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How do I check what an SEO company tells me?

Google publishes advice for exactly this. Its guidance on third-party tools and services says to check a recommendation against Google's own documentation before you act on it, to ask whether the advice cites that documentation, and to make your own decision. So the useful question isn't whether somebody sounds confident. It's whether they can point at where it says that.

Ask where it says that

Google's own guidance tells site owners to check a third party's recommendations against official Google guidance, and to look at whether the advice cites Google's documentation as evidence. That's a question you can ask on a sales call, and the answer tells you a lot.

Somebody who works from Google's documentation can send you a link in a minute. Somebody working from a checklist they inherited will tell you it's proprietary, or explain that Google doesn't publish the real rules, which is its own kind of answer.

The four claims that don't survive a check

A promised position on Google. Google says plainly there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, and its own guide on hiring help warns about anyone who offers one.

A submission service. There's no form to submit your site to hundreds of search engines, the sitemap ping endpoint was retired years ago, and the tool that promises instant indexing is using an interface Google supports for job postings and livestreams only.

A monthly directory sync, which is an afternoon of work billed forever, and a schedule of generic blog posts, which is the shape Google's own guidance warns about when it describes content that recycles what everybody has already said.

What a good proposal has in it

The towns you'd be found in, named. The jobs, named. What gets written and how many pages of it. Who owns the website and the web address at the end. What happens to the pages if you stop paying. And what they'd show you every month.

A proposal that's mostly adjectives, with the deliverable described as optimization, is a proposal you can't check later. Ask what physically exists on the site in ninety days that doesn't exist today.

How to check it yourself, monthly

Search Console is free, it's your data, and it should be in your name rather than in theirs. It tells you which of your pages Google has, what searches you came up for, and whether that list is growing.

Then do the search a customer would do, from a private window, for a job and a town you're paying to be found in. Between those two, you can check most of what anybody tells you without buying a tool of your own or learning a word of the vocabulary.

One customer's before and after

A concrete coating company

River Falls, Wisconsin. Same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site.

more often on Google
3,864 to 22,885
5.9x
more visits from Google
106 to 284
2.7x
Towns they show up in
Wisconsin and Minnesota
27

What this means for you

Before you sign anything, ask for access to your own Search Console in your own account, and ask what will exist on the site in ninety days that doesn't exist today. Those two questions are short, they're fair, and the answers sort the proposals out faster than anything else.

Bindingstone publishes what it does and what it costs, $497 a month with no setup fee and no contract, and you can read the whole arrangement before you pay anything.

Ready to show up in every town you work in?

Your site can be live in about ten days. After that, the towns you drive to can find you.