You have spent thousands of dollars on SEO. Invoices are sent out every month on time. Yet your rankings are not improving, traffic isn’t growing, and nobody gives you a reason for why that is happening. Before signing up again for another year, take a look at these seven red flags.

Monthly reports in PDFs full of generic numbers mean nothing if there is no proof of their direct correlation with the outcome of your business. Numbers about traffic mean nothing without knowledge about conversions. Rankings of keywords are useful if they have some commercial meaning; ranking first for “what is SEO” won’t fill the pipeline as well as ranking first for “SEO services Boston.”

Red flag: Reports that show data on impressions, clicks, and bounce rates but lack any information on leads, phone calls, or revenue. If the company cannot prove any connection between its work and your revenue, then it optimises its work for its dashboard and not for your growth. Unfortunately, such cases happen often in the industry, and clients lose money every year.

No Communication Beyond Invoice Reminders

It is important that you get constant updates from your SEO company about all actions, their efficiency, and obstacles. It is wrong not to communicate with each other during billing cycles since it means working out of sync and problems may remain undetected till some penalties arise.

Warning sign: All communications happen only at billing periods. No proactive discussions of strategy, no update after any changes in the algorithms impacting your ranking, and no discussion of obstacles. A good partner involves you into the process as an investor rather than just another payment source.

Keyword Stuffing and Obvious On-Page Spam

Google retaliates against any manipulative practice. Whenever meta tag, header, or body content of a website is found to be written for machines rather than humans, it stands the risk of facing penalization. Keyword stuffing inside the anchor text, hiding text using white color font, and phrase repetitions are some examples of black hat techniques.

The warning signs include robotic writing style, ten or more keyword-stuffed titles of web pages, and long meta descriptions. Any of these actions can result in demotion by the search engine algorithms that can take several months to fix.

Backlinks From Low-Quality or Irrelevant Sites

Links remain important for rankings, but quality is better than quantity. Google considers links coming from spam directories, link farms, and even different industries to be suspicious. Buying a lot of links from the so-called “link marketplaces” often turns out to be a mistake as these links lose their value.

Warning sign: Link profiles that show hundreds of new backlinks from sites with low domain authority score or irrelevant niche, as well as from different countries, which are not the target audience. Link building should be done step by step.

Refusal to Share Access or Ownership Details

You need to keep full administrative control over your Google Search Console, analytics software, and any third party applications used during the course of your campaign. Your contracts need to explicitly state that all content, domain assets, and link profile belong to you not the agency.

Red flag: The agency denies you account access, uses their proprietary dashboards to manage everything, or includes clauses in the contract that allow them to retain ownership of all deliverables. This results in vendor lock-in, which makes switching providers difficult because of the loss of SEO equity.

Missing Documentation of Strategy and Actions Taken

In any professional SEO project, there are documents used to support the strategy, which will state how recommendations were derived, documents used to indicate the changes implemented, and performance documentation, which shows the impact of those changes.

Warning sign: There are no documents for the project. Recommendations are relayed through a text message or a discussion and there is no document for that. In case there is need to see technical or published documents, the agency cannot provide any organized document.

Guaranteed Rankings or Impossible Timelines

This is the most obvious indicator. No professional SEO agency can assure definite placement by particular dates since Google manages its algorithms, competition keeps changing, and so does the users’ behavior. If someone guarantees a first page placement in thirty days, they are literally offering to cheat.

As written by Google in their recruitment manual: “Nobody can guarantee a #1 position on Google”. The Federal Trade Commission views guaranteed SEO services as a fraudulent business practice and suggests the victims to report to consumer protection authorities.

If you got scammed by an SEO company that provides guaranteed rankings, you need to complain to the FTC. The website that ranks websites recognises the prevalence of SEO scams as being enough for federal regulation. Read our full investigation on why some SEO companies are called scam artists to understand the patterns behind these guarantees.