Hiring an SEO company, read with a red pencil

Google’s own page on hiring an SEO lists the useful services many agencies and consultants provide:

• A review of your site’s content or structure
• Technical advice on website development, such as hosting, redirects, error pages and the use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Management of online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training
• Expertise in specific markets and places
• Optimising for generative AI

Google also says that if you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself, starting with its SEO Starter Guide.

Service by service: what an SEO company does.

Google suggests interviewing a potential SEO, and offers questions like these:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work?
• Do you follow the Google Search Essentials?
• What kind of results do you expect, in what timeframe, and how do you measure success?
• What’s your experience in my industry, and in my country or city?
• Will you share every change you make to my site, and explain your reasoning?

A good SEO, Google adds, should ask you questions too: what makes your business unique, who your competitors are, and how your customers find you.

The full list, with what to listen for: questions to ask an SEO company.

• “Guaranteed number one ranking.”No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
• “We have a special relationship with Google.”Google says to beware of this claim, and of a “priority submit”.
• “Our methods are confidential.”Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what it intends to do.
• “Add our link to your footer.”“You should never have to link to an SEO.”
• “We’ll submit you to thousands of search engines.”Typically a useless exercise, says Google.
• “Pay a little more and Google will crawl you more often.”Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more often or rank it higher.

Why it matters to you and not only to the agency: Google says you are ultimately responsible for the actions of any company you hire, and sites that break its spam policies may rank lower in results or not appear at all.

Each warning, with Google’s reasons: SEO red flags.

business.gov.au’s guide to writing a contract with a contractor (a term it says includes consultants) walks through what to put in: a description of the work or the results to achieve, what has to happen for the work to count as finished, payment details, who owns the intellectual property, how to settle disputes and how changes get recorded.

For the first audit, Google’s view is that it “should be about giving you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved.”

A fictional proposal, marked up: reading an SEO proposal.

Google’s SEO Starter Guide says every change takes some time to be reflected: “Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months.” It suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether your work helped.

It also says plainly that not every change you make will have a noticeable effect in search results.

Why it takes as long as it does: how long SEO takes.

Pages, images and code an agency makes for you can carry intellectual property rights, and copyright protects writing and images automatically in Australia. business.gov.au explains that under IP laws the contractor automatically owns any IP they create, and if the hirer wants to own it, the contract must say so.

The accounts matter as much as the content. In Google Search Console, an owner has full control of a property, and a property must have at least one verified owner. For an initial audit, Google advises granting an SEO only read access to Search Console, not write access.

When an engagement ends, removing a verified owner isn’t one click: Google says to delete their verification tokens as well, or they may be able to verify again, checking first that the same token isn’t used by other Google services.

Content, accounts, data and ending well: SEO contracts and ownership.