How to choose an SEO company or agency, and when not to hire one

Before you compare anyone, write down the one thing that would change your business this year. More qualified enquiries. A shorter sales cycle. A different class of client. Fewer deals lost to a competitor nobody had heard of two years ago.

Then judge every proposal against that sentence. Most do not survive it, because most proposals are priced lists of outputs: posts, articles, a monthly report. A list of outputs is not an answer to a commercial problem. It is a description of effort, and effort is what you get charged for when nobody has agreed what success is.

This is also how you work out whether you need an agency, an SEO company, a consultant, or nobody yet. If your enquiries are healthy and your close rate is the problem, no amount of search work will help you. If buyers cannot find you at the moment they go looking, search is exactly the right purchase. The service should be chosen after the problem, and it almost never is. The structural version of that argument is on the problem with your marketing.

Is SEO worth it has no answer, in the same way that is advertising worth it has no answer. Worth what, to whom, against which alternative, over what period.

The answerable questions are narrower, and there are four of them. Do people search for what you sell, in the language your buyers actually use, in the country you sell in? Is anyone ranking for those terms who has no business being there? Could you plausibly outrank them at your site's current authority, or is that a two year project? And what is one new client worth to you, so you can see how few it would take to pay for the work.

Answer those and you know whether to buy. No supplier can answer them without an hour of work on your specific market first, and a supplier who quotes before doing that hour is quoting for a package rather than for your problem.

The same goes for how much SEO is worth. It is worth the margin on the deals it brings in, less the cost of the work, over a period long enough to be fair. That is rarely under six months and rarely over twelve before you should be able to see direction.

Search carries more weak suppliers than any other part of marketing, because the work is hard to inspect and the results are slow enough to hide behind. Three questions do most of the sorting.

Ask what they would refuse to do. A good answer includes turning down keywords that are too competitive for your domain today, and refusing to publish content by the yard. We know the cost of the alternative because we paid it: this site published around four hundred articles, and in the seventeen months before we rebuilt it they earned thirty five clicks from people who were not already searching for our name. That is not a position, it is a receipt.

Ask who does the work. A good SEO consultant who does it themselves is often a better buy than an agency that sells you a team in the pitch and staffs you with a junior in month two.

Ask about links. Above a certain level of difficulty, rankings are settled by who links to you rather than by what sits on the page. A supplier who never raises this is selling you beautifully written pages on page three.

Ask these in the first meeting. The answers sort the market quickly, and you do not need to be technical to read them.

• What number will you be accountable for, and what happens if it does not move?
• Who exactly works on this account, and will they be the same people in month nine?
• What would make you tell us to stop spending?
• Tell me about a client you failed, and what you changed afterwards.
• What does your report say in a month that went badly?
• What do you need from us, and what happens if we do not provide it?

The last two matter most. A supplier who has never needed anything from a client has never done work that touches the pipeline, because that work always needs your sales team, your data and your time. And a report that reads the same in a bad month as a good one is not a report, it is reassurance. The KPIs worth reporting are a short list, and reach is not on it.

Some businesses should not buy marketing this quarter. Three cases come up again and again.

You cannot answer the enquiries you already get. If leads sit for two days, or nobody follows up after the first call, more leads will make the problem worse and you will have paid to create them. Fix the follow-up first. It is cheaper than anything an agency will sell you and it works faster.

You do not agree on what you sell. If three people in your company describe the offer three different ways, marketing will amplify the confusion and then bill you for the reach. That is a two-week internal job, not a retainer.

The business is about to change shape. A new product, a merger, a new market, a new managing director. Wait. Anything built now gets rebuilt in six months and you will have paid for both.

A supplier willing to tell you any of that before taking your money is showing you how they will behave later, when the work gets hard and the honest answer is unwelcome.

Search earns its budget where buyers describe a problem before they know who solves it. Legal, medical and dental, technical services, software, equipment with a specification, anything a worried person types at eleven at night. In those markets the search result is the shortlist.

It earns less where the market is small and already known to you. If forty companies in the Gulf could buy what you sell and you can name them, search is a validation layer rather than a demand channel. You still need pages that survive inspection, because those forty will look you up before they reply. You do not need a content programme.

It earns least where the decision runs on referral inside a closed network, or where the product is visual and impulsive, in which case creative and paid social do the work instead.

Any supplier who tells you every industry needs SEO is describing their own service rather than your market. Most firms need two channels done properly, and which two depends on the industry far more than a standard package allows.

Keep it short, and make sure it says four things.

• The outcome. One sentence, in writing, that both sides would recognise as success twelve months from now.
• Who owns what. Your ad accounts, your analytics, your domain and your content, in your name, from day one. If the supplier holds any of those, you are not a client.
• Notice. Thirty days after an agreed initial period. Long lock-ins with no exit protect the supplier's revenue, not your result.
• Where media spend sits. Paid to the platform by you, visible in your own accounts, never folded inside a retainer where the margin cannot be seen.

Everything else is detail. If the first meeting was about deliverables and the contract is about deliverables, then nobody in the arrangement is accountable for whether any of it worked. How it works sets out what we commit to in the first ninety days, including the part where we agree the number.

People type that because they bought something that did not work, and they are trying to find out whether the whole field is a con. It is not. But the way it is usually bought makes disappointment close to inevitable.

An agency is hired to produce outputs. So it produces outputs, on time and to a reasonable standard, and reports on them. Nobody in that arrangement owns the revenue number, so nobody notices the month the outputs stopped connecting to it. The client concludes that marketing does not work. What did not work was a structure in which no one was accountable.

The fix is not a better agency. It is a different shape: one team, one agreed outcome, one page a month that says whether it moved and what changes next. That is why we built a department rather than an agency, and it is why the honest answer to whether you should hire us is sometimes no. What the work should cost, ours and anyone else's, is set out in what marketing should cost a company of your size.