How to Choose a Local SEO Company: Compare Before You Sign

We sell this service, so read what follows knowing that. Every question below is one we expect to be asked ourselves, and our own answers are included where they apply.

What should you ask a local SEO company?

Ask the same local SEO company questions of every firm you talk to, and write the answers down:

• What will you do in the first three months, and what will you do after that?
• Can I see a monthly report you send another client, with the name taken out?
• Is the price published, and is ad spend inside it or on top of it?
• Who writes the pages, and will they talk to the people who do the work before writing them?
• What happens to my website, my Google Business Profile and my ad account if I leave?
• Will you guarantee a ranking?

The right answer to the last one is no. Nobody controls where Google puts a page, and a firm that promises a position is either guessing or doing something that will cost you later. For the record, ours: managed search is $800 a month, or $1,600 with Google and Microsoft Ads, there is no setup fee, the ad budget is paid straight to the platform from your account, and we don’t guarantee rankings.

What should a monthly report show?

A report is how you find out whether the money is working, so judge it before you sign. A useful one fits on a page or two and you can read it in five minutes:

• Calls and form fills for the month, with where each one came from.
• What each call cost, wherever ads are running.
• Which pages and searches brought those calls in.
• What was done this month, in plain words, and what is planned for the next.

Rankings and traffic can sit underneath that as background. If a sample report is mostly charts and never mentions a phone call, that tells you what the firm expects to be judged on.

Contract terms to read twice

When you look at an SEO contract, what to look for is mostly what happens at the edges:

• The term, any automatic renewal, and how much notice you have to give to leave.
• A setup fee, and what it pays for that the monthly fee doesn’t.
• How ad management is priced. A fee that is a percentage of ad spend pays the firm more when you spend more, whether or not the spend is working. A flat fee doesn’t.
• What “content” means. A count of blog posts per month measures volume. Pages that answer a real search, one for each service you sell, are what tend to rank.
• What you get back when you leave: logins, reports, and the pages written for you.

Who owns the site, the profile and the ad account

Settle this in writing before anything else:

• The domain is registered in your business’s name, on an account you can log into.
• You own the Google Business Profile, and the firm is added as a manager, not the other way round.
• The ad account is yours and is billed to your card, so the history and the negative keyword list stay with you.
• The analytics account is yours too.

Our post on who owns your website walks through the six pieces to check.

What a low monthly price leaves out

A low monthly price usually buys a report and very little work behind it. The common gaps:

• No new pages. Search needs a page for each thing you sell, and somebody has to write those.
• No cleanup of your listings, so the old address and the wrong hours stay out there.
• Ads run from the firm’s own account, so the account and its history leave with them.
• Reviews treated as something to buy or write. Fake reviews break Google’s rules, and they can cost you the listing.

A higher price doesn’t guarantee any of this either, which is why the questions above matter more than the number. Our post on what $800 a month of SEO buys lists what ours covers and what it doesn’t.

How long before you should see results

Technical fixes such as speed, broken pages and listing details can show up within weeks. New pages for competitive searches take three to six months to rank. Paid search can bring calls in the first month, which is why a firm promising fast organic results is often describing ads. Ask each company which of these it is quoting you for.

If you are comparing firms in a particular market, our pages for search marketing in Columbus and search marketing in Lexington show how we would approach the work there.