Key facts
- No SEO agency controls Google's ranking algorithm, so a guaranteed first page or number one ranking is a claim no honest provider can actually back up.
- Meaningful SEO results on competitive commercial keywords typically take 6 to 12 months, since search engines need time to crawl, index, and build trust in new or improved content.
- Activity based reporting, such as a count of blog posts or backlinks, does not by itself show whether rankings, traffic, or leads have actually improved.
- Content written for a client's website should belong to that client once delivered, and a proposal silent on content ownership is worth questioning directly.
- SearchPod's SEO pricing is 50 dollars Canadian, or 38 dollars US, per page from a minimum of 10 pages a month, stated as a specific number of deliverables rather than a vague monthly fee.
A Guaranteed Ranking or a Suspiciously Fast Timeline
No agency controls Google's algorithm, and no agency can guarantee a specific ranking position for a specific keyword, because Google's results depend on hundreds of signals that change over time and vary by searcher. A proposal that promises number one on Google or a guaranteed first page result is making a claim no honest SEO provider can back up.
Timeline claims deserve the same scrutiny. Meaningful SEO results, particularly for competitive commercial keywords, typically take 6 to 12 months to build, since a search engine needs real time to discover, evaluate, and build trust in new or improved content. A proposal promising major ranking movement within a few weeks is either describing easy, low competition terms only, or simply setting an expectation it cannot meet.
A fair proposal instead describes a realistic range and explains what affects it: how competitive your keywords are, how established your site already is, and how much content and technical work is required before rankings can move.
No Named Pages, Keywords, or Deliverables
A proposal that talks about SEO in general terms, boosting visibility, improving your presence online, without naming specific pages, keyword targets, or a monthly deliverable count is hard to hold accountable later. Ask what exactly happens each month: how many pages get written or optimized, which keywords are the current focus, and what technical work, if any, is planned.
A related red flag is a proposal that never mentions your actual website or business by name in any specific way, reading instead like a template that could be sent to any client in any industry. SEO work that is genuinely tailored to you should reference your actual site, your actual competitors, or your actual target keywords somewhere in the proposal.
If a proposal cannot tell you how many pages or how many hours of work you are paying for each month, ask directly, since per page or per deliverable pricing, which many agencies use, makes this easy to state clearly if the agency is actually planning specific work.
Contract Terms That Favor the Agency Only
A long minimum term, such as 12 months, combined with a harsh exit fee and nothing resembling a cure clause for underperformance, is a red flag regardless of how good the rest of the proposal sounds. SEO does take time, but a fair contract still gives you an exit if the agency is not delivering the agreed work.
Check who owns the content once it is written and published. A proposal that is silent on this, or that implies the agency retains rights to content built for your site, is worth questioning directly, since content written for your business should belong to your business.
Watch for a proposal that never mentions your Google Search Console or Google Analytics access. An agency doing real SEO work needs visibility into your actual search performance, and a proposal that does not address this access at all may be planning to work with limited or no real data.
No Way to See Whether It Is Actually Working
A proposal that does not describe any reporting on rankings, organic traffic, or leads generated from organic search is a significant gap, since without reporting you have no way to know whether the work is producing anything at all until months have passed with no visibility.
Be cautious of reporting that only shows activity, such as a count of blog posts published or backlinks built, without any connection to actual rankings, traffic, or business results. Activity metrics are easy to hit regardless of whether the work is effective, so a proposal leaning entirely on activity rather than outcomes is worth questioning.
A fair SEO proposal states what you will see, how often, and connects the reporting to your actual business goal, whether that is leads, calls, or online sales, rather than only to metrics that are easy to report but hard to translate into results for your business.
Related questions
No. Rankings depend on Google's algorithm, which no agency controls, and on how competitive a given keyword is at any given time. Any proposal promising a guaranteed ranking position is making a claim it cannot actually back up, and it is worth treating as a signal to look elsewhere rather than a selling point.
Most honest proposals describe a range of 6 to 12 months for meaningful movement on competitive keywords, with easier, lower competition terms sometimes moving faster. A proposal promising major results in a few weeks is either describing very low competition terms only or setting an expectation that does not match how search engines actually work.
Yes, ideally. A proposal built around your actual business should be able to name at least some of the keywords or topics it plans to target, based on research into what your potential customers actually search for. A proposal that stays entirely general, with no specific keyword or page targets mentioned, is harder to hold accountable to later.
Expect reporting connected to actual outcomes: organic traffic to specific pages, rankings for target keywords, and where possible, leads or sales attributed to organic search. Reporting that only shows activity, like a count of pages published, without connecting it to traffic or rankings, leaves you with no way to judge whether the work is actually effective.
It can be, since a per page structure states plainly how many pages or how much content you are paying for each month, which is easy to verify against what actually gets delivered. A flat retainer is not automatically less transparent, but it should still state a specific number of deliverables rather than leaving the monthly workload undefined.
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