One of the risks of hiring an SEO agency is that it’s easy for the relationship to become very one-sided. After all, in most cases you’ll be hiring the agency because you don’t have the relevant skills in-house, and there’s nothing wrong with this. But when it comes to a discipline that’s as prone to abuse as SEO is, it’s important that you’re aware of the warning signs that should prompt you to tighten the leash.

You also need to know what to do next - how to respond if you suspect that the agency that you’ve hired is not acting in good faith.

So what are the classic warning signs that your agency is letting you down?

1.      They won’t provide you with locations of links they have produced

Using links as a metric for SEO is problematic even at the best of times, and if your agency is claiming to be creating links for you - but is unwilling to tell you the locations of all of them (rather than a “representative” handful) - you may have a major problem.

Google can, and will, actively penalise you for a poor quality link profile. This type of activity can produce SEO benefits in the very short term, but will not escape detection in the long term.

You can download a list of sample links from your webmaster tools account, or even find examples by using the ‘links’ advanced search function. A good starting point is considering whether or not you could expect a link to bring actual human traffic to your site.

2.      Directory links

One thing in particular to watch out for is directory links, unless from a very high quality and relevant directory such as DMOZ. Submitting to large numbers of low quality directories used to be a common link building tactic, but it certainly shouldn’t be a major part of any current SEO strategy. The same goes for poor quality guest articles and un-newsworthy PR releases.

3.      Re-spun content

If an agency is producing content on your behalf, you need to ensure that it’s entirely original and not just a re-written version of content from elsewhere from the internet. Duplication is a major negative in the eyes of search engines and they are very good at spotting similarities between content.

You can check the originality of a piece by searching for excerpts. Just keep in mind that originally produced, carefully researched content is very expensive to produce in comparison.

4.      Suspiciously quick turnaround

Especially with offsite SEO, a quick turnaround time is often a warning sign rather than a selling point. Of course sometimes circumstances just come together in your favour, but if your agency is promising you quality links within a time frame of less than a month, you need to be very suspicious of how they’re getting them.

"The easiest warning sign of all is the agency that explicitly advertises unethical SEO service"

5.      Implausibly low pricing

Good quality SEO work, especially off site SEO is an expensive, time consuming process - if the price tag sounds too good to be true then it almost certainly is. Unfortunately SEO doesn’t scale well to small businesses. If you can’t afford to pay for good quality SEO work, then a budget equivalent shouldn’t be your next port of call. Below a certain price point, quality SEO doesn’t really exist.

You pay for the SEO you get. Scrimp on price and things might not go to plan

6.      Promises about ranking gains

Organic SEO is a zero sum game: if you go up, someone else goes down. This means that SEO is always at least partially reliant on what other people are doing.

Add to the fact that good SEO is a time consuming and long term proposition, and the net result is that you should be very wary of anyone making big promises with regard to ranking gains.

Think of it as running a marathon - quickly overtaking the charity runners dressed as comedy animals is a very different prospect to finishing in first place.

Beyond this, from a general standpoint it’s not a good idea to get distracted by easy to measure metrics such as ranking, compared to more useful ones such as revenue and conversions.

7.      Dubious reporting

Be absolutely sure that you know what any numbers and metrics mean. Where ROI is critical, making sure that you are clear on exactly what is being claimed can save you a lot of money.

Don’t be too hasty to attribute irregularities to dishonesty, as reporting mistakes will happen occasionally even in well-run SEO campaigns, but it’s in everyone’s interest that they get spotted. If you are regularly spotting mistakes that your SEO company is overlooking, then it’s obviously another red flag.

8.      Trying to restrict your access to reporting tools and accounts

Your SEO agency will need access to important web tools such as Google Analytics and webmaster tools, but that does not mean you should hand over the keys to them. You should allow their nominated Google account access to make changes to account settings as required, but you shouldn’t allow them to control the account itself.

Where possible, you should be doing the same with any social accounts or on domain email accounts that they need access to.

Be very wary of implementing any on-site changes recommended by an SEO agency without first having them reviewed by your web team, in particular look very carefully at any JavaScript or complicated code, or embedded links to make sure they are performing as advertised.

9.      Failure to pick up on problems

If something goes wrong and your SEO team fails to pick up on it in a reasonable period of time, it’s a strong indication that they aren’t paying much attention to your account. This could be a search penalty for a significant on-site SEO issue that has gone unnoticed for a long time.

Google webmaster tools offers warnings of a wide variety of issues, and a competent SEO practitioner should have alerts set up to warn them of this kind of issue.

10.  Offering black hat services

Of course the easiest warning sign of all is the agency that explicitly advertises unethical SEO services.

Any suggestion that you should purchase links, pay for articles or guest blog submissions, fabricate online reviews or social account activity can be treated not so much as a red flag but a skull and crossbones.

Taking your leave…

None of this is to suggest that you should leave your SEO agency at the slightest sign of problems, as with any business relationship many problems can be resolved with a little dialogue. But if worst comes to worst, and you part ways with an SEO agency under any circumstances, you should immediately ensure that you’ve removed their access to, and reset the passwords of any of your accounts that they’ve had access to.

You are protecting yourself from (the very unlikely) possibility of reprisal from the SEO company, and you are protecting the SEO company from any liability that might arise from access to a client that no longer generates revenue, or may indeed no longer even be covered by their insurance.

Matt Leach is an online marketing executive at Circus Street.