The SEO industry has a reputation problem, and it has largely earned it. There is a long history of agencies and consultants selling work that ranges from ineffective to actively harmful — creating technical debt, low-quality link profiles, and thin content that takes years to clean up. After 14 years doing this work, I have a clear list of things that should make you pause and ask hard questions before signing an agreement or clicking publish.

Red Flag: Guaranteed Rankings

Nobody can guarantee search rankings. Google controls the algorithm, and it changes. An agency that guarantees you will rank on page one for specific keywords within a specific timeframe is either lying or planning to use tactics that will eventually create a penalty. Legitimate SEO produces results, but those results are probabilistic and depend on factors that no consultant fully controls — competitor behavior, algorithm updates, domain history. What a credible practitioner can promise is a clear process, honest benchmarking, and accountability to measurable leading indicators. Promised ranking outcomes are a sales tactic. Walk away.

Red Flag: Vague Deliverables and Disconnected Reporting

If you cannot get a specific answer to ‘what exactly will you do each month and how will I know if it is working,’ that is a problem. Some agencies survive on reporting decks full of impressions and traffic trend lines that never connect to business outcomes, while collecting retainers for work that is difficult to evaluate. Before signing, ask specifically: what pages will be created and why, what links will be pursued and through what methods, what technical work is planned, and what does success look like at six months and twelve months? Vague answers protect the agency’s accountability, not your investment. Understanding how to measure SEO success makes it much harder to be misled by fluffy reporting.

Red Flag: Pricing That Does Not Reflect Real Work

SEO done correctly requires substantive work: keyword and competitive research, content strategy, technical analysis, writer coordination and editing, outreach, and ongoing measurement. Agencies charging $200 to $400 a month for ‘full SEO services’ are either doing almost nothing, outsourcing to content mills producing thin low-quality text, or building links through methods that create future liability. I charge $500 an hour for strategy consulting and $1,500 for a comprehensive website audit — those prices reflect the depth of analysis required to do the work honestly. Pricing far below what real work costs is a sign that something is being cut somewhere you cannot see yet.

Red Flag: Link Schemes and Opaque Link Acquisition

Links still carry meaningful weight in SEO. But the methods used to earn them determine whether they help or hurt. Private blog networks, undisclosed paid link placements, bulk comment spam, and mass irrelevant directory submissions are tactics Google has been actively penalizing for years. The broader breakdown of white hat vs black hat SEO explains why the line matters and what legitimate link acquisition actually looks like. If an agency promises ‘X links per month delivered’ as a standard deliverable without explaining the editorial process behind each link, ask. Legitimate link acquisition is slow, relationship-based, or content-driven. It requires real outreach and real value exchange. If the explanation for how links are earned is vague or defensive, that tells you what you need to know.

Red Flag: Volume-Based Content Promises

A promise of 20 blog posts a month for a flat rate is a promise of thin content. Google has been progressively downgrading content it classifies as unhelpful — written primarily to populate a topical cluster or hit keyword targets rather than to genuinely serve the reader. Flooding a site with shallow pages can actively suppress rankings over time, particularly after Helpful Content system updates. The right question is never ‘how many pages can we publish?’ It is ‘which pages will genuinely answer these specific queries better than existing results?’ Depth and specificity outperform volume in modern SEO, and any program that leads with volume as a selling point is misaligned with how Google currently evaluates content. The keyword research post explains how to identify which pages are actually worth building.

Red Flag: Keyword Stuffing and On-Page Over-Optimization

If someone recommends forcing a target keyword into every heading, inserting it in image alt text whether or not it is descriptive, and repeating it to hit a specific ‘keyword density,’ they are working from a playbook that was outdated before 2015. Modern Google uses semantic understanding of content — it evaluates meaning and relevance, not term frequency. Pages that over-optimize for specific phrases read unnaturally, and the algorithm is sophisticated enough to recognize mechanical keyword insertion as a manipulation signal rather than a quality indicator. Good on-page SEO makes a page clearer and more useful. It does not make it sound like a legal contract drafted by a robot.

Red Flag: No Discussion of Your Business Before Proposing a Solution

A legitimate SEO consulting engagement starts with understanding the business: who you serve, what problem you solve, what a customer is worth, what your competitive position looks like, what your current conversion rate is. An agency that leads with ‘we will get you to position one’ without asking any of those questions is selling a generic service they run for every client. The guide on when to hire an SEO consultant covers the right evaluation process — including the questions you should be asking before any engagement starts. The tactics will be the same regardless of your situation, and the results will be correspondingly generic. Strategy requires context. If the discovery conversation is shallow or skipped entirely, the strategy will be too.

Red Flag: Methodology Treated as a Trade Secret

You should be able to understand — at least at a high level — what is being done on your site and why. Good SEO practitioners want clients to understand the work because informed clients collaborate better, have more realistic expectations, and make better decisions about their own content and technical choices. An agency that gets defensive when asked to explain the methodology, or treats the specifics of what they do as proprietary information they cannot share, is protecting something. Usually it is protecting tactics that would not survive scrutiny.

Red Flag: Recommendations Without Auditing First

Any agency that quotes a program and price before conducting a thorough audit of your current site is guessing. The strategy, budget, and timeline for an SEO program are directly shaped by what already exists: the domain’s current authority, existing content that can be improved rather than replaced, technical problems that must be fixed before rankings are possible, and competitive gaps that are actually achievable. Without that audit, any proposal is speculative. At Salterra we start every new engagement with an audit for this reason — there is no honest alternative.

If you want a second opinion on work you are already paying for, or want to understand what a legitimate engagement should look like, the SEO consulting page is a reasonable starting point.