SEO Promises That Should End the Meeting

Most bad SEO is not sold by crooks. It is sold by decent salespeople repeating things they were trained to say, to owners who have no way of checking them. The pitch works because the promises sound like exactly what you want: a number one ranking, an inside line to Google, a mountain of backlinks, all for a fixed monthly fee.

You do not need to become technical to spot the bad ones. You need to know what each promise would require someone to actually do, and then ask whether that is possible. Here are the ones that should make you close the laptop, and the questions that get you there quickly.

"Guaranteed number one on Google"

Start with the one Google itself warns about. Google publishes a page in its own Search Central documentation about hiring an SEO, and it says plainly that no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and that you should be wary of anyone who claims a special relationship with Google or priority submission. That is not my opinion or an industry rumour. It is the platform's own written guidance, free to read.

The mechanical reason is simple. Rankings are not a setting anyone can adjust. They are the output of a system that re-evaluates results constantly, against competitors who are also working, for queries whose results now vary by location, by device, by the user's history, and by whether Google decides to show an AI-generated answer at the top that day. Two people on the same street can search the same words and see different orders. There is no single "position one" to guarantee.

There is a second, sneakier version of this promise. The agency guarantees rankings — but on keywords they choose after signing. Six months later you get a report showing position one for "affordable modular kitchen manufacturer in Laxmi Nagar East Delhi", a phrase nobody has ever typed. The guarantee was met. The phone did not ring.

The question to ask: "Which exact phrases, agreed in writing before we start, and what is the search volume for each?" If the phrases are decided later, the guarantee is decoration.

"We have contacts inside Google"

This one is worth separating into what is true and what is not, because the half-truth is what makes it convincing.

What is true: Google Ads has real account representatives. If you spend enough on ads, someone from Google may genuinely call you, and agencies do have partner-level relationships on the advertising side. That is a commercial relationship around a product you are paying for.

What is not true: that any of this touches organic search. Google states in its documentation that it does not accept payment to crawl a site more often or to rank it higher, and that paid and organic results are separate systems. An Ads rep cannot lift your website up the unpaid listings. Nobody can ring a friend and have your page moved.

The same logic applies to "we can get you indexed instantly through our contacts". Submitting a page to Google is free and takes about thirty seconds through Search Console's URL Inspection tool, which any owner can open themselves. Charging for it, or dressing it up as privileged access, tells you what the rest of the relationship will look like.

The question to ask: "Is that contact on the Ads side or the organic side?" Watch what happens to the answer.

"Five thousand backlinks in ninety days"

Volume promises about links are a pricing decision dressed as a strategy. Links that can be produced in bulk are, by definition, links anyone can produce in bulk — directory submissions, comment drops, profile pages on forums nobody reads, network blogs that exist only to sell links. The cost of creating them is near zero, which is precisely why they are worth near zero.

Google's spam policies publicly describe link schemes — buying links, excessive exchanges, large-scale automated link building — as a violation. That is documented, not folklore. The practical risk is not usually a dramatic penalty; it is more often that the links simply do nothing, and you have paid a year's fees for a spreadsheet of URLs.

There is a tell in how these are reported. Ask for the list. If it arrives as a thousand rows of domains you have never heard of, half of them with names like directory-listing-india-24.info, you are looking at output that was generated, not earned. Twenty links from suppliers, trade bodies, local press and genuine partners will do more, and they take real work. We have written separately about why one relevant backlink beats fifty bought ones.

Things an agency could sell you that I would not buy

These are not scams. They are billable activities that quietly fill a retainer while the needle stays still — and yes, they are things agencies including ours could happily invoice for.

• Bulk directory submissions. Getting your business on Google Business Profile, Justdial, IndiaMART and your trade association matters. Being on four hundred directories does not. The first ten are the value.
• A blog post a week, on autopilot. Four thin articles a month written by someone who has never spoken to your sales team is filler. One page that answers the question your customers actually ask before buying is worth more than a year of it.
• "Domain Authority" as the headline metric. That is a third-party score invented by an SEO tools company, not a Google metric. It is a rough estimate. It is not what you are being ranked on, and it makes a convenient number to show going up.
• Automated audits as a deliverable. A 90-page PDF from a crawling tool takes four minutes to produce. The value is in someone deciding which six of those 400 issues matter. If nobody has prioritised it, it is a printout, not a plan.
• Guaranteed placement in AI answers. This is the newest one and the most honest thing to say about it is that nobody knows. How ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews choose what to cite is not publicly documented in any detail, changes frequently, and is not queryable the way rankings are. There are sensible things to do about being visible in AI search — clear answers, structured data, being cited by sources those systems already trust. Guarantees are not among them.

What an honest proposal looks like instead

A proposal you can trust is usually less exciting to read. It talks about work, not outcomes. Some markers:

• It names deliverables, not results. "We will rewrite these eleven pages, fix the mobile checkout, and build three location pages" is a promise someone can be held to. "We will improve your rankings" is not.
• It tells you what is wrong before you pay. Not a tool dump — a short, specific list. If your product pages take nine seconds to load on a 4G phone, that should be in the first conversation.
• It measures enquiries, not positions. Rankings are a means. The reportable outcome is calls, forms, WhatsApp messages and walk-ins. If the agency does not ask how you currently track those, they are not planning to be judged on them.
• It says what it cannot do. An agency that tells you your category is dominated by aggregators and organic will be slow going, so spend the first three months on local search and the site itself, is being more useful than one promising the moon.
• It has a notice period you can actually use. Twelve-month lock-ins with guaranteed rankings attached are a structure designed so you cannot leave during the period when nothing is happening. Three months is enough to see whether work is being done.

The five-minute test before you sign

You do not need to audit anyone. Ask four things and listen to the shape of the answers.

1. "Show me the last three months of work for a client at my budget — the actual pages and links, not the report."
2. "What will you need from me, and how often?" Real SEO needs your product knowledge, your pricing logic, your photos. An agency that says "nothing, we handle it all" is planning to produce work that could be for anyone.
3. "Who owns the Search Console, Analytics and Google Business Profile accounts?" The answer must be you. If they are created under the agency's email, leaving costs you your history.
4. "What would make you tell me to stop spending on this?" Anyone who cannot name a scenario is selling, not advising.

The pattern across all of it: honest SEO sounds like a list of jobs, and dishonest SEO sounds like a promise. The jobs are dull — fix the site, write the pages people actually search for, earn a handful of real mentions, keep the site fast and working on phones, answer enquiries quickly. Dull is the point.

What to do next

If you have a proposal on your desk right now, take it and mark every sentence that promises a result rather than a task. If most of the page is marked, you have your answer. If you are already six months into a retainer and unsure what you have bought, ask for the list of pages published and links earned in that period — that single request usually settles it.

If you would like a second opinion on a proposal, or a straight account of what your site would actually need, get in touch and tell us what you have been promised. We will tell you which parts are possible.

Questions we get asked