Price and homework
SEO pricing is extremely uneven: you pay for the team's work, link acquisition and writing articles for search queries. Any price is subjective, and every provider quotes the number they value themselves at.
You can overpay or save a lot. But how do you know which one is happening? You have to study the potential provider more deeply - which leads to the next point.
Do your homework
Analyse the specialist's portfolio and reviews. Reviews can be faked; portfolios are much harder to fake, and few people risk it.
Why bother studying a marketer's portfolio before you start? When you choose an SEO provider, you are often choosing a partner for several years: SEO projects can run for a long time because of how the channel works. You need to be sure you have picked the most professional specialist you could reach on the market.
What to look for in a portfolio
- What tasks were solved and how. Project results say a lot, including about scale. If a team only ever reached 1,000 visitors a month, it is unlikely to build processes for attracting 1 million.
- Level of detail. Dry, thin case studies that hide the project specifics, the task and the result are a warning sign. If the project succeeded, why hide the details?
- Recognisable names. Well-known brands in a portfolio show the provider can solve problems and act effectively. Winning a large brand with its own security service and several approval layers is hard, so it is a plus.
- Whether they solved your exact task. This is the key point. If the team has solved it once, they will probably solve it again: they know the sequence of steps and the pitfalls.
Analysing the portfolio and reviews is one of the most important stages of choosing an SEO provider. Do not skimp on the time.
The relationship with the provider
It may seem irrelevant. You set a task, they do it. But marketing is a field where nothing can be guaranteed. The one thing you can be 100% sure of is the team you work with.
You need to be sure these people will give 110% to hit your plan. The relationship between you and the provider's team matters enormously. If the team does not respect its lead or believe in them, the work gets done half-heartedly, and there is no point talking about growth.
So the rule is simple: you should feel a kinship with the provider. You should be on the same wavelength, understand and complement each other. It is like love: hard to explain, but you know it when you meet the right person.
Does the provider use SEO for itself?
SEO processes can be fully standardised. With the right approach, you write the playbooks and design the business process once, and then the system runs without the owner or top managers.
What is surprising is how many SEO specialists sell SEO while not believing in the channel themselves. Why? Because they cannot get a positive ROI from it.
Which raises a logical question: if they do not believe in this traffic channel and do not use it for themselves, should you trust them with your marketing? These providers could not build the processes in their own business.
A simple example: in the digital marketing agency where I am a partner, SEO processes are fully delegated to an in-house team. The owner and top management do not need to dive deep into the channel. It is like going to a bank and exchanging $1,000 for $3,000, or $10,000 for $30,000 - on a highly competitive marketing market. That is one of the main reasons I advocate SEO and recommend adopting it in many niches.
Factor X: your personal feeling
Have you ever had a situation where you felt something was off about a person? On the surface all is well: smart, polite, likeable, attentive. But inside you know you should not get involved.
That is intuition. Perhaps it is life experience telling you what to do. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle: life guides you and protects you from wrong decisions through various signs and intuition.
What to do? The decision is yours. It is your business and your life. Your intuition may be wrong and everything may turn out fine. Or it may be protecting you from bigger problems.
The takeaway
When choosing an SEO provider, weigh the price, study the portfolio carefully, build the relationship, check whether they use SEO for themselves, and trust your intuition. The decision is yours, but these factors help you avoid mistakes.
