Ask for the audit before you agree a retainer

Before you commit to a monthly SEO fee, ask for something smaller: an audit of your own site. It is the most reliable test of a provider that I know of, because it forces them to say something specific about your pages before they have been paid to do anything.

Why an audit first

A proposal written without looking at your site is a template with your name on it. An audit shows whether the provider can find real issues, explain them in plain language and rank them by importance. You will learn more from one audit than from three presentations.

It also gives you a document that can be compared. If two providers audit the same site, you can set their findings side by side and see which is more specific, which found something the other missed, and which explained why it matters.

What access to give

An audit does not need much access. Google's guidance on hiring an SEO says that if an SEO offers an audit, you should grant only read access to Search Console, and not write access, at that stage. That advice sits in Google Search Central.

Search Console describes its own permission levels. An Owner has full control and can add and remove users. A Full user can take most actions but cannot manage users. A Restricted user has simple view rights on most data, and only owners can add or remove users, as the Search Console permissions page explains. The Restricted level is the closest match to the read access Google describes. You keep the Owner role.

What a good audit looks like

• It names specific pages and says what is wrong with each.
• It separates technical issues from content and from links.
• It says what should be done first and why, and what can wait.
• It states what the provider could not check, and why.

Be cautious of an audit that is mostly a generic report with your domain name at the top, or one that ends in a price before it ends in findings.

Keep the audit separate from the contract

Some providers include the audit in a retainer. That is fine if the audit comes first and you can stop after it. If you cannot, you are paying for the retainer before you have seen the quality of the thinking. The checklist for the rest of the proposal is in what an SEO proposal should contain, and the access guidance is in what access to give an SEO agency.

A disclosure

This site is published by Web Marketing International FZCO, which offers a free SEO audit. Treat it like any other provider's audit: read it, compare it with the others, and score it in the SEO proposal scorecard.