Choosing an agency · 9 min read
The warning signs that an SEO engagement is going to cost you
Six practices that should end a conversation, five that deserve a hard question, and an explanation of why the incentives in this market keep producing them. Written about the practices, not about anyone in particular.
Written by Zubair Afzal, FounderUpdated
Walk away
Six practices that should end the conversation
These are not matters of style or preference. Each one either promises something nobody can deliver, or removes your ability to check what was done.
Every item below is written about a practice rather than about a firm. All of them are common, all of them are legal, and all of them transfer risk from the supplier to you.
- They promise specific positions in the search results.
- It exists because it closes deals: a buyer comparing three vague proposals will take the one that sounds certain. It costs you because the only reliable way to keep the promise is to target phrases with negligible demand. You get a report showing first place for terms nobody searches, a year of budget spent, and no additional customers.
- The method is proprietary and cannot be described.
- Secrecy is a pricing strategy. If the work cannot be explained, it cannot be compared to a cheaper alternative, and it cannot be audited by anyone you might ask for a second opinion. The cost lands later: you cannot tell whether something done to your site caused a problem, you cannot transfer the work to another supplier, and you cannot brief a developer on what to preserve during a rebuild.
- You do not have your own administrator access to Analytics and Search Console.
- Sometimes this is laziness at setup and sometimes it is deliberate. Either way the effect is the same. You cannot verify the baseline, you cannot check whether a chart in the report matches the platform, and at the end of the relationship you lose the history rather than keeping it. An ordinary contract becomes a switching cost.
- The agency owns your domain, hosting, ad account or Business Profile.
- These get created in agency accounts because it is faster at kick-off, and then nobody moves them. The moment there is a disagreement about renewal, those assets are leverage. Recovering a Business Profile or a domain from an unwilling holder is slow, and in the meantime your listings, your ads and sometimes your email are in someone else’s hands.
- Links are sold in packages at a price per link.
- A per-link price only makes sense if links are being placed rather than earned, and placements bought to influence rankings fall under Google’s link spam policies. The cost is asymmetric: the agency carries none of it. You inherit a profile that may need disavowing or cleaning, and the sites involved rarely send a single real visitor.
- A long minimum term with deliverables described only as "ongoing SEO".
- Length is defensible; vagueness is not. If the contract does not name what arrives each month, there is nothing to fail to deliver, which means the non-delivery clause is decorative. Twelve months later the only honest answer to "what did we get" is a folder of reports, and there is no basis for a refund conversation.
The mechanism
Why these practices keep reappearing
It is tempting to treat all of this as dishonesty, but that explanation is too easy and it does not help you avoid it. The pattern is produced by the structure of the market.
Search is a credence good: the buyer cannot assess quality before purchase, and often cannot assess it afterwards either, because the outcome is influenced by competitors, seasonality, product changes and a ranking system nobody can inspect. When quality is unobservable, promises do the selling. An agency that describes its work accurately loses pitches to one that describes it confidently, and over time the market selects for confidence.
The second force is retention. Search work takes months to show, which means every agency has a window in which the client cannot yet tell whether it is working. The commercially safest way to survive that window is to make the work hard to verify — proprietary methods, reports built from the agency’s own dashboard, metrics that always rise. None of that requires anyone to lie.
This is why the defences on this page are structural rather than moral. Own the accounts, define the deliverables, keep the notice period short, and insist that the work can be described. Those four things remove the conditions the bad practices depend on, and they cost a good agency nothing.
Ask, do not run
Five amber flags worth a hard question
These are not automatically disqualifying. Each one has a legitimate explanation, and each one also hides a common failure.
- The reporting is rankings and nothing else.
- Rank tracking is a useful diagnostic and a poor scoreboard: positions vary by location, device and personalisation, and a page can climb while sending fewer visitors because the result now sits under an answer block. Ask what happens in the report when rankings improve and enquiries do not.
- You never meet the person who does the work.
- Some agencies genuinely shield delivery staff from meetings to protect their time, which is defensible. But it also conceals a common arrangement where the strategy is sold by a senior person and executed by whoever is available. Ask for one working session with the practitioner before you sign, not a meet-the-team slide.
- Content is produced without ever speaking to anyone in your business.
- It can work for general material. It cannot work for anything where your expertise is the differentiator, and those are exactly the pages worth writing. If nobody has asked to interview a technician, a partner or a clinician, the content will read like a summary of your competitors, because that is what it is.
- The proposal is structurally identical to one you have seen elsewhere.
- Templates are efficient and not a scandal in themselves. The problem is when the template is the analysis: the same phases, the same monthly allocation, the same deliverable counts regardless of what the site needs. Ask which part of this proposal would be different for a business twice your size in another sector.
- Nobody in the team can read a server log or a release diff.
- A large share of serious organic problems are engineering problems: a canonical dropped in a release, a robots rule shipped from staging, a template rendering its content only after a script runs. An agency without that capability will diagnose those as content problems and sell you content. Ask who they call when the cause is in the code.
The defence
What to put in the contract, and what to refuse
None of these terms is unusual, and none of them is expensive for an agency that intends to do the work.
Require in writing
- Administrator ownership of analytics, Search Console, ad accounts, the Business Profile, the domain, the DNS and the CMS, in your name.
- A named monthly deliverable list, so that non-delivery is a factual question rather than an argument.
- A written baseline recorded before work starts, including the window it covers.
- Disclosure of every subcontractor involved in writing, development or outreach.
- An itemised handover at exit: documentation, dashboards, published content, and any accounts created on your behalf.
- The right to a second opinion — permission to have the work reviewed by an independent party without it being a breach.
Decline to sign
- Any clause where assets created for you remain in accounts the supplier controls after termination.
- Automatic renewal with a notice window shorter than one reporting cycle.
- A confidentiality clause broad enough to prevent you describing the work to another supplier.
- Deliverables measured only in hours, credits or "campaigns" with no named output.
- Link acquisition priced per link, with the placements unnamed and unreviewable.
- Any promise about search positions, however it is worded, because the only versions that can be honoured are the ones worth nothing.
Questions
What people ask after a bad experience
Is a ranking promise ever legitimate?
No, and not because agencies are dishonest. Results are personalised by location, device and history, they change without notice, and no supplier controls the system that produces them.
The only way to keep such a promise reliably is to pick phrases with almost no search demand. The promise is then technically met and the business is no better off.
The agency built our website. Who owns it?
Whatever the contract says, which is why this needs settling before the build rather than after. Ownership of the code, the design files, the content, the domain, the DNS and the hosting account are six separate questions and are often answered differently.
If the answer is that the site sits on an agency platform you cannot export, you are renting. That can be a reasonable arrangement, but you should know you are in it.
Are all paid links a problem?
Links bought or exchanged to manipulate rankings are against Google’s spam policies, and paid placements are meant to be marked so they do not pass ranking signals. That is a policy position, not an opinion.
Paying for genuine advertising, sponsorship or placement is normal business. The distinction is whether the payment is for the audience or for the ranking signal, and whether the link is disclosed appropriately.
The quote is very cheap. Is that a red flag on its own?
Not on its own, but it constrains what can be true. A very low monthly fee buys a small number of hours, and those hours have to cover strategy, execution, reporting and account management.
Ask how many hours the fee represents and who they belong to. If nobody will answer that, the low price is not the problem — the vagueness is.
We are already in a contract that is not working. What now?
Start by taking back what is yours: administrator access to analytics, Search Console, ad accounts and the Business Profile, plus an export of everything published. Do this before raising the wider issue.
Then read the termination clause and put your concerns in writing with dates and specifics. Most contracts have a non-delivery route, and most disputes are resolved by whichever party has the better written record.
Get a second opinion on a proposal you are holding
If you have a proposal or a contract in front of you and something about it is not sitting right, bring it to a call. We will tell you what we would push back on, including where we think the pricing is fair.
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