Google’s guide to hiring an SEO puts the risk on you: whatever the company you bring in does to your site, you answer for it. So the agency you want is one whose claims trace back to a source and whose work you can see and keep. This guide shows B2B SaaS teams how to spot one, whether it’s a first agency or a replacement.
Copy the checklist below into one document per agency, and use the scorecard near the end to compare them.
The SEO company checklist
1. Before the first call
Check whether your team can ship site changes within a week
Name who owns the search plan, if anyone does
Pick the business metric you’ll judge the agency on
2. On the first call
Get the names of the people who’ll work on your account each week
Check whether SEO is their main service
Ask what they’d fix first, and what can wait
Pin down expected results, with dates and the metric behind them
Find out what happens in months two and three
Request a dated case study from a company like yours, plus a reference
Confirm they’ll log every change, with the reason for each
Have them name the Google documentation behind their AI search advice
3. Red flags
Rule out any finalist that raises one of the seven red flags below
4. Before you sign
Call the reference they named
Confirm you own every account, and the agency gets user roles
Get a 90-day plan with a visible result at each stage
Read the minimum term, notice period, and exit terms
Rate every finalist on the same scorecard
Agency, consultant, or in-house hire?
Two facts about your own team narrow the choice: how quickly a fix can go live, and whether someone on staff already sets search priorities.
Two facts about your team decide the type of hire: how fast you ship, and who owns the plan.
Which hire fits your team
Ships changes within a week
Someone owns the plan
What fits
What it adds
Yes
Yes
A freelancer for scoped projects
Extra hours, if you need help at all
Yes
No
A senior consultant
A plan, plus training for your team
No
Yes
An agency or a freelancer for execution
Capacity your team lacks
No
No
An agency
A plan and the people to carry it out
An in-house hire fits when search will be a core channel for years. O*NET puts the 2025 median annual wage at $78,760 for the occupation that covers search marketing strategists. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data on Employer Costs for Employee Compensation shows wages at 68.5% of the total for full-time private-industry workers in June 2026, with benefits making up the rest. Assuming your company matches that ratio, a median hire’s wages and benefits come to about $115,000 a year. That figure is the O*NET median divided by 0.685.
Before the first call, choose the number you’ll judge the work on. For a B2B SaaS team, that could be demo requests from organic search. Have Google Analytics record each demo form submission, and mark it as a key event. Once you have a full month of data, that count becomes the baseline for every proposal.
Nobody owns your search plan yet? That is the gap our SEO consulting fills. In week four, a senior consultant walks your team through a ranked 90-day roadmap. After that we meet every week, leading the strategy and reviewing your team’s work, or doing the work ourselves if there is no one to do it.
Questions to ask before you pick an SEO company
Ask these on the first call, and get the answers in writing. Three come from Google’s own list of questions to ask an SEO. The rest test what a pitch can hide.
Seven questions to ask, with strong and weak answers
Question
Strong answer
Weak answer
Who will run our account each week, and can we meet them first?
Named SEO specialists, their weekly hours, and a call before signing
“Our team,” or a senior person who only joins the pitch
What would you fix first, and what can wait?
A ranked diagnosis of your site, with reasons for what waits
A package priced before anyone has looked at your site
What results do you expect, by when, and how will you measure them?
Ranges tied to your business metric, with early signals reported separately
Rankings and traffic with no link to demos
What happens in months two and three?
Monthly deliverables, reviewed against your baseline
A detailed onboarding plan, then “ongoing optimization”
Can we see a dated case study from a company like ours, and call the client?
Start and end numbers with dates, plus a reference
Percentages with no baseline, or logos only
Will you log every change you make, and why?
A change log or tickets with reasons
“Our methods are proprietary”
Which Google documentation supports your AI search advice?
Google’s guidance, with impressions tracked in Search Console’s generative AI report
Ask each agency whether SEO is its main service. SE Ranking and Duda’s December 2024 pricing survey drew on 260 agencies, mostly smaller firms. About 93% offered SEO alongside other services. Only 7% did SEO alone.
The change-log question matters because the log is your record of what was done to the site in your name.
Want to put these questions to us? Ask them on our intro call. It’s free, it takes 30 minutes, and the senior consultant you speak with will have looked at your site beforehand. Book your intro call.
Red flags that rule an agency out
Treat any one of these as disqualifying.
Any one of these rules an agency out. The check beside each takes a single question.
Google suggests reporting a deceptive SEO firm, and in the US, the Federal Trade Commission handles those complaints.
What should you own, and what goes in the contract?
Keep every account in your company’s name. Google’s tools separate owners from users, which means the agency doesn’t need to control your accounts to do its work.
A manager-account link without ownership. Ownership would let their admins edit your users
Domain registrar and DNS
The login, under a company email
None. Your team makes the DNS changes they request
When the engagement ends, remove their users everywhere. In Search Console, also delete any verification token they added, since a former owner can re-verify while it stays.
The contract should cover:
The minimum term and the notice period
Copyright in all content, code, and reports, assigned to your company
A list of every link they built, with the contact behind it
In the US, paying for content doesn’t make you its copyright owner. For commissioned work to count as made for hire, the US Copyright Office says it must fit one of nine categories and be covered by a signed agreement saying so.
At Mission SEO, we agree scope and price up front, and every engagement starts with an audit and a roadmap.
What does an SEO company cost?
SE Ranking and Duda’s survey also found the monthly retainer was the most popular pricing model, preferred by 53% of agencies over every other option. Overall, 64% of agencies offered retainers under $1,000 a month. Among agencies with 25 or more employees, over 70% charged more than that.
Share of agencies charging over $2,000 a month, by region.
Nearly every agency surveyed, 94%, served small or local businesses. Only 15% served SaaS companies. The authors also note the sample may be too small for statistical significance. Surveys like this one mostly sample small agencies, so they read low for large sites: our guide to how much enterprise SEO costs prices each buying model from public contracts and wage data.
For a B2B SaaS program, compare finalists on written scope: who does the work, and what ships each month.
Comparing written scopes? Ask for ours. You get a ranked plan that gives every item an owner and a date, and for SaaS teams, our SEO for B2B SaaS program judges each page by the signups, demos, and pipeline it brings, in one live dashboard.
How to compare SEO companies with a scorecard
Judge each finalist against six criteria, and fix the weights before you meet any agency. US federal rules for negotiated contracts require buyers to publish each factor’s relative importance before proposals arrive, including how quality weighs against price.
The weighted scorecard
Criterion
Weight
What a 5 looks like
The team
5
Named specialists you’ve met, with their weekly hours in the proposal
The diagnosis
4
Priorities ranked for your site, each with its reason
The plan
4
Deliverables for each of the first three months, tied to your metric
The evidence
3
Dated results, confirmed on a call with a client like you
The transparency
2
A change log with reasons, and AI advice tied to Google’s guidance
The terms
2
Accounts and copyright in your name, with a notice period you accept
Rate each criterion from 1 to 5, multiply by its weight, and add the results. The maximum is 100.
Next steps
Set one deadline for all proposals, then score them in a single sitting. To add Mission SEO to your shortlist, book a free 30-minute call. We review your site and its AI visibility before the call and end it with the first three fixes we’d make. If we’re a fit, a proposal follows, and its plan is one you can use whether or not you hire us.
Frequently asked questions
How long does SEO take to show results?
Google says some changes can show up within hours and others may take several months. It suggests waiting a few weeks before judging a change. Our estimate at Mission SEO is that pages targeting searches close to a buying decision can start bringing B2B SaaS demos within three to four months. For category-wide authority, we plan on six to twelve months.
How do you switch SEO agencies without losing data?
Start before you give notice. Search Console shows only the last 16 months of performance data. Its bulk export to BigQuery can keep more, beginning up to 48 hours after you set it up. Only owners can add a disavow list, and each new one replaces the last. Check whether the outgoing agency left one, and review it with your new team.
Do you need a separate agency for AI search?
Not for Google’s AI features. They draw on the same core ranking systems as regular search, which makes optimizing for them still SEO. OpenAI says sites that block its OAI-SearchBot crawler won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers, except as navigational links. Before paying extra, ask the agency to tie its visibility figures to your Search Console data. Our guides to how to rank in AI Overviews and answer engine optimization best practices cover what that work involves.
Disclaimer: This guide offers general information only. Have a lawyer review any agency contract before you sign. Sources were last verified in October 2026.
We’re a B2B SEO and AEO agency. Book a free 30-minute call with a senior consultant: we look at your site before we talk, so you leave knowing what to fix first.
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