Seven out of ten small businesses paying for SEO wouldn’t send a friend to the same provider. That’s the number that stuck with me from a survey of 1,200 owners I quoted in my tips for choosing an SEO agency, and it hasn’t gotten better since. Most of those owners didn’t get “scammed”. They got sold something they couldn’t evaluate, by someone who just might have known they couldn’t evaluate it.
So this is the checklist I’d hand my brother-in-law if he ran a plumbing company and had three proposals on the kitchen table.
You don’t need to learn SEO.
You need to know what a straight answer sounds like, and what the crooked ones sound like, and I’ve been listening to both since 2003.
The map pack is the ranking you’re actually buying
Start here, because half the confusion downstream comes from not knowing what “ranking” means for a local business.
When someone in your town searches for what you do, Google shows a map with three businesses under it before it shows anything else. That block is the map pack. Roughly 42% of searchers click something in it, and the businesses in it win the call. Everything below it is fighting over the leftovers.
Google publishes how it fills those three spots, and there are exactly three factors: relevance, distance, and prominence. Relevance is whether your listing and site clearly say what you do. Distance is how far you are from the person searching. Prominence is how well known and well reviewed you are, online and off. That’s the whole game. A provider who can’t explain their plan in those three words is either hiding something or doesn’t know. I wrote a longer piece on how the map pack works if you want the mechanics.
Why does this matter for vetting? Because a lot of proposals sell you “rankings” that live on page one of the regular results, forty pixels below the block your customers actually tap. Ask which ranking they mean. Then ask them to show you where you sit in the map pack today, from a few different spots in your service area, not just from their office. If they can’t produce that, they haven’t looked.
Three promises that should end the meeting
I’ll be blunt about this part, since it’s where the money disappears.
“Guaranteed #1 rankings.” Nobody can guarantee that. Google’s algorithm changes constantly and your competitors don’t sit still. There’s an old trick behind this promise: the provider “ranks” you for your own business name, which you already rank for unless your site is broken. You pay for nothing and get a screenshot. My own answer on this is on the SEO services page, in writing, and it’s no.
“We have a special relationship with Google.” No one does. Not the agency with the Google Partner badge (that’s an ads program), not the guy who says he knows someone. Google is the sole judge of what ranks, and it doesn’t take calls.
“We’ll build you 10,000 backlinks.” This one can actually hurt you. Cheap links from junk sites are the fastest way I know to get a small business penalized, and cleaning it up takes months. I made a short video on what toxic backlinks are and how to spot them. Four minutes, and you’ll know more than the salesperson hopes you do.
If you hear any of the three, you don’t need the rest of the pitch. Thank them for their time. There’s a longer list of tells in my toxic backlinks article, but those three cover most of what walks through my door.
Ask who owns what before you sign anything
Here’s the question almost nobody asks, and it’s the one that decides whether you can ever leave: when this ends, what do I keep?
Your Google Business Profile should be owned by you, with the provider added as a manager. Same for your website, your domain, your analytics, and any ad account. The content they write for your site is yours the day it’s paid for. If any of that lives in the provider’s accounts instead of yours, cancelling doesn’t end the relationship. It starts a negotiation, and you’re the one without the passwords.
Read the term, too. I run month-to-month agreements with no long-term lock-in, and I say so on my services page. That’s not the only honest way to do it. Plenty of good providers ask for six months, because SEO genuinely takes time and month-to-month clients sometimes quit right before the work pays off. What’s not honest is an auto-renewal you didn’t notice, an annual payment up front, or an exit clause you’d need a lawyer to find. If the contract holds your content or accounts hostage in any way, walk.
The report should show phone calls, not colors
Ask to see a real monthly report from a current client, names blurred. You’ll learn more from that one page than from an hour of pitch.
A report that’s mostly green arrows and a “visibility score” is a report designed to keep you paying. The honest version is boring. It shows the calls, form fills, and chats that came in, and which channel each one came from: the map listing, regular search, ads, even the odd one from Bing. Rankings belong on it as the leading indicator, the thing that should move before the phone does. They don’t belong on it as the headline.
This is the part I care about most, and it’s why my team runs every client on a system that tracks calls, forms, and chats back to their source in real time. Not because the dashboard is pretty. Because “our rankings went up” and “you got 31 more calls” are different sentences, and only one of them pays your crew.
One more thing to look for on that report: reviews. Prominence is a third of the ranking, and reviews are most of prominence. A provider who never mentions your review count or your response rate is ignoring a lever they could pull for free. (Small aside: a 4.8 or 4.9 is trusted more than a flat 5.0. I built a little calculator for how many reviews it takes to get there.)
Five questions that sort providers in one phone call
You don’t need a scorecard. You need five questions and a good ear. I published these in my piece on why local SEO works the same in every industry, and I’d want them answered before hiring anyone, including me.
- What exactly is in your audit? A real one covers your profile, reviews, service pages, citations, site health, and your actual positions across your service area, with evidence for every finding.
- What lands in month one, and what lands in month three? Vague answers here predict vague invoices later.
- How do you measure results? The honest answer involves calls, forms, and booked work, with rankings as the leading indicator. Anyone selling rankings alone is selling the scoreboard instead of the game.
- Who does the work? You want to know whether the person you’re talking to does the strategy and the execution, or hands it to a subcontractor three time zones away.
- What happens when something isn’t moving? Every campaign plateaus. The answer tells you whether they diagnose or excuse.
Notice what’s not on the list: “have you worked with businesses like mine?” It feels like due diligence. It mostly filters for agencies that are good at collecting logos. Google can’t see a provider’s client list. It sees your profile, your reviews, your pages, and your distance from the searcher, and those work the same whether you fix drains or teeth.
What I’d tell you before you hire anyone, including me
Expect three to six months before the numbers move in a way you’d notice, and expect the provider to say so up front. Anyone promising the first page in thirty days is describing either your brand name or a fantasy.
And sometimes the right answer is not to buy this at all. If you need calls this week, ads will get you there and SEO won’t. If you’re already at capacity, more visibility buys you one-star reviews from people you couldn’t serve. If your reviews reflect a real service problem, ranking higher just amplifies it. A provider who’ll tell you that on the first call, and lose the sale, is the one I’d trust with the next twelve months.
That’s the whole test, really. Not whether they know more than you. They should. Whether they’ll tell you something you don’t want to hear.
