How to Choose an SEO Agency Without Getting Fleeced

SEO is the only industry where you can pay someone for six months, see no change whatsoever, and still be told it's going brilliantly. It's a bit like hiring a personal trainer who won't let you near a mirror.

We do SEO, so read this with that in mind. It's still the advice we'd give a mate — including the part where the honest answer is that you don't need an agency yet.

What an SEO agency actually does

The label covers three fairly different jobs, and knowing which one you're buying prevents most of the disappointment.

• •Technical work — making the site fast, crawlable and correctly structured. Usually front-loaded: a big push, then occasional maintenance.
• •Content — building pages that answer what people actually search for. This is the slow, compounding half, and the half most often quietly skipped.
• •Local visibility — your Google Business Profile, reviews, and being consistently listed with the same name, address and phone number everywhere. For a business with a van or a shopfront, this is usually where the quickest wins are.

If someone searching for an SEO service near you is quoted a monthly fee with no mention of which of these three they're getting, that's the first question to ask.

What local SEO costs in the UK

The page currently ranking top for this has a whole section headed "how much does local SEO cost" and doesn't name a single figure. Here's the ballpark for a small UK business in 2026.

Below roughly £300 a month you are almost certainly buying an automated tool and a report, not a person's attention. That isn't automatically a scam — for a very small business, a tidy Google Business Profile and nothing else is a perfectly rational purchase. Just know that's what it is.

Seven questions that separate the real from the rubbish

1. 1"Who actually does the work?" Account managers are fine. What you want to know is whether the strategy, writing and technical work happen in-house or get passed to a freelancer somewhere cheap. Ask to speak to whoever will do it.
2. 2"Can I see a UK case study for a business my size?" Not a global brand. Someone with your budget, in your kind of market. Vague success stories with no numbers mean there are no numbers.
3. 3"What would you do in the first 90 days, and why?" A good answer is specific and slightly boring. A bad one is a list of services.
4. 4"How will you report, and what will you count?" You want calls, enquiries and form submissions. Rankings for terms nobody searches are the oldest trick in the trade.
5. 5"What happens if we stop?" Do you keep the site, the Google Business Profile, the analytics account and the content? Get this in writing before you start, not when you're leaving.
6. 6"How do you rank for your own terms?" Not decisive — plenty of good agencies are too busy on client work — but if they can't rank themselves and can't explain why, that's telling.
7. 7"What could go wrong?" Anyone who says nothing is either inexperienced or selling. The right answer involves Google updates, slow content sign-off and competitors with bigger budgets.

Red flags

• •Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google. A guarantee means either a meaningless term or a refund clause you'll never successfully claim.
• •Results promised in 30 days. Local SEO typically takes three to six months to move properly. Anyone compressing that is selling, not advising.
• •Cold email or cold calls opening with "I noticed errors on your website". They haven't looked at your website.
• •Long tie-ins with no exit. Twelve months is common and not automatically wrong, but it should come with a break clause if targets are missed.
• •Defensiveness. Ask one awkward question during the pitch. However they handle it now is how they'll handle it in month eight.

The cheapest due diligence there is: ask for two clients they've worked with for over a year, and actually ring them. Agencies who are good at this hand the numbers over without flinching.

How to read the report they send you

You'll get a monthly PDF. Most people skim it, see graphs pointing up and file it. Three things are worth thirty seconds of your attention.

• •Are the keywords ones a customer would type? "Emergency plumber Chichester" is a customer. "Best plumbing solutions provider" is padding.
• •Is traffic turning into contact? Sessions going up while calls stay flat means they're attracting the wrong people, or your site isn't converting the right ones.
• •Is there anything in it they did badly? A report with no setbacks in six months isn't a report, it's a newsletter.

How long before it works?

Google Business Profile work can shift things in two to four weeks. Content and technical work takes three to six months to show properly, and longer in a competitive town. Anyone who tells you otherwise is managing your excitement rather than your expectations.

The corollary matters too: if you're six months in and enquiries haven't moved at all, that is enough evidence. Not "give it another quarter".

When not to hire anyone

If your website is slow, unclear about what you do, or doesn't show a phone number without scrolling, SEO is the wrong purchase. You'd be paying to send more people to something that already isn't converting the ones you've got. Fix the site first — it's usually cheaper and it always works faster.

And if you're getting all the work you can handle from word of mouth, genuinely, don't. Come back when that dries up or you hire another pair of hands.