VETTING YOUR PROVIDER
There are a few ways to tell if your prospective provider is worth your precious marketing dollars. The following list should help get you started, though I recommend to ultimately follow your gut feeling.
Do they make guarantees?
If they do, this is a GIANT red flag. Nobody in the search marketing industry can guarantee results. Even if you are sitting on your porch, enjoying a beer with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, he cannot offer you a guarantee. I have friends that work at Google, and it is written right into their contract that they will lose their cushy job if they attempt to manipulate search engine results. In my opinion, any search “expert” that offers guarantees is full of it.
If your provider does make guarantees, what are they? Are they delivering? How many keywords is the guarantee valid for? How many locations? Is this data quantifiable? What is your recourse if the guarantee is not met?
Then there’s the infamous First Page guarantee. This is a very fuzzy concept, as the definition of “First Page” can vary. For example, some page ones have 10 results, some 20, and some 30. Google’s Mobile First index is testing infinite scroll on mobile devices, which by default puts anyone on the “first page”, even if you’re 200 positions down.
Getting on page 1 for your search terms is always a good feeling, but it should never be the ultimate goal.
Are they a reputable company?
Usually a quick search will reveal a lot about a company, or worse, nothing at all.
I would recommend to go a few pages deep into the search. Remember, when dealing with a search marketing company, they will make every attempt to put their best foot forward and bury any negative press deep in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). This is what they do for a living.
Something to be aware of is if a company has changed their name, or if they have done that multiple times. This usually, but not always, signals discontent from their customer base.
Can they provide proof of results from other clients?
Most legitimate agencies will be happy to share their positive results, and will have no problem providing references. However, this can be manipulated as well.
Something to look for when checking the results of an agency is to search for their clients yourself. Look for results in markets similar to yours. Are they crushing it for most of their keywords, not just one or two? That is a good sign.
Is the agency’s portfolio readily available? If not, ask for at least a dozen sites that they have worked on. Do your research from there. If they are not willing to provide that, run!
Are they priced competitively?
Would you hire a dentist that only charges $100 for a root canal? I didn’t think so! As always, you get what you pay for.
Search management takes real work, and costs real money. A good portion of our 462 Web Concepts clients came to us from firms that were charging +/- $25 a month to manage their online presence. 100% of the time, in these instances, we have come to find that nothing at all was done for this money, aside from checking in every now and again to verify that their website still existed. Sometimes, that wasn’t even accomplished.
To give a cost example, at 462, by the time we pay for licensing, servers, software, monitoring, rank tracking etc, we are up over $100 per client, per month in just costs to run a professional service. This is before even a penny of profit, and before a single backlink, citation or sentence of content is created.
If you find someone cheap, make sure you get their battle plan in writing, and check in periodically to make sure these tactics are actually occurring.
Read the fine print.
As always, you should know what you are getting yourself into before signing any contract. If you feel unsure, it is always best to reach out to someone who knows better, or a pro (feel free to contact me) for guidance.
Does the company use the latest, industry standard platforms?
Find out what platform your website will be built on. Basic HTML is more or less out of style, more than likely not mobile responsive and will be costly to upgrade / maintain.
Most webmasters will not consider Godaddy Sitebuilder, Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, Yahoo Sitebuilder etc as “professional tools”.
WordPress is the Gold Standard in 2025, and for the foreseeable future. It is free, though there are thousands of themes and plugins of varying quality available for purchase if needed. Acceptable WordPress alternatives would include Drupal, Joomla or a custom PHP website.
Does the company actually provide ongoing SEO?
Some firms charge ongoing fees for SEO services that are akin to “set it and forget it”. You could be paying extravagant fees, thinking that someone is actively building links, creating content, building citations etc, only to find out that these things were not in the contract, and you’ve been paying for imperceptible “monitoring” or “security.”
What exactly will the ongoing SEO consist of? Will these methods keep up with the ever-changing search engine algorithms? Is this work able to be documented and available upon request?
These are all very important questions to ask, as SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.
Will you own your website?
Whether or not you own your website, or simply rent it should be spelled out in plain terms in any contract. The last thing you want to do is spend thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars over time on your website only to find it has been “Rank and Rented” to your competitor when you decide to go another route.
That being said, website ownership is not for everyone. There are a handful of companies that offer legitimate rented websites, and make it very clear that this is what they do. If your goal is to be 100% hands-off forever, and the ongoing fee is something you are comfortable with, then this is a good option.
Will you own the work that has been done?
This is entirely dependent on any specific agency’s terms of service. Here at 462, we believe that if you paid for it, you own it, even if you don’t renew your contract.
Other companies rent any backlinks, citations, content etc they develop to you. If you stop paying, every bit of it disappears.
A perfect example of this is a company called Yext. For somewhere around $100 a month they create local citations for you. If you stop paying, they either completely disappear, or get left in an inconsistent state, and you will not be able to access the citations to fix this.
For an investment of a legit agency’s, or your OWN time, you never have to worry about this.
Will your domain be registered to you, by you?
If not, transfer it to a GoDaddy or Google Domains account that you own IMMEDIATELY! If things go south with your company, and they decide not to play nice, or even worse go belly up, you will lose that domain. No other web professional will be able to get it back for you. Period.
Will your Google My Business listing be registered to you, by you?
The same as above. If anything ever happens, all the traction you’ve gained and review you built go bye-bye.
Does the company have staying power?
When choosing a provider, you might want to make sure that they are going to be around in a few years. Staying power is important, not only because you want to build a good relationship with your provider, but you will also want them to be around to help with any issues that arise.
I know that for some people, especially when just starting up, the fastest, cheapest option is usually what seems to be the best. What happens in 3 years when you need something done, or need access to your website? Is your niece’s high school boyfriend that built your site going to be around? Is the in-between-careers guy that you met at the bar going to be there? What about the Craigslist designer you found that had a portfolio with a whopping two half-completed websites?
Even bigger agencies disappear. This goes back to the pricing issue I spoke of above. If a firm is not charging enough to have a sustainable business, they have a good chance of pulling a Houdini.
I’ve spoken with at least a dozen people recently who have lost everything when their former providers went belly up or sold out to another company. I even spoke to two who lost over a decade of email correspondence out of nowhere when this happened. Most of the time, there is nothing a pro like myself can do aside from reaching out and hoping someone checks the voicemail / email at the now defunct firm and gets back to me.
If not, the only course of action is to start over from scratch.
In any case, before you invest your marketing dollars and relinquish control of your online presence to anyone, make sure to do your research! With so many scams and shams about, an hour or two of your own time spent could pay dividends in the future!
