In short
- Ask what they would fix first, before they have seen any of your data
- Guaranteed rankings are either meaningless or untrue
- You should own the content, the logins and the data
- A good agency will tell you what not to spend money on
When you hire a designer you can look at their work. When you hire a writer you can read it. When you hire an SEO agency in Mumbai you are buying something you cannot inspect, measured by numbers most clients cannot interpret, over a timescale long enough that by the time it is obviously not working you have paid for six months of it.
So the selection has to be done on process rather than on promises. What follows are the questions that actually separate people, and the answers that should end the conversation.
What separates a good SEO agency from a bad one?
A good agency is specific before it is paid. It names things wrong with your site in the first conversation, explains which of them it cannot influence, and tells you what will take six months. A bad one talks about rankings, algorithms and packages, and avoids committing to anything you could later check.
Nine questions to ask before you sign
- What would you fix first on our site, and why? Ask before handing over any data. A serious answer names something specific they have already found. A weak one describes a process.
- Which queries are you targeting, and who is searching them? You want the person behind the phrase described, not the search volume read out.
- Who writes the content, and can I read something they have written? If the writer cannot be named, the writing is being outsourced or generated.
- How many hours a month, split how? Writing, technical work and reporting are three different costs. A retainer that cannot be broken down is a retainer that is mostly reporting.
- Are technical fixes included, or does my developer do them? This is the single commonest gap between what a client thinks they bought and what they bought.
- What will you not be able to influence? Everyone has limits. An agency that admits to none has not thought about yours.
- Which of our pages would you delete? Good SEO removes as much as it adds. Nobody who has only ever added pages has done this long.
- Show me a monthly report you sent a client, with the names removed. You learn more from one real report than from an hour of pitching.
- What happens to the content, the accounts and the data if we stop? Ask it last, and watch how comfortable the answer is.
Answers that should worry you
| What they say | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| “We guarantee page-one rankings” | They will target phrases nobody searches, or phrases you already rank for |
| “We have a proprietary algorithm” | There is no such thing. Google's ranking systems are not licensable |
| “We submit your site to 500 directories” | Automated listings on sites no human reads, which do nothing and can do harm |
| “You'll see results in 30 days” | Either the work is trivial or the metric has been chosen because it moves fast |
| “We can't tell you who our clients are” | Sometimes legitimate. If they cannot produce one named reference, it is not |
| “SEO is included free with the website” | A checkbox in a page builder, not a service |
The ranking guarantee deserves a word of its own, because it sounds like the most reassuring thing on the list. Nobody controls Google's results, so the guarantee can only be honoured by choosing targets that were never in doubt. Ask which exact phrases are guaranteed, then search them yourself and see how many results come back.
What a fair contract covers
Before you sign
- A named deliverable list rather than “ongoing optimisation”
- Hours or outputs per month, written down
- Your outright ownership of every piece of content produced
- Your ownership of Search Console, Analytics and Google Business Profile
- A notice period measured in weeks rather than quarters
- No lock-in that depends on them holding your logins
Who owns what when you leave
This is where clients get hurt, and it is almost never malice — it is drift. The agency sets up a Search Console property, an Analytics account and sometimes the Google Business Profile under their own login because it is faster. Two years later those assets, and the entire history inside them, belong to somebody you are no longer speaking to.
Insist that every account is owned by a Google account your company controls, with the agency added as a user. It takes ten minutes at the start and is close to impossible to unpick at the end. The same applies to content: anything you paid to have written should be yours outright, with no licence that lapses when the retainer does.
When you should not hire an agency at all
If your site is three pages old and your company is six months old, you do not have an SEO problem. You have a nobody-knows-you-exist problem, and PR, outbound and your own network will move faster than search will.
If nobody searches for what you sell, no agency can conjure demand that is not there. Check before you spend. And if you have genuine subject knowledge and a few hours a week, do the first six months yourself — the technical housekeeping and the local listings in particular are well within reach of a founder with a weekend, and you will be a far better client afterwards.
One last test
Ask what they would charge to do nothing for two months while you fix your own content first. An agency comfortable saying “you don't need us yet” is one worth keeping the number of. An agency that cannot say it is selling a retainer, not a result.
If you want the underlying detail — what each part of the work involves and what it should produce — that is in the companion piece on what SEO services in Mumbai actually involve. How we handle it is on our SEO content page.