Can an SEO agency guarantee rankings?

No, and the guarantee itself is the warning. Ranking is decided by a system nobody outside it controls. What can be committed to is the work: what will be done, on what schedule, and how the result will be measured.

What should I see in an SEO report?

Three things kept apart: where you rank, how much traffic that brought, and how many enquiries came out of it. A report that shows only the first is showing the easiest number to move and the least connected to revenue.

What do I keep when the work ends?

You should keep the pages, the technical fixes, the analytics history and the accounts, all in your own name. If the work lived inside the agency tools and leaves with them, you rented a result rather than building an asset.

Questions to ask an SEO agency

Search work is unusually easy to sell and unusually hard to judge from the outside. The gap between a team that has a plan and a team that has a monthly report template is not visible in the pitch. It becomes visible in the answers to a few specific questions.

Ask what will be done

Ask for the first month in detail: which pages, which technical fixes, in what order. A team with a method will describe an audit, a list and a sequence. A team without one will talk about keywords and content in general terms.

Ask how they decided that list. The honest answer involves looking at your site, your competitors and what your buyers actually type. If the plan is the same one they would hand anyone in your sector, it was not made for you.

Search work is not one job but three. An agency first month plan should show how it orders them.

Ask how it will be measured

Search work is three jobs running together on different clocks. Technical fixes show in weeks. Content aimed at real intent shows in months. Authority takes longer than both. A plan that does not separate them cannot be judged fairly at any point.

Then ask what the report will contain. Ranking on its own is the easiest number to make look good and the least connected to whether the business gained anything. Traffic without enquiries is the same problem one step later.

Ranking is not the goal on its own; how much of that traffic turned into work belongs in the same report.

Ask about risk and handover

Ask what they will not do. A team that has been doing this a while has a list: bought links, thin pages produced in bulk, tactics that work until they are penalised. A team with no such list either has not thought about it or does not want to say.

Then ask what happens at the end. Analytics and Search Console in your own name, content on your own site, technical changes in your own codebase. If any of it lives in their account, agree the transfer before you start rather than after.

What good answers sound like

Good answers are specific and slightly boring. They name pages, dates and measurements rather than outcomes. They admit what is uncertain. They are comfortable being checked against a plan in three months.

If you want a second opinion on a proposal you already have, we will read it with you and tell you what we would ask.

Questions to ask an SEO agency before you sign