Looking for SEO or Digital PR Services? Watch out for these Red Flags

For business owners it can be scary to take a leap of faith and invest resources into any form of external marketing. The key thing you want to establish is that you’re going to get value for money and some form of return on your investment. In the world of SEO and digital PR it can be confusing for clients to understand what is reasonable to expect from your digital marketing strategy. Any good freelancer or agency should be accountable for communicating what success looks like, ensuring you have the right context in your reporting to understand key growth markers.

Unfortunately in our industry there are some less trusted marketers who won’t be transparent about their ability, deliverability of results or methods in general. After working in this industry for over a decade, I’ve heard many stories and seen strategies in action which didn’t align with the standards I would personally offer clients. To help, I’ve put together my guide on red flags that should be considered when you look for a reputable digital PR or SEO partner.

SEO Red Flags

1. No KPIs or markers of success:
   There’s a delicate balance between over and under promising results by digital marketers, finding the right balance is key. Someone who gives you no indication of what success looks like has no benchmark or framework within their strategy, meaning you both have no idea of what you’re aiming for. KPIs shouldn’t be too niche, ignoring the bigger picture of SEO success, but they should be in place to have a common goal in mind for the marketer and the client. I start by asking clients that are their wider business goals, key product/service focuses for each quarter and expand my strategy from there, looking at how digital PR or SEO activity can have more specific impact on these goals instead of doing work for work’s sake.
2. You don’t know who is doing the work:
   It is important to note that there are agencies or freelancers who draft in support when things get busy. This is common and not an issue when the quality control is being overseen by the agency or freelancer themselves, although it should be disclosed to any clients affected. This becomes a problem when agencies or freelancers subcontract entire projects to third parties without disclosing it to clients and without taking ownership for the strategy or results. These agencies essentially become a middle man and this can waste budget for clients and resource investment, which could be more efficiently spent if the client cut out the middle man and hired the marketer directly. Clients contract marketers because they are choosing the expertise that has been sold to them in the pitch and by not being honest about who is doing the work, this means the client may be getting a lower quality of work than has been sold to them.
3. No team members are listed onsite with the right credentials:
   I’ve pitched against agencies before where not a single person on the team page had the relevant job title or experience for the services being sold, hinting that these services would be immediately outsourced if a contract is won. This relates to the previous point on transparency and accountability from agencies or freelancers to make clear who would be leading the projector doing the work. It’s important to understand the experience of the marketer to ensure they know your sector and have the skillset to employ the sold strategy effectively. Always look at your agency’s team members page and ask about what specialists they have to work on the account.
4. No senior staff working on the account:
   It can be common in some agencies that you see a senior team presented in the pitch who never end up working on the account, instead junior team members are placed onto accounts to save resource for ‘bigger’ or ‘more important’ clients. This shows an agency’s prioritisation if they aren’t willing to put experienced people on the account. Whilst it is important for juniors to get experience working on accounts and have their skillsets developed, they should never be dumped with the ownership of a full account when they aren’t ready and don’t have the necessary experience. Always ask who will be working on your account so you have full understanding of what level of skill will be applied to the strategy.
5. Unbelievable results:
   We’ve all seen hard to believe case studies being pedalled around LinkedIn over recent months. Oftentimes, these results aren’t always as they seem when you dive deep into them. It can set a dangerous precedent as clients understandably believes that insane results and viral campaigns can be achieved on a shoestring budget consistently, which just isn’t the reality of digital marketing. Growth and success takes long term investment, steady strategy and you may have months which fluctuate. Transparency and honesty in our industry is integral to managing realistic expectations. If you’re being presented case studies which sound hard to believe, do some digging and ask deeper questions to verify the validity of the results. Additionally, ask how frequent those types of results are as a one off success shouldn’t be sold as the norm to expect.
6. Boiler plate strategies:
   There are many marketers selling out of the box SEO and digital PR, which on the surface sounds fine but can be a huge waster of investment for businesses if they strategy isn’t correct for their industry and audience. Tailored marketing strategies require more resource but are worth the effort as it means you are adapting what works to suit the client you are working on. I wouldn’t sell product PR or reactive to a client where there are limited opportunities, just as you wouldn’t expect advertising of a fashion brand to be the same as a car dealership. Ask the question “how will this strategy directly work for my industry?” to understand if the person or agency you are contracting actually understands your business and website audience to be able to effectively deliver results.
7. Race to the bottom pricing:
   When it comes to SEO and Digital PR, you really do get what you pay for a lot of the time. There has unfortunately been a lot of discount pricing, essentially selling packages of basic marketing for low low prices, which correlates to the out of the box strategies previously mentioned. There’s a line between agreeing KPIs and explaining how the strategy will work to achieve them and simply selling X number of links or keyword positions, with no context as to what impact they’d have on the website’s organic growth. People selling actions without impact is simply a waste of resource. If it seems too cheap, you can guarantee you won’t be getting an experienced strategist on the account and results may be topped up by quick win or spammy tactics, which won’t move the needle. This doesn’t mean you have to pay sky high prices either, as freelancers can typically charge less than agencies due to lower overheads and operational costs. It’s important to find the balance and bring this back to who is going to be doing the work and what is their expertise.
8. Focus on isolated metrics:
   In line with cheap and not-so-cheerful packages comes isolated metrics. So many times I see marketers selling just links, as well as having requests myself for X amount of links. I will always explain to businesses that this viewpoint is narrow and not conducive to organic success. If you do KPI things like links numbers, it needs to be part of a bigger strategy which looks at your actual business goals. What products or services is your business focusing on? What are the goals of your SEO strategy, is it brand or non-brand? Is there are specific category of your site that needs a boost currently? All of this is relevant and having that tailored strategy means you don’t just get endless low quality homepage links that leave you wondering why your organic traffic still hasn’t grown. Additionally, just looking at growth in organic traffic can be a road to nowhere, as it’s easier to write content for content’s sake on irrelevant topics which don’t draw in a targeted audience. You need to partner with a marketer who understands relevancy and focuses on this over arbitrary metrics that don’t honestly communicate success.
9. Too much busywork:
   When you have bigger budgets or are working with a freelancer/agency who doesn’t have the right experience there can be a lot of busywork put into each month’s workload to simply pad it out and keep retainers going. I’ve onboarded several clients where a lot of important and urgent website issues had never been tackled whilst their previous marketers spent months on a strategy that consisted of work like updating metas on pages that were noindexed anyway and disavowing links which will be ignored by Google regardless. Less scrupulous marketers may take advantage of clients’ lesser knowledge of SEO and aim to give themselves easier work to do instead of doing important work that might be challenging and take time to implement. Low level work can make up a bigger project plan, but you should ask the right questions to make sure the big issues have been tackled first before you get into the lower priority tasks. Communicate with your marketer or agency to ensure they have your priorities clear and you’ve working towards a common goal, with the right prioritisation of tasks.
10. Buying links to top up results:
    This tip should really be obvious in 2025 but I’ve still seen agencies recently that rely on a strategy of buying links for clients. Whether to ‘top up’ failed digital PR strategies or to outright sell onto clients, it just isn’t the vibe for 2025 and Google has long clamped down on these black hat tactics. Any short term growth you see from this is misadvised and trust that you will see your organic traffic nosedive at some point once the algorithm becomes wise to the paid links. These paid links are also usually terrible quality, low DA and pure spam. Diligence is important here, making sure you know exactly how your marketer will be gaining backlinks for you, making sure they are going for quality and relevancy in an authentic way.

Hopefully these tips will help you vet your future agency or freelancer if you’re seeking out a new partner for any SEO or digital PR work. You should always ask for reviews or testimonials if unsure, as well as asking about your prospective marketers industry experience.

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