How to vet an SEO agency: access, questions, and report checks

Vetting a supplier starts with account access, not with comparing proposals. Every SEO agency shows similar slides and makes similar-sounding promises, so the question that separates them is whether they agree to work inside your Google Search Console and your analytics account. Only then can you verify every number they report at the source, on your own, without asking anyone for permission. Everything after that — the questions, the contract, the billing — falls into place more easily.

Which accounts have to sit on your email address

Your Google Search Console property and your analytics account must be verified on your own email address, with the agency listed only as an added user you can remove with one click. This is not a formality and not a sign of distrust. Without it, every number you use to judge the engagement passes through the hands of the party being paid — and any assessment of work based solely on material supplied by the supplier is an assessment you cannot verify.

Google Search Console is free, and its performance report gives you clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position, with data reaching 16 months back. If the property is verified on the agency’s account, you lose entry to that history on the day the engagement ends. The same tool holds the Manual Actions section — the only reliable way to check whether your site actually received a manual penalty from Google, when somebody tells you over the phone that it did.

Permission scope has stages. Google’s official guidance for businesses hiring an SEO specialist (updated 5 June 2026) recommends granting “only read access to Search Console” during the audit stage, without write permissions. You add broader rights later, when the agency is genuinely implementing changes, and you withdraw them the moment you decide to.

How to vet an SEO agency at the first meeting, and how an evasive answer sounds

The best screening questions come from Google itself: ask for examples of previous work and success stories, and ask what results to expect and in what timeframe. The value is not in the question but in whether the answer can be checked. The same method — a fixed question with a recognisable evasive answer — is what settles how to choose a software house when the supplier you are vetting builds the site rather than promotes it.

Ask about scope too. A firm that starts by selling a monthly retainer before anyone has looked at the site is skipping the stage that should produce an SEO audit showing what blocks visibility — and without one, the first months of work are guesswork.

The warning signs Google names outright

Google publishes its own list of warnings and it is short. The documentation states plainly: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google”. It warns against suppliers who guarantee rankings, claim a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise “priority submission” of your site to the search engine. Separately it names two signals about how the service is sold: contact through an unsolicited email offer, and reluctance to explain clearly what exactly will be done.

The same principle holds in local results: Google names three factors — relevance, distance, and prominence — without publishing their weights and without any way to buy a position. The full sequence of steps is covered in the separate guide on where to start with local SEO.

How to read the report so you are not buying somebody else’s PDF

Average position is the averaged position of your site across all impressions for a given query in the selected period — not the spot you see when you type the phrase into a browser. Results are personalised and depend on location, so a position checked by hand by you, by the agency, and by your customer can differ, and none of them is evidence. Four numbers from the performance report are checkable on your side: clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position.

The most telling of all is the number of queries your site appears for at all. It grows when content that answers real customer questions is added, and it stands still when the work amounts to editing meta tags. It is worth asking at the same time whether the agency tracks visibility in AI Overviews, because a share of impressions now ends in an answer generated above the results.

Billing and time: why nobody honest gives you a date for a ranking

An honest supplier bills for work delivered and for measurable changes, not for the date a position is reached. On timing, Google says only that some changes take effect in hours and others in months, and advises waiting a few weeks before judging the impact (starter guide, updated 10 December 2025). Any offer with a specific deadline “for a top three spot” promises control over something the supplier does not control.

Price can be an argument, but you need to know what you are comparing. The figures circulating online — from a few hundred złoty a month for local packages up to sums in the low thousands — are rates agencies state in their own offers and published materials in 2026, not market research, so they are useful only for judging whether a given offer sits far outside what firms say about themselves. Far more informative is a breakdown of the amount into hours of work and concrete deliverables: texts, technical fixes, configuration, reporting.

That the work is heading somewhere shows up in things independent of rankings: dated changes actually appear on the site, the number of pages answering customer questions grows, the number of queries generating impressions rises, and the agency raises technical problems itself instead of staying quiet about them.

What to put in the contract so you can walk away from it

The contract has to settle four things: ownership of accounts and access, the scope of work billed monthly together with the URLs of the pages changed, rights to the content and materials created during the engagement, and a notice period with a deadline for handing over documentation. Any of those missing translates into a cost of leaving — usually in the form of content you are not allowed to use, or an account you have no password for. This description is information, not legal advice.

Prepare the enquiry to several agencies the same way you would prepare a software project brief: one document for everyone, the same required response format, the same list of questions. Offers that arrive in a layout you imposed can be lined up row by row, and you will see who priced the work and who priced a subscription. Apply that to us as well: if you also need changes to the site itself alongside visibility work, describe the scope when you bring us the project, then hold our answer against every question in this article before you sign anything.