How do I tell if an SEO company is a scam?

The twelve red flags

1. A guaranteed ranking. Google sells no position and no agency controls it — Google’s own page on hiring an SEO warns against exactly that promise. A guarantee is either a lie or a phrase nobody searches.
2. Page one in thirty days. Real local SEO shows in months, not weeks. Thirty days is possible only for a search with no competition, which is a search with no customers.
3. “We are calling from Google.” Google does not cold-call, and it has no “partner” program that certifies SEO companies. The Google Partner badge exists for Google Ads management only and says nothing about SEO.
4. Secret methods. There are no secrets. Anyone who will not explain what they do is either doing nothing or doing something that will get you penalized.
5. A report of vanity phrases. Twenty “keywords on page one” that turn out to be your own business name and phrases nobody types. Ask for Search Console, where the real searches are.
6. The website in their name. A site built on the agency’s account, a domain registered by them, a platform you cannot export from. When you leave, the site does not come with you — that is the point.
7. The Business Profile they “manage” under their login. Same trick, worse consequence: you can lose the listing.
8. Bulk directory submissions and link packages. Five hundred listings on sites nobody reads and a hundred links from sites built to sell them. The listings do nothing; the links can earn a manual action, which you will inherit after they are gone. The backlinks post is about cleaning up after exactly this.
9. Blog posts by the pound. Eight generic articles a month, rewritten from somebody else’s, that no customer reads and no engine cites. Volume is not a strategy.
10. A year-long contract for a month-to-month service. The lock-in is there because the results will not keep you.
11. No conversion tracking. An agency that cannot tell you how many calls the site produced last month is not measuring the thing you are paying for.
12. Silence. Reports that arrive late or not at all, a contact who changes every quarter, a “what did you do this month” that goes unanswered. The work is not being done.

Why the scams work

Because SEO is slow and invisible, and an owner cannot easily tell the difference between an agency that is doing real work that has not paid off yet and one that is doing nothing. Both look the same at month two. The scam relies on that gap: collect for six months, send a report of vanity phrases, and by the time the owner concludes nothing happened, the contract is half over and the agency has moved on to the next one.

The defense is not to demand results faster — that is what makes owners fall for the thirty-day promise — but to demand visibility into the work. Real work has artifacts every month: the pages written, the profile changes made, the listings fixed, the measurements taken from where the customers are. An agency that can show those is doing the work. One that cannot is not, whatever the report says.

The questions that expose them

• “What exactly will you do in the first ninety days? List it.”
• “Which searches are we targeting, and how many people in my area make them?”
• “Who owns the site, the domain, the profile and the ad accounts, and what happens to them if I leave?”
• “Will you set up Search Console and analytics under my account and add yourselves as users?”
• “How do you measure the map pack — from my office, or from where my customers are?”
• “How do you count calls and forms, and will I see them by source every month?”
• “What do you do about AI search — the answers Google, ChatGPT and the others give?” (An honest answer names the engines and describes measuring them by asking. A blank look means they have not noticed the last two years.)
• “Can I leave month to month?”

A good agency will answer every one of these without flinching, in writing, before you sign. That is the whole test.

What an honest engagement looks like

A baseline before any work: positions for your real searches, the map-pack grid, what the AI engines answer, and last month’s calls and forms. A written scope that names the work by month. Everything built on accounts in your name, and everything yours the day you leave. A monthly report that shows what was done, what moved — impressions and the specific searches in the early months, positions and calls later — and what is next. Month-to-month terms, because the results should be what keeps you. And a straight “no” when you ask for a guarantee, followed by an explanation of why nobody honest can give one.

That is what we do, and it is described on the SEO page in the same words, so it can be held against us.