How to Spot a Bad SEO Agency: 9 Red Flags
The clearest warning signs are guaranteed rankings, refusing to give you ownership of your own Google accounts, long lock-in contracts, and reporting that shows activity rather than outcomes. Any one of these is worth a hard question; two together is usually enough to walk away.
The nine red flags
1. Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google. A guarantee means either meaningless terms nobody searches, or tactics that create a future problem.
2. They own your accounts. Your Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Ads and Business Profile should be in your name. An agency holding them is holding leverage, and it is the single most common way businesses get trapped.
3. Long lock-in contracts. SEO needs a few months to be measurable, so a three-month minimum is reasonable. Twelve or twenty-four months with no exit is a retention mechanism, not a strategy.
4. Reporting that measures activity. "We built 40 links and published 8 pages" describes effort. Ask instead what happened to impressions, clicks and enquiries.
5. No baseline. If nobody recorded where you started, nobody can prove what changed. This should happen in week one.
6. Mass-generated location pages. If the proposal involves dozens of near-identical pages differing only by suburb name, that is the doorway pattern Google explicitly targets. It rarely ranks and it is expensive to undo.
7. Secrecy about method. "Proprietary techniques" that cannot be explained usually cannot be explained because they should not be done.
8. Instant results promised. Anything meaningful inside a month is either fixing something broken or is not real.
9. Pressure to sign now. Discounts that expire today are a sales tactic. SEO is a multi-month commitment and there is no legitimate reason to rush.
Questions worth asking before you sign
Who will own the accounts? Correct answer: you, in your name, with the agency granted access.
What happens if I leave? Correct answer: you keep the accounts, the site, the content, and the data.
What will you do in the first month? A vague answer here usually means there is no plan.
Can I see a report you would actually send me? Not a case study — a real monthly report.
What would make you tell me SEO is not right for my business? An agency that cannot answer this will sell SEO to anyone.
What good looks like
A good agency will tell you when something will not work. It will record a baseline before touching anything, explain what it is doing in language you can follow, and give you honest reporting in months when the numbers went the wrong way.
It will also be clear about what it does not control — which is most of the outcome. The work is controllable; the ranking is not.
Frequently asked
01 Is it a red flag if an agency will not guarantee results?
The opposite. Refusing to guarantee rankings is a sign of honesty. Nobody can control Google's output, and anyone claiming otherwise is either misinformed or misleading you.
02 How do I check my current agency is doing anything?
Ask for access to your own Google Search Console — it is your data and you are entitled to it. Compare impressions and clicks over the engagement. If nothing has moved in six months and nobody can explain why, that is your answer.
03 What if I have already been burned?
Get your accounts back into your own name first, before anything else. Then get an independent audit of what was done — some damage, such as mass-generated thin pages or spammy links, needs actively undoing rather than just stopping.
Want the service, not the explainer?
This article covers one part of seo. For what we actually do, what it includes and what it costs: