Key takeaways
- Nobody can guarantee a ranking. An agency that offers one is either naive or dishonest.
- Ask what they would do in month one. "An audit" is the right answer; "publish blogs" is not.
- Reporting on impressions and keyword counts hides the only metric that matters: qualified leads.
- Ask who implements the technical fixes. If the answer is "your developers", budget for that.
- A twelve-month lock-in with no exit clause is a bigger risk than a higher monthly fee.
The three claims that should end the conversation
"We guarantee first-page rankings." Google's ranking systems are not controllable by any third party, and the results page differs by location, device and personalisation. An agency guaranteeing a position is either guaranteeing something meaningless — a long-tail phrase nobody searches — or does not understand what it is selling.
"We have a proprietary technique." There are no secrets in SEO. The mechanics are publicly documented by Google and openly discussed by the industry. What differs is diagnosis, prioritisation and whether the work actually gets implemented. "Proprietary" usually means either nothing or something that will get you penalised.
"We will build X hundred backlinks a month." Volume link-building at a fixed monthly quota describes a link scheme, which is an explicit spam policy violation. The recovery from a link-based penalty costs far more than the campaign did.
What to ask instead
"What would you do in the first month?" A good answer starts with a crawl and an audit, because until someone has looked, nobody knows whether your problem is technical, content, duplication or authority. An answer that jumps straight to publishing content is selling a product, not solving your problem.
"Who implements the technical recommendations?" This is the question that predicts whether the engagement produces anything. Most SEO audits die as a spreadsheet nobody actions. If the agency hands fixes to your developers, you need to know your developers have capacity, or you are paying for advice you cannot use.
"What will you report on?" The right answer is qualified leads and revenue, with rankings and traffic as diagnostics. Reporting built on impressions, keyword counts and "positions improved" is designed to look like progress independently of whether any of it produced business.
"What are the risks?" Anyone experienced will name several — that the timeline depends on your competition, that content needs input from your team, that some things will not work. An agency that presents no risks has either not thought about it or is not telling you.
Reading the case studies
Look for the starting position. "Increased traffic 400%" means very little from a base of fifty visits a month. Look for the timeframe, and be sceptical of dramatic gains inside two months — those are usually either a technical fix on a broken site, which is legitimate but not repeatable, or a seasonal effect.
Ask whether the traffic gains turned into business. Plenty of campaigns produce impressive-looking traffic charts from queries with no commercial intent. Ask for a reference in a comparable sector and actually call them.
What SEO cannot fix
SEO does not fix a product nobody wants, a price that is uncompetitive, or a website that does not convert the traffic it already gets. If your current visitors are not converting, more of them will not help, and an honest agency will tell you to fix the conversion problem first.
It also does not work on a timescale that suits everyone. If you need leads this quarter, paid search will get there faster, and the right recommendation may be to spend on ads now and build organic in parallel. An agency that recommends its own service regardless of your timeline is optimising for its revenue rather than your outcome.
On contracts
SEO genuinely does take months, so a supplier wanting some commitment is reasonable. A twelve-month lock-in with no exit clause is not — it removes the only leverage you have if the work is poor.
Look for a three-month initial term with a notice period after it, clarity on who owns the content and the accounts, and a written scope of what is delivered monthly. If the deliverables are vague, the reporting will be too.
Frequently asked questions
- How much should SEO cost in India?
- It scales with how competitive your keyword set is and how much work the site needs, so a fixed figure would be misleading. What matters more than the number is that the scope is written down — a cheap retainer with vague deliverables usually costs more than a considered one, because you pay for months before discovering nothing measurable is happening.
- How long before SEO produces results?
- Technical fixes can show within weeks. Competitive ranking gains typically take three to six months because they depend on authority, which compounds rather than switches on. Anyone promising competitive rankings in thirty days is describing something that does not happen.
- Can an agency guarantee first-page rankings?
- No. Google's systems are not controllable by third parties and results vary by location, device and personalisation. A guarantee is either meaningless — attached to a phrase nobody searches — or a signal to walk away.
- Should I hire an agency or an in-house SEO?
- In-house makes sense when SEO is a primary channel and there is enough continuous work to justify a salary. An agency makes sense when you need a range of skills — technical, content, engineering, links — that one person rarely combines, or when the work is front-loaded into a fix-and-stabilise phase.
- What if my pages are not even being indexed?
- Then indexing is the problem to solve before anything else, and it is usually a duplication or rendering issue rather than a content one. We wrote a separate guide on diagnosing that from the Search Console buckets.
Work with us on this
We start every engagement with a written scope after a free discovery call.