than one held by a clause.

Run the test on us

If you are choosing an agency at the moment, run this process on everyone, including us. Our prices are published, from local SEO at £395 to the market leader plan at £2,500. Our references are yours to choose. And the response time test starts whenever you like: call 01746 769612 and see how it is answered.