Red flags when hiring an SEO agency

Why is a ranking guarantee a red flag?

Google publishes its own advice on hiring help, a Search Central page called Do you need an SEO?. On guarantees it is blunt: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." The same page says that if an SEO guarantees their changes "will give you first place in search results, find someone else."

Google also tells you to beware of SEOs that "claim to guarantee rankings, allege a 'special relationship' with Google". An agency can improve your Business Profile and your pages. It cannot decide where Google puts you, so a promise about your position is a sales line, not a plan.

On a sales call, the guarantee is not always that obvious. Listen for these versions of it:

• "Page one in 30 days, or your money back."
• "We guarantee you a top-three spot in the map for carpet cleaning in your town."
• "We have a contact at Google who can help your listing."
• "We'll get you to number one for carpet cleaning in every town you serve."

An honest agency describes the work, how it will measure it and a rough timeline, and it labels that timeline as an estimate. Our own guidance, not a promise, is that SEO usually shows first movement in 60–90 days and real ranking gains in months four to nine. The carpet cleaning SEO guide explains what happens during each of those stretches.

Red flag: reports with traffic and impressions but no calls or booked jobs

An agency report may lead with impressions, clicks and keyword rankings. Google's Search Console help pages define an impression this way: "An impression means that a user has seen (or potentially seen) a link to your site in Search, Discover, or News." That tells you that you showed up. It does not tell you that anyone picked up the phone.

Those numbers help an agency find problems. But you don't pay your techs with impressions, and a report that stops there is measuring the agency's activity. A report worth paying for connects the work to calls, form leads and booked jobs.

Booked jobs live in your CRM (customer relationship management software), such as Housecall Pro or Jobber. Ask the agency how it will match a lead to a job there. Here is how we do it: each call and form is tagged with its source when it comes in, and we match that lead to the job in your CRM, so the monthly report shows booked jobs by channel. If you run Housecall Pro, our guide to Housecall Pro and Google Analytics goes deeper on tracking.

Who should own your Google Business Profile, Ads and Analytics accounts?

You should. One red flag is an agency that sets up your Google Business Profile (GBP, the listing that shows in the map results), Google Ads, Google Analytics 4 (GA4, the analytics account for your website) and Search Console under its own login. You get view access, or nothing. If you part ways, you may have to ask the agency for permission to get into your own listing.

Each of these Google tools has a top role that holds the keys. Google spells out what that role can do:

The healthy setup is simple. You own each account under a Google login your company controls, and you add the agency as a user. On a Business Profile, Google says the manager role has "mostly the same access to the profile as owners," except managers "can't add or remove users or remove the profile." That gives an agency room to work while you keep control of who gets in.

Google's hiring page adds one more limit for the early stage. If an SEO is only auditing your site, "only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access)." Our Google Business Profile guide covers the rest of the profile setup. Check these four things today:

1. Check who is listed as the primary owner of your Business Profile. Google says a profile "can have multiple owners but only one primary owner."
2. Confirm that you are an owner in Search Console, not only a user.
3. Confirm that you hold the Administrator role in GA4 and Admin access in Google Ads.
4. Make sure the owner login is a company email address you control, not an agency address or a former employee's Gmail.

Red flag: "we do SEO" with no list of deliverables

"We'll optimize your site and handle your SEO" sounds like a plan, but you can't check it. Google's page says to "be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do." One of the questions it suggests you ask is "Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site".

Vague work is a risk, not just a waste of money. Google says "you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire." It also warns that if an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, "your site could be removed entirely from Google's index."

Ask for a written list of what the agency will deliver each month. For a carpet cleaning company, a real list names things like these:

• The service pages it will build or rewrite, such as pet urine odor, upholstery or tile and grout.
• The towns it will write pages for, starting with the ones where you book the most jobs.
• The Business Profile changes it will make to categories, services, photos and posts.
• How it will help you ask for reviews and reply to them.
• The technical problems it found, and the order it will fix them in.
• What the monthly report will include, line by line.

One more test: if an agency asks for a link to its own website on yours, Google's page is direct about that too: "You should never have to link to an SEO."

Long contracts with no reporting, and agencies that go quiet after signup

A long contract becomes a red flag when it comes with thin reporting, because then you are paying for months of work you can't see. Read the contract for these terms before you sign:

• A term of many months with no way to leave early.
• An early termination fee, or a rule that you pay out the remaining months.
• Automatic renewal that you have to cancel in writing inside a short window.
• No mention of a monthly report, or of what the report must contain.

The other pattern shows up after you sign. The salesperson was on every call, and now your questions go to a general inbox. Warning signs include no kickoff call, no requests for access to your accounts in the first weeks, a report that comes late or not at all, and "SEO takes time" as the answer to every question.

Google's page suggests you "see if the SEO is interested in you and your business." Before you sign, ask who your contact will be, how you reach them and what date the report arrives each month.

Questions to ask an SEO agency on the sales call

Keep this list open on your phone during the call. Google's page suggests asking, "Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?" and "How do you measure your success?" The other questions below come from the red flags in this post.

Ask every agency the same questions and write the answers down. Our own results name the company, the dates and where every figure came from. You can see them in our case studies. For the bigger picture on what good marketing looks like, start with our carpet cleaning marketing guide.