How to choose an SEO company: questions, red flags and contracts

How to choose an SEO company comes down to how it diagnoses your site before it sells you anything: ask it what it would fix first and why, how it will measure progress against your business goals, and what you will own when the contract ends. Walk away from any company that guarantees rankings, hides its methods or locks you into a long contract before you have seen a written audit. This guide covers the questions to ask, the red flags, the contract terms, what good reporting looks like, what real SEO work includes, and how an agency compares with a freelancer or an in-house hire.

Last updated: 21 October 2026.

What does an SEO company actually do?

An SEO company works to make your website easier for search engines to crawl, understand and trust, so that it appears for the searches your buyers make. Good SEO work has three parts: technical work on the site itself, content that answers real questions, and the reputation signals (links and mentions) that tell search engines other people rate you.

Increasingly it has a fourth part as well: being cited by AI assistants and AI search answers, which read the same pages and reward the same clarity. A competent SEO company treats these as one job, not four separate products sold one after another.

At Odduel, a creative and technology agency in Barcelona and São Paulo, SEO sits inside our digital marketing service, next to the design and development of the sites it works on. That shapes how we think about the question in this article: the best SEO partner is the one whose recommendations can actually be carried out on your site.

In short: choose the company that explains its diagnosis in plain words, ties its work to your enquiries or sales rather than to rankings alone, shows you exactly what it did each month, and leaves you owning everything. Price matters, but a cheap contract that builds nothing you keep is the most expensive kind.

When do you need an SEO company at all?

Not every business needs an outside company. Google itself explains, in its guide on whether you need an SEO, that many site owners can handle the basics themselves, and that hiring one is a decision to take with care.

You are likely to need outside help when:

• Your site is large, multilingual or built on a platform with technical limits you cannot assess yourself.
• You are planning a redesign or a platform move, where mistakes can lose years of search visibility in a week.
• Your market is competitive and the pages that rank are clearly the result of sustained, expert work.
• Nobody inside the business has the time to publish and maintain content every month.

If none of these apply, a one-off audit and a short training session may be worth more than a monthly retainer.

How do you choose an SEO company? The 12 questions to ask

The questions below separate companies that understand your business from companies that sell a standard package. Ask them in the first call and listen for specific answers, not reassurance.

Questions about their diagnosis

1. What would you fix first on our site, and why? A good company has looked at your site before the call and names two or three concrete issues. A weak one talks about “strategy” in general.
2. Which searches do you think our buyers make? You want to hear queries tied to buying intent, not only high-volume words that bring visitors who never become customers.
3. What do you need from us to start? Access to your analytics and Google Search Console, a list of your services and margins, and time with someone who knows your customers. A company that needs nothing from you is guessing.

Questions about their method

1. How do you build links or mentions? Ask for examples of the kind of sites that have linked to clients’ pages, and how those links were earned. Vague answers here are the most common warning sign.
2. Who writes the content, and who checks it? Find out whether a subject expert reviews it, how AI drafting is used, and who has the final word on accuracy and tone.
3. Who makes the technical changes? Some companies only send recommendations. If your developer or platform cannot carry them out, the audit sits in a drawer.
4. How do you handle AI search and assistants? You want an answer about clear structure, factual pages, structured data and consistent company information, not a promise of special tricks.

Questions about results and reporting

1. How will you measure success for us? The answer should mention enquiries, sales or sign-ups from organic search, not only rankings and traffic.
2. What will a monthly report show? Ask to see a sample, with client details removed.
3. What happens if results do not come in the time we expect? A straight company explains what it would change, and when it would advise stopping.

Questions about the contract

1. What is the notice period, and is there a minimum term? Short notice periods show confidence in the work.
2. What do we own at the end? Content, reports, accounts, data and any links built should all stay with you.

What are the red flags of a bad SEO company?

Some warning signs are so reliable that one of them is enough to end the conversation. Google’s spam policies describe the practices that can get a site demoted or removed from results, and several red flags below lead straight to them.

• Guaranteed rankings or “page one in 30 days”. Nobody controls search results. A guarantee means either a meaningless keyword nobody searches, or risky shortcuts.
• Secret methods. If a company will not tell you how it gets links, assume you would not like the answer.
• Bought links in bulk. Packages of “100 high-authority links” usually mean paid placements on sites built only to sell links, which search engines discount or penalise.
• Unsolicited emails promising to fix your SEO. Good companies are rarely short of work and do not cold-email with automated audits.
• Reports full of rankings for words nobody asked for. Rising positions for irrelevant phrases are easy to produce and worth nothing.
• They keep your accounts. Analytics, Search Console, your domain and your content must sit under your own accounts, with the company added as a user.
• Mass-produced content. Dozens of thin articles a month, written without anyone checking the facts, can harm a site more than publishing nothing.
• A long lock-in before any audit. A twelve-month commitment signed before you have seen a written diagnosis puts all the risk on you.

What should good SEO work include?

Before you compare proposals, it helps to know what a complete piece of SEO work looks like. Most proposals emphasise one part and quietly leave out another.

Technical SEO

Technical work makes sure search engines can reach, read and index your pages. It covers crawling and indexing, page speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile layout, clean addresses, redirects, structured data, duplicate pages and, for multilingual sites, correct language versions with hreflang tags and translated addresses.

It is usually the first phase, because content and links cannot help pages that search engines cannot read. If you are also planning a new site, the order of work matters even more: our guide to SEO during a website redesign covers how to protect existing rankings through the move.

Content

Content work starts from research into what buyers search for, then plans pages that answer those searches better than what already ranks: service pages, guides, comparisons and answers to common questions. It includes updating and merging old pages, not only writing new ones.

Good content is written for people first. It is specific, accurate, written or checked by someone who knows the subject, and structured so that both readers and AI assistants can pull a clear answer from it. AI can speed up research and first drafts; judgement, expertise and final editing remain human work.

Links and reputation

Links from other sites still tell search engines that people trust you. Good link work earns them: useful resources other sites want to cite, real industry relationships, press, directories that matter in your sector, and accurate company profiles. It is slower than buying links and far safer.

Reputation now also means consistency. Your company name, services and contact details should match across your site, your business profiles and the directories you appear in, because both search engines and AI assistants cross-check them.

Measurement

The last part is honest measurement: analytics and Search Console set up correctly, conversions tracked, and consent handled in line with the GDPR so that tracking only runs after visitors agree. Without it, nobody can tell whether the work is paying for itself.

In-house, agency or freelancer: which is right?

There are three ways to buy SEO, and each suits a different business. The table compares them on the points that usually decide it.

	In-house specialist	SEO agency	Freelancer
Range of skills	One person’s skills; gaps need outside help	Technical, content, links and analytics together	Usually strong in one or two areas
Knowledge of your business	Deepest, day to day	Good after onboarding	Good, depends on time given
Capacity	Limited to one person’s hours	Can scale up for launches or migrations	Limited; holidays and illness stop the work
Cost structure	Salary, tools and training, all year	Monthly retainer or project fee	Hourly, daily or monthly rate, usually the lowest
Continuity	Lost when the person leaves	Kept by the company’s records and process	Depends on one person
Best for	Large sites with constant SEO work	Growing businesses that need several skills at once	Small sites or a specific, well-defined task

Many businesses combine them: an agency sets up the technical base and the plan, and an in-house marketer or a freelancer keeps the content going. The same trade-offs apply in other fields, as our comparison of an AI development company and a freelancer shows.

What should an SEO contract include?

A clear contract protects both sides. Before you sign, check that it sets out the following terms in writing.

1. Scope. Which pages, languages and markets are covered, and which parts of the work (technical, content, links, reporting) are included.
2. Deliverables. What you receive each month or each phase: an audit, a number of pages written or updated, fixes made, a report.
3. Who does the implementation. Whether the company changes the site itself or hands recommendations to your developer, and who pays for that time.
4. Term and notice. The minimum term, if any, and the notice needed to end the contract. Short notice after an initial phase is fair to both sides.
5. Ownership. Content, data, reports, accounts and anything built for you belong to you, during and after the contract.
6. Access and security. How the company gets access to your site and accounts, and that access is removed when the work ends.
7. Methods. A statement that the company follows search engines’ published guidelines and will not buy links or use hidden techniques in your name.
8. Data protection. Where the company processes personal data for you, such as analytics or form data, a data processing agreement under the GDPR.
9. Reporting and reviews. How often you meet, what each report contains, and when the plan is reviewed.

On pricing, SEO is usually sold as a monthly retainer, a fixed project fee (an audit or a migration) or a mix of both. Each model shifts risk differently; our guide to agency pricing models explains how to read them. What drives the cost is the size of the site, the number of languages, how competitive your market is, and how much content and implementation the company takes on. A reliable fixed quote follows a short brief and a first look at the site.

What does good SEO reporting look like?

Reporting is where many SEO relationships go wrong. A long report full of charts can hide the fact that nothing useful happened.

A good monthly report fits on a few pages and answers four questions:

1. What did you do? A plain list of the changes made, pages published and links earned, with addresses.
2. What changed? Organic visits, enquiries, sales or sign-ups from search, and visibility for the searches that matter to you, compared with the previous period and the same period last year.
3. Why did it change? An honest reading, including the effects of seasonality, site changes and updates to search engines.
4. What happens next? The priorities for the coming month and anything the company needs from you.

Expect patience in the first months. SEO builds over time, and early reports should show work done and leading signs, such as pages indexed and impressions rising, before enquiries follow. What you should never accept is a report that cannot tell you what the company did.

How do you compare SEO proposals side by side?

Once you have two or three proposals, compare them on the same points, not on the headline price alone.

1. Did they diagnose your site? The best proposals show findings from your own site, not a generic process.
2. Is the plan in phases? A sensible plan usually starts with an audit and technical fixes, then content, then sustained work on reputation.
3. Is the goal a business goal? Look for enquiries or sales, not rankings for a list of words.
4. Is the scope realistic? Promising everything for a small fee usually means none of it is done properly.
5. Who will do the work? Ask to meet the people who will work on your account.
6. Can they show real work? Ask for case studies and, where possible, a former client you can speak to.

If you are choosing a partner for more than SEO, for example a new website and its search work together, the same tests apply to the whole agency. Look at what it has built and published itself; at Odduel, every project we show in the Portfolio is real work for a real client.

Questions people ask

If you are comparing SEO companies, start by asking each one for a short written diagnosis of your site and judge them on how clearly they explain it. If you would like us to look at yours, our digital marketing service covers technical SEO, content and measurement for sites in every European market we work in; talk to us about your project and we will tell you plainly what we would do first.