Plenty of agencies promise rankings. Fewer will show you the work plan, the pages they will touch and how you will verify progress yourself.
These five separate agencies that do the work from agencies that mostly do the reporting.
Ask what they will fix in month one and why. A real answer names technical issues and priorities, not a content quota.
Pages written by people who understand your product read differently from filler produced to hit a word count.
You should be able to check rankings, traffic and conversions in your own tools, without waiting for a slide deck.
Search now includes AI-generated responses. Your agency should explain how that changes the job, not pretend nothing changed.
Technical fixes stay and published pages stay. Rankings can drift. Ask what decays on its own and what does not.
A short document listing what gets fixed, what gets written and what gets measured beats any promise about page one.
We treat search as a single system. Discover what your market asks. Diagnose what is blocking you. Optimize the technical base, the content and the references around your brand. Measure what moved.
Traditional rankings still matter, and so do the answers AI systems assemble. You do not need two agencies for two halves of the same journey. You need one team that can explain both in plain language and show the work.
Start with an audit of your own site. You will know within a week whether the agency in front of you is solving real problems or selling activity.