Short answer
How do you pick an SEO agency, and what should you ask?
The questions that separate search agencies are not about the portfolio but these three: what do you measure, which work do you do and which do you expect from us, and what do I still hold when the engagement ends. A proposal guaranteeing a ranking position should be dropped; Google does not sell positions and no agency can promise one. The measurable commitment is published work and measured visibility, not rank.
Key takeaways
- A proposal guaranteeing a ranking goes out in the first pass: the engine decides position, and no supplier can commit to an engine's decision.
- The right commitment is about output: how many pages get rewritten each month, which technical fixes are made, which measurement is reported and how often.
- The report should show a query breakdown, not a traffic total; mistaking traffic arriving on your own brand name for growth is the most common measurement error.
- If the contract is vague about who writes the content, three months later nothing has been published — the single most common reason search work stalls.
- What you must still hold at the end: account access, the published content, the list of technical fixes, and the measurement history.
Which proposals go out in the first pass?
- Anyone guaranteeing a ranking. The engine decides position; a supplier can only commit to the work they will do, not to an engine's decision.
- Anyone claiming "we have an arrangement with Google". No such channel exists in organic results; the sentence alone is enough to disqualify.
- Anyone who will not say what they will do. "Monthly SEO work" is not a scope; how many pages, which technical fixes, which report — in writing.
- Anyone reporting only keyword positions. A rank table does not show a business result; clicks, query breakdown and conversions do.
- Anyone leaving content responsibility vague. If it does not say who writes the copy, three months later not one page has been published.
Which questions should you ask?
Four questions, and how to read the answer
What will you do in month one?
- A good answer
- Access audit, page inventory, baseline measurement
- A bad answer
- "Analysis and optimisation"
What will you report?
- A good answer
- Query breakdown, clicks, list of pages published
- A bad answer
- A keyword rank table
Who writes the content?
- A good answer
- We do / you do, with the draft workflow named
- A bad answer
- "We'll sort it out together"
What do I keep if we part?
- A good answer
- Accounts, content, the fix list, measurement history
- A bad answer
- "You can access it from our dashboard"
| Question | A good answer | A bad answer |
|---|---|---|
| What will you do in month one? | Access audit, page inventory, baseline measurement | "Analysis and optimisation" |
| What will you report? | Query breakdown, clicks, list of pages published | A keyword rank table |
| Who writes the content? | We do / you do, with the draft workflow named | "We'll sort it out together" |
| What do I keep if we part? | Accounts, content, the fix list, measurement history | "You can access it from our dashboard" |
What should you look at in the report?
The most common measurement mistake is looking at total organic traffic. Inside that number are people searching for your brand name — people who already knew you; every month you advertise, that line rises and looks like the search work succeeding. The correct view splits queries that contain the brand name from those that do not: whether growth is real is visible only in the second group.
The same distinction is needed on the generative side: typing your own brand name in to check is not a measurement. Measurement uses questions that never name the brand, repeated across runs — the same question does not return the same source every time, so a single run is noise.
Frequently asked
What happens if the search work does not deliver?
- With an exit clause and a transfer clause in the contract, parting is clean: the accounts stay yours, the published content stays on your site, the measurement history is in your hands. Without those clauses, leaving can also mean losing the content and the data. The right question is not "do you guarantee results" but "what do I keep when we part".
How long before results show?
- Technical access fixes pay off fastest, measured in days. Content and structure work reaching results depends on pages being recrawled and reprocessed; in practice the band runs four to twelve weeks. A proposal offering a firmer calendar than that is promising something it does not control.
Monthly retainer or project-based?
- Technical fixes and the initial build are finite work that suits a project fee. Content production and measurement need continuity and fit a monthly arrangement. The common mistake is folding both into one monthly package until what was done in which month becomes invisible; separating the two makes what you are paying for visible.
Sources
- 01AI features and your website — Google Search Central, 2026
- 02GEO: Generative Engine Optimization — Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan — KDD 2024, 2024
- 03How to write and submit a robots.txt file — Google Search Central, 2026
Queries this page answers
- how to choose an seo agency
- seo agency questions
- seo guarantee
- hiring an seo agency