Every few months a friend from Brentwood or Billericay messages me the same question: "I need someone to do my SEO, who should I use?" I've been doing this long enough that I don't give a polished answer any more. I give the messy one. Here it is, written down properly for once.
Start With What You're Actually Buying
SEO isn't a product. It's a bundle of decisions, some technical, some editorial, some just stubborn persistence over many months. When you hire an SEO company you're buying someone's judgment, not a magic script that pushes you to page one. Friends who understand that going in tend to end up happier. Friends who think they're buying rankings on a shelf almost always get burned, because the companies willing to promise that are usually the ones cutting corners to deliver it.
So the first question I ask back is: what decisions do you want help making? Content? Technical fixes? Local visibility around Chelmsford or Southend? The answer changes who you should even be talking to.
I ask this because most people haven't actually worked that out yet when they start looking. They just know "my website isn't doing anything" and assume the fix is one single thing called SEO. It rarely is. Sometimes it's a technical mess under the bonnet. Sometimes it's a site with decent bones but nothing written for the searches people actually type. Sometimes, honestly, it's neither, and the real problem sits somewhere else entirely, which brings me to a different conversation I have with friends fairly often.
Ask to See Their Own Website Analytics
This sounds cheeky, but it works. Any SEO company that's any good will have put real effort into their own site. Ask them, directly, how their own organic traffic has moved over the past year. Watch the reaction. Hesitation, vague deflection, a quick change of subject to "every business is different" — that tells you something. Confidence backed by an actual screen share tells you something else entirely.
I've sat in meetings where an agency owner pulled up their own Search Console data without blinking. I've also sat opposite people who got visibly uncomfortable at the exact same question. Guess which one I trusted more.
It's not a perfect test. Some genuinely good people are just rubbish at marketing themselves — plumbers are notoriously bad at this too, and some of the best ones I know have the ugliest vans. But a total unwillingness to show their own numbers, when numbers are literally their product, tells you something worth noting down.
Don't Hire the Best Pitch — Hire the Best Fit
Some agencies are brilliant at selling. They'll walk you through a slick deck, throw around terms like "topical authority" and "entity optimisation," and leave you nodding even though you understood about sixty percent of it. That's fine if the substance matches the delivery. It often doesn't.
What matters more is fit. A tradesperson in Grays with a three-van operation needs something very different from a multi-site retailer in Colchester. If an agency gives you the same pitch they'd give anyone, that's a red flag, not a reassurance.
- Ask what they'd do differently for your specific business versus a generic client in your sector.
- Ask who actually does the work — the person pitching, or a junior you'll never meet.
- Ask what they won't do, because that's often more revealing than what they will.
Watch How They Talk About Competitors
I pay close attention to how an agency discusses the client's competitors during a pitch. If they trash every rival site as "doing it all wrong," that's usually posturing. If they can point to something a competitor is doing well and say so honestly, even while explaining how you could do it better, that's someone who actually looked at the market instead of running a template audit.
A Quick Story
A friend who runs a small bridal shop near Maldon once had an agency tell her every single competitor had "terrible SEO." One quick look proved that wasn't true — two of them had been doing solid work for years. She didn't hire that agency. Smart move.
What got her, she told me afterwards, wasn't even the exaggeration itself. It was that they clearly hadn't expected her to check. That's the bit that stuck with me too.
Pricing Honesty Matters More Than Price
I'm not going to tell you to pick the cheapest or the most expensive option, because neither rule holds up. What matters is whether the pricing conversation feels honest. Can they explain, in plain terms, what you get for £800 a month versus £2,000? Do the numbers roughly match the scope of work, or does it feel like a figure plucked from thin air based on how big your shopfront looks?
Plenty of businesses across Essex pay well for SEO work and get genuinely good value. Plenty of others pay similar money for a monthly report nobody reads. The difference rarely shows up in the price tag itself.
One thing I always flag to friends: ask what happens to pricing in year two. Some agencies quietly raise fees once you're settled in, banking on the hassle of switching being bigger than the hassle of just paying more. Not necessarily dishonest, but worth asking about upfront rather than discovering it on an invoice.
Check Their References the Boring Way
Don't just read the case studies on their site — those are, obviously, the best examples they have. Ask for a client you can actually ring. A real conversation with a real business owner tells you more in ten minutes than any polished write-up could in an hour. If an agency is reluctant to offer this, ask yourself why.
When friends tell me they skipped this step because it felt awkward, I remind them it's far more awkward to be twelve months into a contract that isn't working.
What a Discovery Call Should Actually Feel Like
A decent first call should feel more like a diagnosis than a pitch. If a prospective agency spends forty minutes talking about themselves and five minutes asking about your business, that ratio is backwards. We try to flip it on our own calls — more questions about the business, far less chest-beating about what we've done elsewhere, because frankly, what we've done elsewhere only matters if it's relevant to what you're trying to solve.
Anyone wanting a sense of how we run that first conversation can look at our approach to SEO across Essex before booking a call, just to see whether the tone matches what they're after.
Trust Your Gut, Then Check It With Facts
Gut feel matters. If something feels off in the sales process — rushed answers, pressure to sign quickly, reluctance to put commitments in writing — that feeling is probably information, not paranoia. But don't stop there. Pair that instinct with something concrete, whether that's a reference call, a look at their own rankings, or a close read of what's actually in the contract.
We've worked with clients who came to us after being burned elsewhere, and almost every single one says the same thing in hindsight: they noticed the warning signs early and talked themselves out of acting on them.
One client, a sign-writing business out towards Rayleigh, told me he'd actually written down a concern about his old agency's reporting after month three. He didn't raise it until month eleven. By then he'd paid for eight more months of a relationship he already half-knew wasn't working. I think about that story more than I probably should.
The Bottom Line
There's no single test that separates a good SEO company from a bad one, which is frustrating advice to give a friend who just wants a straight answer. But a handful of small checks — their own numbers, their honesty about competitors, their willingness to put you in touch with a real client — tell you far more than any pitch deck. The businesses I've seen do best with a properly run SEO partnership are the ones who asked uncomfortable questions before signing, not after.
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