I spent most of a decade inside big agencies — Sydney first, then Los Angeles — before starting Glassy, the last stretch of it as an SEO director watching monthly retainers climb while the actual work getting done quietly shrank. Nobody on the client side could tell, because the reports looked busy and the account manager was charming. I do not say that to be dramatic — it is just the ordinary failure mode of this industry, and it is worth understanding before you sign anything.
So this is a genuinely awkward post to write, because I am telling you how to evaluate agencies including, implicitly, mine. I would rather you pick correctly and it not be us than pick badly and it be us.
Red flags that should end the meeting
- Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google's algorithm, including Google's own engineers on a bad day. Any agency promising a specific ranking position by a specific date is either lying or planning to manipulate short-term signals in a way that gets you penalized later. Ask what happens contractually if the guarantee is not met — the answer is usually nothing.
- "We have a relationship with Google." There is no back channel. Google Partners status means an agency passed a certification quiz and manages ad spend, not that anyone picks up the phone for them. This claim alone tells you the person does not understand how search works, or is betting you don't.
- Secret sauce and proprietary algorithms. SEO is not a secret. The fundamentals — crawlability, relevance, authority, user experience — are publicly documented, discussed constantly, and the same for every legitimate practitioner. Anyone selling you a proprietary method they cannot describe is selling you the absence of a method.
- Long lock-in contracts. A twelve-month contract with an early-termination penalty exists to protect the agency from you leaving once you notice nothing is happening. Good work does not need a cage.
- Reports nobody can read. If your monthly report is forty pages of charts with no plain-English summary of what actually happened and what happens next, that density is often doing a job — hiding the fact that not much changed.
- Link packages sold by volume."50 links a month" or "Domain Authority 40+ guaranteed" is a strong signal of a private blog network or paid link farm, which violates Google's guidelines and can get a site manually penalized. Quality link building cannot be sold by the unit because it depends entirely on what is actually earned.
Green flags worth paying for
- They show you the actual work. Not a dashboard screenshot — the specific pages changed, the specific content published, the specific technical fixes shipped, with enough detail that you could hand it to a different agency and they would understand exactly what state the site is in.
- They explain trade-offs instead of certainties. "We could go after this keyword, but it's a eighteen-month play against entrenched competitors — here's a faster win instead" is what an honest strategist sounds like. Certainty is the tell, not the reassurance.
- Month-to-month, with confidence. An agency willing to let you leave anytime is telling you it expects to earn the relationship every month, which is the incentive structure you actually want.
- Honest timelines. Real organic growth for a competitive query typically takes six to twelve months, sometimes longer for genuinely hard categories. Anyone promising faster either has an unusually easy market or is not being straight with you.
- Willing to say "you don't need this." The best conversations I have with prospective clients sometimes end with me telling them their money is better spent elsewhere — their GBP just needs cleanup, not a six-month content engagement, or their site is fine and the real problem is their sales process. An agency that never says this is optimizing for your contract, not your business.
The pricing conversation nobody has honestly
Retainers for a real SEO engagement in a mid-sized market like Orange County generally land somewhere between fifteen hundred and ten thousand dollars a month, depending on competitiveness and scope — a single-location home services business fighting for a handful of local terms sits at one end, a multi-location or B2B company chasing national keywords sits at the other. Anyone quoting three hundred dollars a month is not doing meaningful work at that price; the math does not survive contact with a real hourly rate. Anyone quoting twenty thousand a month without being able to explain specifically what that buys is pricing off your fear, not their cost structure. Ask an agency to break down roughly how the retainer splits across strategy, execution, content, and reporting. If they cannot, they probably have not thought about it either, which means neither has their staffing.
Why I actually left
The specific moment was a client renewal call where my job was to keep a wildfire-damaged relationship alive for another quarter, not because we had a plan to fix what was actually wrong with the account, but because the retainer was propping up a chunk of the team's headcount. I was good at that call. I did not want to be good at that call. I quit the next morning after a dawn patrol session that had nothing to do with work and everything to do with finally being awake enough to admit the job had quietly become about retention math instead of results. Glassy exists because I wanted to find out whether an agency could stay small enough that the retention math and the results math were forced to be the same equation. Four years in, most months, they still are.
Questions to ask in the first call
- Who exactly does the work? Get names. Is it the person on this call, a specialist team, or an offshore subcontractor you will never speak to? There is nothing wrong with a lean team using contractors, but you should know who is actually touching your site and whether that person will be reachable when something breaks.
- Can I see an anonymized report from a real client? Not a case study PDF — an actual monthly report, redacted. This tells you more about reporting quality than any sales deck.
- What happens in month one, specifically? A vague answer ("we'll do an audit and get started") is worse than a concrete one ("full technical crawl, Search Console review, prioritized fix list delivered by day twenty").
- What would make you fire me as a client? A good agency has boundaries — unrealistic expectations, refusal to make recommended site changes, or asking for manipulative tactics. If they say "nothing, the customer is always right," that is itself a red flag.
- How do you measure success beyond rankings? Rankings for their own sake are vanity. Leads, calls, bookings, and revenue are the actual point. An agency should be able to connect the work to at least one of those.
What we actually do differently, for what it's worth
Everything above is basically our operating manual. Month-to-month, the person doing your audit answers your email, and our reports are built to be read in four minutes by a busy owner, not skimmed by a marketing team. You can see the pattern across our case studies — the work described is specific because specificity is the whole point of this post. If a twenty-minute call would help you figure out whether you actually need an agency right now, that is a conversation we are happy to have even if the honest answer turns out to be no.