What an SEO agency sells if it can't promise rankings

It sells hours, judgement and a monthly explanation of what those hours did, because the one thing a buyer really wants isn't the agency's to sell. Google's own page on hiring an SEO says it flatly: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."

I find that a lovely business problem. It's like selling gym memberships when the only outcome anyone cares about is decided by a third party, who has also told your customers in writing to beware of anyone promising it.

So what's in the box?

Start with the price and work backwards. Ahrefs polled 439 SEO providers, and the most common monthly retainer was between $501 and $1,000.² The most common hourly rate in the same poll was $75 to $100.²

Divide one by the other and that retainer buys somewhere between five and thirteen hours of someone's month. That's my sum, and the people charging the common retainer aren't necessarily the ones charging the common rate, so it's a rough picture.

Still, it's a useful one. Ten hours isn't a lot of anything.

Where ten agency hours might go in a month, my rough guess

Ahrefs sells SEO tools, so it has a stake here, and it isn't a Malaysian poll. I couldn't find an independent Malaysian survey of retainers at all.

The only ringgit figures I can find come from agencies selling SEO, so hold them loosely. One agency's Malaysian page gives RM3,000 to RM8,000 a month for a small firm, and says plainly that these are benchmarks and not quotes.⁵

Why the report matters more than it should

Here's the awkward bit. The work is paid monthly, and the result may take a very long time to turn up, if it does.

Ahrefs looked at a million random pages and found that only 1.74% of newly published ones reached Google's top ten within a year.⁴ Most of those pages, I'd assume, have no agency behind them, and a cleaner sample gave about 6%, so that isn't a verdict on anybody's work.⁴ It does tell you how long the silence can be.

So what does a client see in month three? Probably not a number one spot. They see a report, and I think that's why the report is half the product.

The agencies seem to feel this. In a survey of 115 agencies, run by another vendor and again not Malaysian, 35 named proving their value as a challenge.³ That's about three in ten, in a trade where the whole point is supposed to be measurable.

How does an honest one stay in business?

The same survey gives the first clue. Half of those agencies, 58 of them, reported net margins of 21% or more, so it can clearly be done.³

The biggest complaint wasn't Google. It was scope creep, named by 59 agencies, which is the survey's way of saying clients want more than the ten hours they bought.³

That makes sense to me. If what you really sell is hours, then every extra favour comes straight out of your margin, and you can't point to a ranking to justify saying no.

So my guess is that the honest ones promise what they control. They'll say what they'll do each month, who's doing it and what changed, and they'll say what they expect and by when without swearing to it. Even the agency page I mentioned above says the same, calling a top spot promised within 30 days a red flag.⁵

The dishonest version is cheaper to sell, and that's the real competition. Google's warning covers more than disappointment: it says aggressive tactics can lower a site's presence in its results, or get it removed.¹ You'd be paying to carry that risk.

What I'd want for the money

If I were hiring one, Google's own page has most of my list. I'd ask what results they expect and over what timeframe, how they measure success, and how they'd tell me about changes to my site.¹

I'd add two of my own:

• Whose hours am I buying, and how many of them?
• If I leave, what do I keep? The pages and the data should stay with me.

Google also says that if an SEO offers an audit, I should give read access to Search Console and not write access.¹ I'd do that even with someone I liked. It costs nothing and it's a rather polite way to find out how they react.

The usual advice is to judge an agency by its case studies. I'd look at them, and I'd look harder at a sample report, because that's the thing I'll be reading every month. The case-study people are right about one thing: someone who's never done it for a business like mine is a risk I'd want priced in.