“We guarantee #1 rankings” and other red flags when hiring an SEO agency

SEO is one of the easiest services to sell badly, because the results take months and most clients can’t easily verify the work. That gap is where the dodgy operators live. If you’re about to hand someone your search visibility, here are the warning signs worth knowing.

The guarantee that guarantees trouble

The biggest red flag is a guarantee of specific rankings. “We’ll get you to number one for your keyword” is something no honest agency can promise, because nobody controls Google’s results. The people who can guarantee a position are usually either targeting keywords so obscure that ranking is meaningless, or planning to use tactics that work briefly and then get you penalised. Real SEO talks in terms of probable outcomes and timelines, not guarantees.

Secret methods and suspicious prices

Be wary of secrecy, too. “We have a proprietary method we can’t share” usually means there’s nothing to share, or the methods wouldn’t survive daylight. Good SEO isn’t secret. It’s well understood; the value is in doing it well and consistently, not in some hidden trick.

Suspiciously cheap retainers are another. SEO done properly takes skilled time, and skilled time costs money. A $300-a-month “SEO package” is buying you automated reports and maybe a few directory submissions — activity that looks like work and changes nothing. You’ll pay more in the long run for the year you wasted. If you want to know what fair pricing actually looks like, we’ve published straight numbers on what SEO costs in Australia.

Read the reporting before you sign

Watch how they report, as well. If the monthly report is full of metrics that go up but never connect to traffic, leads or revenue — keyword “impressions,” vanity rankings for branded terms you already won — you’re being managed, not served. The numbers that matter are the ones tied to your business.

Ask to see a real (anonymised) monthly report before you sign. Thirty seconds of reading will tell you whether the agency measures itself against your revenue or against a dashboard it controls.

The good signs are the boring ones

Clear scope. Specific deliverables. Honest timelines. A willingness to explain what they’re doing in plain language. References or results they’ll actually show you. And ideally, a website of their own that demonstrates the standard they’re selling — because an SEO agency with a slow, neglected site is telling you something. It’s the reason we build and publish to the standard we sell, and say so plainly on our about page.

One more boring-but-good sign: an agency willing to start small. A bounded first engagement — typically a technical audit with a ranked action plan — lets you judge the thinking before you commit to a retainer. An agency confident in its work has no reason to avoid that.

Trust the agency that tells you what it can’t do as readily as what it can.