Hiring an SEO agency in Kerry? 9 red flags to check before you sign

Maybe it was an email out of the blue promising “page one of Google”. Maybe you’ve paid a monthly SEO fee for a year and still can’t say what you got for it. Either way, the hard part of paying for SEO isn’t the work itself. It’s knowing whether the person doing it is any good.

SEO is worth doing properly. People searching for exactly what you sell, in your area, are the warmest leads you’ll ever get. But anyone can call themselves an SEO expert, and results take long enough to show that a poor job can go unnoticed for months.

Here are nine red flags, most of them straight from Google’s own advice on hiring an SEO, and the questions to ask before you sign.

1. They guarantee rankings

This is the big one. In its guide for business owners, Google puts it bluntly: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” (Google Search Central) It adds that if someone guarantees you first place, you should find someone else.

What a good SEO can promise is the work: what they’ll fix, what they’ll build and how they’ll report on it.

2. They contacted you out of the blue

Google specifically warns about SEO firms that email you uninvited. If an agency found you by spamming you, think about how it plans to promote you.

3. They won’t say what they’ll actually do

“Proprietary methods” and “secret strategies” are a warning, not a selling point. Google advises caution with any company that is secretive or won’t clearly explain what it intends to do. Ask for a written plan, and a record of every change made to your site.

4. They sell links or directory packages

“500 backlinks a month” or “submission to thousands of search engines” sound like value. They’re the opposite. Google’s spam policies treat links created mainly to manipulate rankings as link spam, and buying links is one of the examples.

At best, those links are ignored. At worst, they become a problem you pay someone else to clean up.

5. You won’t own your own accounts

Your website, domain, Google Business Profile, Google Search Console and analytics should all be in your name. A good agency asks you to add it as a manager or user. It doesn’t create accounts that it controls.

If an agency owns your Business Profile and you part ways, you can lose access to your listing, your photos and the reviews your customers left.

6. Their reports are full of numbers that don’t matter

“You now rank for 312 keywords!” Most of those will be searches nobody makes. Good reporting answers the questions you actually care about:

• How many enquiries, calls and messages came from search?
• Which pages and searches brought them in?
• What was done this month, and what’s next?

You should also have your own access to Google Search Console, so you can see the searches your site appears for yourself, not only the agency’s summary.

7. A long contract before you’ve seen a plan

SEO takes months, so some commitment is reasonable. Signing up for a year or more before you’ve seen an audit, a plan or a single report is not. Start with a defined piece of work, judge it, then decide.

8. One package for every business

Bronze, silver and gold, each with a fixed number of “keywords”, treats a B&B in Dingle the same as a builder in Tralee. They need completely different work. A good proposal starts with your business, your customers and your competitors. That’s also one of the things Google suggests checking: whether an SEO is genuinely interested in your business.

9. They skip the basics on your doorstep

For a local business, the biggest wins are often the plain ones: a complete Google Business Profile, a clear page for each service, a fast mobile site, consistent details and a steady flow of genuine reviews. If an agency jumps straight to “content strategy” without looking at those first, it isn’t looking at your business.

Questions to ask before you sign

Google suggests asking a potential SEO questions like these:

1. Can you show me examples of your previous work?
2. Do you follow Google’s Search Essentials?
3. What results should I expect, how soon, and how will we measure them?
4. What experience do you have in my industry, and in my area?
5. How will we communicate, and will you tell me about every change you make?

Add two of your own: “Who will own the accounts?” and “What happens if I stop?”

What good SEO looks like for a Kerry business

• Fixing the technical problems that stop Google crawling and understanding your site.
• A Google Business Profile that’s complete, accurate and active.
• Pages that match how people actually search, from locals on their phones to visitors planning a trip.
• Genuine reviews, asked for every time.
• Plain-English reporting on enquiries, not jargon.

Our local SEO checklist covers the basics you can do yourself. If you’d like a second opinion first, a one-off audit gives you a prioritised list of what’s holding your site back, whoever ends up doing the work. Find out more on our SEO services page.