Quick answer: how do you choose an SEO agency?
- Ask for case studies with results you can check yourself.
- See whether they rank, and get named by ChatGPT, for their own trade.
- Find out how much of your fee buys authority rather than reports.
- Get a written plan for the first 90 days.
- Avoid long tie-ins, and question anyone promising a ranking position.
What are you actually paying an SEO agency for?
Three things: hours on your website, hours producing content, and money spent on other websites to build your authority. Most buyers never see the third on a proposal.
Here’s the arithmetic. If we did a deal for £2,000 a month, we’d spend half of it with other websites on link building. We don’t keep that money. When you compare two quotes, work out what’s left once the hours are paid, because at £500 a month there’s usually nothing left for authority, however good the people doing the work are.
What questions should you ask an SEO agency before you sign?
Five questions sort most agencies out quickly, and we’d happily be asked every one of them.
Plenty of the businesses that come to us have been through loads of agencies, paying anywhere from £500 to £100,000. Pages got rewritten. Content went out four pages a day. Nobody touched the off-page work. We dealt with a few agencies ourselves on our own finance brand before taking it in-house, so we know how it feels from your side. The warning signs to walk away from have their own guide.
Can you show me case studies with real numbers?
Ask for traffic, leads and enquiries, not a screenshot of a line going up. Then check them. If an agency can’t point to anything you can verify, you’re buying a pitch. The strongest evidence is a named business you can check for yourself. Ours is The Investors Centre, our own finance brand, which draws 20,000+ organic visits a month and appears in more than 4,000 AI answers without a penny spent on ads.
Do you rank for “SEO agency” in your own area?
Search for SEO agency plus their town and see where they land, then ask ChatGPT the same question. If they can’t rank for their own trade on their own patch, it’s fair to ask how they’ll manage it for you. We’d call that a red flag. Newer agencies take longer to climb nationally, and we’re a young agency ourselves, so don’t hold anyone to page one for the whole of the UK.
What is actually in the price, and how much of it is reporting?
Ask for the split: how many hours, spent on what, and how much goes out of the door to other websites. We’ve seen proposals weighted heavily towards the monthly report. We’re in the age of AI. Reporting is almost all automatic now, so it should be a very small part of what you pay for. If the report is the thing being sold to you, ask to see what sits behind it.
How much of my fee goes on building authority?
Ask what share of the fee goes off-site on links, mentions and digital PR. If the answer is none, nothing is building your authority, and without authority you can’t compete for the big money keywords. You could leave a website untouched, put the whole budget into off-page, and stuff would still move. A local tradesperson can get a long way on a strong Google Business Profile, but for anyone competing nationally, off-page is a huge part of the job.
What will you do in the first 90 days?
You want it in writing: what gets fixed first, what gets built, and what you should be able to see by the end of month three. A vague answer usually means the plan gets written after you sign. Ask too whether they’ve properly looked at your business yet. Making recommendations without understanding a business first is, frankly, insane to us, and it’s why our audits are free.
What is the 80/20 rule in SEO, and why doesn’t it apply here?
The 80/20 rule says most of your results come from a small share of the effort. It doesn’t hold in SEO, where doing half the job gets you nowhere near half the result.
SEO is not an 80/20 Pareto game. It’s 100%. Authority, content and technical all have to be covered. On our own finance brand we spent about £2,000 a month on links for a year before the business got any traction, so roughly £24,000, with the content and technical work done in-house on top.
Should an SEO agency guarantee results?
Not on rankings. Nobody controls where Google puts a page, so a promised position is either a bluff or a keyword nobody searches for.
If an agency offers you a guarantee, ask what happens when they miss it, and get the measure in writing. Ours is a different kind of promise, because it puts the cost of missing on us. If ChatGPT isn’t recommending your business within 90 days, we keep working for free until it does.
Does it matter whether your SEO agency is local?
For most B2B firms, yes. Being able to meet the people doing the work changes how accountable they are.
We like working with businesses within about 50 to 100 miles of Bury St Edmunds. We want to meet you and shake hands, and we’re B2B for a reason. We are not in Bali, in a gaming chair, in a different time zone. The work itself happens at a desk wherever the agency is, so this is about accountability rather than rankings.
How can you tell if an agency is any good at AI search?
Ask ChatGPT who the best agencies are for your sector and area, and see whether the agency pitching you gets named.
Then ask how they measure it. There’s no Search Console for ChatGPT, so anyone serious should be tracking a fixed set of buyer questions over time and showing you the trend against your competitors. We track 15 of those questions for our own brand across ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and Gemini, and we’ve recorded ChatGPT recommending us on screen.
What should happen if it isn’t working?
Give it 90 days, then hold the agency to its plan. It takes at least that long to see which way things are heading.
Lots of agencies tie people into big, long contracts, which we think is utterly ridiculous. If you don’t want to work with an agency, you shouldn’t have to. Ours is a three-month minimum, then rolling month to month, because it takes about 90 days to see the full extent of the work and judging it any sooner means judging it on half the evidence.
How much should you expect to pay?
It depends on your niche. Ranking a painter and decorator in a village is very different from ranking a national finance brand, and the price reflects that.
Our floor for fully managed SEO is £2,000 a month. Below that there isn’t enough budget to move the needle, and we won’t take on work we don’t think we can help with. Ours is a young business, and bad reviews are the one thing we won’t risk. Our pricing guide sets out what each level of budget buys.
Is it worth hiring an SEO agency?
A good one is. The hard part is telling the good ones from the bottom feeders.
Look for a proper plan covering the first three months and beyond, case studies you can check, and real money going into authority. The payback can be big. A year into our own finance brand, we were spending £5,000 a month on SEO against £50,000 a month of turnover. Four years after launch, it was £20,000 a month including wages, against £130,000 a month.
Frequently asked questions
Should I use a freelancer or an agency?
A good freelancer can suit a small local business on a tight budget. The trade-off is capacity, because one person rarely covers technical work, content and authority building at the same time. Too many one-man bands charge £500 a month knowing they can’t move the needle, and it has soured the market somewhat. Whichever you pick, put the same five questions to them.
Who will actually work on my account?
Ask to meet them, and ask how many other accounts they look after. At some agencies the person who sells to you disappears once the contract is signed. Ask whether the work is done in-house or passed to a white-label supplier, and if it is, who checks it before it goes live on your site and who you call when something breaks. You should be able to talk to the person doing the work directly.
What should I own if we part ways?
Your website, content, Google Business Profile and analytics accounts should all be in your name from day one. Links placed on other websites stay where they are if you leave. Get it in writing. If an agency currently holds any of your accounts in its own name, ask for them to be transferred now rather than at the end.
How long before an SEO agency gets results?
Expect early signs by day 90. In a competitive niche, real commercial traction can take around a year; our own finance brand spent twelve months on links before it got any. Local and low-competition work moves faster. The usual shape is a long flat stretch followed by growth that compounds, which is why the first few months need a plan you trust.
Which SEO agencies are the best in the UK?
The best one for you is whichever passes the questions above in your sector and area. Look for agencies named by independent directories and by ChatGPT for their own category, with case studies you can verify. Be sceptical of “best agency” lists written by an agency that happens to rank itself first. We’d rather be judged on the same five questions as everyone else.