How to Choose a Local SEO Company

Key takeaways

Ask who will own your Google Business Profile and your Search Console property. If the answer is the agency, you are renting access to your own data.
Ask them to explain distance. Google names relevance, distance and prominence as its local inputs, and an agency that implies it can move distance is either misinformed or hoping you are.
Ask how they generate location pages. A template with the city name swapped produces near-duplicates, which Google consolidates rather than ranking.
Ask what the review process is. Asking customers properly is legitimate work; supplying reviews is illegal in the United States and will eventually cost you the profile.
Ask what month one is. A specific answer means they looked at your site. A generic answer means the proposal was written before they did.
The answer that should end the call is a ranking guarantee. Google itself lists it among the warning signs in its guidance on hiring an SEO.

Most advice on choosing a local SEO company is a list of qualities nobody would admit to lacking. Transparency, experience and communication are not selection criteria; they are things every proposal already claims.

What sorts firms is questions with answers that are hard to fake. Six of them follow, each chosen because a weak firm cannot answer it well without exposing the weakness.

None of them requires you to understand SEO. They require the firm to understand your business, which turns out to be the harder test.

Who will own my Google Business Profile and Search Console?

Short answer: You should, with the agency added as a manager. Ownership sitting with the agency means that ending the relationship means losing your profile history, your Search Console data or both, which converts a service contract into leverage over assets that are yours.

This is the question that reveals most about a firm, and it takes one sentence to answer. A good firm will already have a process for being added as a manager rather than an owner.

The reason it matters is not suspicion, it is continuity. Profile history and Search Console data are the only record of what happened, and sixteen months of it is not reproducible after the fact.

Your Google Business Profile. You are the owner. The agency is a manager, which is a role Google supports precisely for this.
Search Console. Your property, your verification. Agency users get delegated access, which you can revoke in one click.
Your analytics. Your property, in an account you control, not a sub-property of an agency account.
Content and pages. Yours on delivery, in writing. Ask specifically, because some contracts are silent and silence favours whoever drafted it.

Can you explain what distance does to my rankings?

Short answer: A firm that knows the answer will tell you distance is fixed. Google names relevance, distance and prominence as its local ranking inputs, and distance is set by your address and where the searcher happens to be, so nobody can sell you movement on it.

The practical consequence is that you cannot rank evenly across a wide area from one address. A business in one part of a city will do better in nearby searches than in ones twenty minutes away, and that is the system working as documented.

So when a proposal promises visibility across a whole metro from a single location, it is promising something the ranking inputs do not permit. The honest version is a plan for the area you can realistically serve well.

This question also sorts firms by whether they have read Google documentation or absorbed the industry folklore. The two produce very different answers.

How do you build pages for multiple locations?

Short answer: The answer you want involves something genuinely different on each page, drawn from that location rather than generated. A template with the place name substituted produces near-duplicates, and Google consolidates duplicates rather than ranking them all, so a page set built that way ends up competing against itself.

We are specific about this because we hit it ourselves. The site you are reading runs 150 location pages, and the test suite that stops them turning into near-duplicates is the largest single test in the codebase.

What makes a location page genuinely distinct is not synonyms, it is content drawn from that location: what people there actually search for, what the local competition looks like, what the market is made of.

Ask to see two of their location pages for different cities, side by side. Read them.

If swapping the place names would leave both sensible, they are near-duplicates whatever the proposal says.

What is your review process?

Short answer: Building a system that asks real customers at the right moment is legitimate, effective work. Supplying reviews is not, and in the United States the Federal Trade Commission rule bans fake reviews and testimonials outright, which makes it a legal exposure rather than a shortcut.

The distinction is worth hearing them draw unprompted. A firm that treats review generation as a volume problem has not thought about who carries the liability.

There is a second thing to listen for, which is whether they mention responding to reviews. Responses are visible to every future reader and are the part most businesses neglect.

Review gating, where you ask happy customers for a public review and unhappy ones for private feedback, is specifically against Google policy and is a common feature of cheap review packages. Ask whether their tool does it.

What would you do in month one?

Short answer: The quality of this answer tells you whether anyone looked at your site before writing the proposal. A specific answer names your pages, your profile and your actual problems. A generic answer describes a methodology, which is a template with your logo on it.

You do not need to assess whether their month one is correct. You need to notice whether it could have been written about any business in your trade.

A firm that has looked will usually mention something slightly awkward: a page that contradicts another, a profile category that is wrong, a phone number that disagrees with itself somewhere. That awkwardness is the evidence.

Ask the follow-up too. What would make you change the plan in month two?

A firm with no answer is not planning to look again.

Do you guarantee rankings?

Short answer: No reputable firm does, and Google lists ranking guarantees among the warning signs in its own guidance on hiring an SEO. Nobody controls the ranking systems, so a guarantee is either meaningless, scoped to terms nobody searches, or a refund clause dressed as confidence.

What can legitimately be committed to is work, cadence and reporting. Those are things an agency controls, and they are what a contract should actually specify.

The usual trick is a guarantee on terms so specific that they carry no demand. Ranking first for a nine-word phrase nobody types is trivially achievable and worth nothing.

If you hear a guarantee, ask what the terms are and what the search volume is. The answer ends the conversation one way or the other.

Frequently asked questions

Should I hire a local company or a remote one?

The work is remote either way, so proximity mostly buys you easier meetings. What matters more is whether they understand your market, and a firm with real experience in your trade elsewhere usually beats a nearby firm with none.

How do I check a local SEO company own claims?

Search for the terms they say they rank for, from the area in question, and look. Ask for two client examples you can look up yourself. Published case studies with no verifiable client are the weakest form of evidence in this industry.

Is a long contract a red flag?

Not by itself, because the work genuinely takes time to compound. A long contract with no named monthly priority is the red flag, because it commits you without committing them to anything specific.

What if they will not give me Search Console access?

Treat it as disqualifying. It is your property, the data is yours, and the only reason to withhold it is to control what you can check. Google documents how to set it up yourself in a few minutes.

How many clients should one person handle?

Ask, and ask who specifically will do your work rather than who is on the call. A firm that cannot name the person or the number is describing a pooled service, which is fine if priced as one and not if priced as a retainer.

Sources and further reading

Ask us these six

We will answer all six in writing before you commit to anything, including the ones with awkward answers. If our answer to any of them loses us the work, it was going to lose us the renewal anyway.