The short answer Ask four questions on the first call: what will you do in the first 90 days, who actually does the work, how do you build links, and what happens if I leave. Google states plainly that no one can guarantee a number one ranking. Any agency that guarantees rankings has already told you enough. What.
The short answer
Ask four questions on the first call: what will you do in the first 90 days, who actually does the work, how do you build links, and what happens if I leave. Google states plainly that no one can guarantee a number one ranking. Any agency that guarantees rankings has already told you enough.
What actually drives the number
Before you can judge a proposal you need to know what the market charges, so you can spot the two failure modes: too cheap to work, and too expensive for what is being delivered.
- Retainers. Ahrefs surveyed 439 SEO providers and found an average monthly retainer of $2,917, with agencies averaging $3,209 and freelancers $1,349. SE Ranking's agency survey found 64% of agencies charge under $1,000 a month, and only 25% of North American agencies charge above $2,000.
- Hourly. Average hourly rate across the Ahrefs survey sample was $111, with agencies at $98.90 and independent consultants at $171.18.
- Seniority. Ahrefs found providers with two or more years of experience charge 33% more. That premium is usually worth paying, because most SEO damage is done by people who do not know which rules they are breaking.
- Scope creep in disguise. A $2,000 retainer that includes content, technical work, digital PR and reporting is not four disciplines. It is a few hours of each. Ask how many hours a month you are actually buying.
The questions to ask on the first call, and the bad answers
| Ask this | A good answer sounds like | A bad answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| What will you do in the first 90 days, specifically? | A named sequence: audit, tracking, technical fixes, then a content plan with page counts | “We start with a discovery phase and build a custom strategy” |
| Who does the work day to day, and where do they sit? | Named people, named roles, and a straight answer about subcontractors | “You’ll have a dedicated account manager” with no mention of who executes |
| How do you build links? | Digital PR, original data, partnerships, and a refusal to buy links | “We have a network of publishers” or “we get you 30 links a month” |
| What do you consider a conversion, and how do you track it? | GA4 events tied to calls and forms, plus call tracking, plus CRM reconciliation | “We report on rankings and traffic” |
| If I leave in month four, what do I keep? | You own the site, the accounts, the content and the data. Full handover in writing | Silence, a hosted “SEO platform”, or content that lives on their domain |
Google publishes its own list of warning signs in its guidance on hiring an SEO: unsolicited email pitches, guaranteed rankings, claims of a special relationship with Google, and unwillingness to explain what they are doing. Google also notes you are ultimately responsible for what an SEO does to your site, which is exactly why “trust us, it’s proprietary” is disqualifying.
How to tell which applies to you
Use this rule: if the agency cannot describe a specific action they will take on your site before you have paid them, they are selling process, not work.
Any competent SEO can open your site during a discovery call, look at page titles, indexation, load speed and internal linking, and name three things that are wrong. If they will not do that until a contract is signed, the contract is the product.
Second rule: match the agency size to your category. If your competition is local, you do not need an enterprise agency and you should not pay enterprise rates. If your competition is national ecommerce or legal, a two-person shop will get outrun on content volume. Ask how many clients the agency runs in your exact category, and ask to speak with one.
What we’d do
TACK™ has run this process since 2009 from Sherman Oaks, across 300+ brands, 15+ industries and 2,500+ campaigns. Engagements start at $5,000 a month. Here is what we put in writing before anyone signs.
- A ninety-day plan with named deliverables and dates. Not phases. Deliverables. Crawl fixes, schema, tracking, and a page count per month.
- Ownership from day one. Your domain, your GA4, your Search Console, your Google Business Profile, your content. We work inside your accounts, not ours.
- Answer engines in scope, not as an upsell. Being cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews requires entity markup and answer-first page structure. That work sits inside how we get you found rather than in a separate invoice.
- Revenue reporting, not ranking reporting. Calls, forms, qualified leads and closed revenue in one view, reconciled to your CRM. Rankings are a diagnostic, not a result. You can see the shape of that work in our capabilities and in our case studies.
Common mistakes
Buying a guarantee. Google's own documentation says no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and that Google never accepts money to rank sites organically. A ranking guarantee means the agency will target keywords nobody searches so they can show you a win. The cost is a year of budget aimed at traffic that does not convert.
Accepting cheap links. Google's spam policies classify buying links, excessive link exchanges, low-quality directory links and link-stuffed widgets as link spam, and warn that offending sites may rank lower or not appear at all. A link package priced at $30 a link is the fastest way to lose a domain you have spent ten years building.
Judging at day 30. Ahrefs found only 1.74% of newly published pages break into the top 10 within a year, and 72.9% of pages currently in the top 10 are more than three years old. Firing an agency at day 45 because rankings have not moved is how businesses spend three years starting over with four different agencies.
The bottom line
The right agency will tell you what is wrong with your site before you pay them, name the humans doing the work, and hand you every account on day one. The wrong one sells guarantees, hides its link sources, and reports on rankings instead of revenue.
If you want a straight read on your current site and what it would take, book twenty minutes: talk to an expert, or call 310-620-1141.
Sources
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