Skip to main content

Category

Choosing and working with an agency

This is the category we have the most obvious conflict of interest in, so it is written to be useful even if you decide to hire nobody. It covers how to read a proposal, which guarantees should worry you, what a retainer should actually include, who owns the website and the data when the relationship ends, and how to leave cleanly. It also covers the honest comparison against doing it yourself. After reading it you should be able to run a hiring process that protects you, including against us.

Start here

All twenty articles on choosing and working with an agency

In reading order rather than by date. 20 published so far, and the rest are written and scheduled. Titles without a link are not live yet.

  1. How to find a good SEO company

    A good SEO company will tell you what it cannot do, show you work you can check yourself, and agree on how it gets measured before you pay anything.

  2. Questions to ask before hiring a marketing agency

    The questions that matter are about who does the work, how it gets measured, and what happens when it does not work.

  3. Red flags in an agency proposal

    The warning signs in a proposal are all versions of one thing: a promise you cannot check.

  4. Why guarantees in SEO should worry you

    Nobody controls Google's ranking, so a ranking promise can only be made safe by defining it down to something that does not help you.

  5. Agency pricing models compared

    There are four structures you will be offered: a monthly retainer, hourly billing, fixed-price projects, and performance or spend-based fees.

  6. What a marketing retainer should actually include

    A retainer should name five things: recurring deliverables with units attached, the person doing them, a reporting date with defined metrics measured against a starting point, a.

  7. Contracts, notice periods, and what to negotiate

    Negotiate four things: ownership of everything produced, the notice period and how notice is delivered, access to your own accounts and data, and disclosure of any subcontracting.

  8. Who owns your website when the relationship ends

    Ownership is not one thing. It is five: the domain, the hosting, the platform account, the files and content, and the connected accounts like analytics and your business profile.

  9. Signs your current agency has stopped doing the work

    You can check this yourself in about twenty minutes, without asking anyone.

  10. How to read an agency's case studies critically

    Look for three things: the starting number, the time period, and what else changed during it.

  11. Offshore, local, or freelance: the honest tradeoffs

    Offshore buys volume and overnight turnaround, freelance buys senior attention with no backup, and local buys context and someone who can stand in your building.

  12. What to do when you have been burned before

    Do three things in order. Recover the accounts you own, work out which of the four failure modes actually happened, then design the next engagement so that specific failure cannot.

  13. Setting expectations for the first 90 days

    The first thirty days are access, measurement, and fixing what is plainly broken.

  14. How often you should hear from your agency

    A monthly report on a fixed date, a short monthly call, and immediate contact for three specific events: a real drop, a policy problem, or something they need from you.

  15. Approving work you do not fully understand

    You do not need to understand the technique. You need four answers: what problem this solves, how we will know it worked, what breaks if it is wrong, and whether it can be undone.

  16. When to fire your agency and how to transition cleanly

    Fire an agency for three reasons: agreed work is not being produced after you have asked in writing, you have been told something untrue, or nobody can explain what is being done.

  17. Doing it yourself versus hiring: an honest cost comparison

    Doing it yourself costs hours, learning time, tool subscriptions, and the work you stop doing to make room.

  18. What a good discovery process looks like

    Discovery is diagnosis before prescription. It should cover three layers: how your business actually makes money, how customers currently find and choose you, and what technically.

  19. Reference checks that actually tell you something

    References are chosen by the agency, so stop trying to catch a lie and start learning the working relationship.

  20. The claims agencies make that do not survive checking

    Statistics in agency pitches fail in five recognizable ways: real research under a borrowed publisher's name, a vendor blog dressed as a study, a citation to a study that does not.

Be honest with yourself

When this category is not your problem

If you have the hours and the interest to do the work yourself, an agency is a convenience purchase, not a capability one. Plenty of local businesses rank fine without hiring anyone, and the honest cost comparison is in this category.

And if your business does not yet have a repeatable offer or a way to handle more customers, hiring anyone is early. Marketing makes an unfinished business fail faster and more expensively.

Where to go next

If you have a proposal in front of you and want a second read, send it to eric@seod.com with the agency name removed. I will tell you what is standard, what is padded, and what is missing. I do this knowing it sometimes talks people out of hiring anyone, including us.

Reading all of this and still not knowing where to start is a reasonable place to land. The Business Growth Review looks at the business first and then recommends a starting point, which is the opposite of being sold a package.

Call Eric Email Eric