There are good SEO agencies. There are also a lot of agencies charging enterprise retainers for work that doesn’t connect to revenue. Here’s how to tell which one you have.

Reporting focuses on rankings, not traffic.

Keyword rankings are a proxy metric. Traffic to the right pages, from the right queries, converting at a reasonable rate, is the actual goal. If your monthly reports are full of rank position screenshots but light on traffic trends and conversion data, someone is obscuring the real picture.

The technical audit happened once and never got revisited.

Technical SEO isn’t a one-time project. Sites change. Crawl issues resurface. New pages get launched with structural problems. If your agency did a big audit in month one and hasn’t revisited the site’s infrastructure since, they’re not maintaining what they built.

Link building is pitched as the main driver.

Links matter. But low-quality link acquisition at scale is a liability, not an asset. If your agency is excited about the volume of links they’re generating and vague about their sources and editorial quality, that’s worth pressing on.

You can’t get a clear answer about what they’re actually doing.

Good search work is explainable. If your agency can’t walk you through their current priorities and the reasoning behind them in plain language, something is off. Vague language about “building authority” and “improving signals” without specific actions attached is a red flag.

Traffic is up but leads aren’t.

This one’s subtle but important. If organic traffic is climbing but pipeline contribution from organic isn’t moving, the content strategy is probably attracting the wrong audience. More pageviews from people who will never buy is not a win, and it’s easy to hide behind in reporting.

Good agencies tie their work to business outcomes. If yours doesn’t, it might be time to ask harder questions, or to look at what a more accountable arrangement could look like.