- Company Legitimacy
- Minimal Metrics or Work
Let’s start with the first: Company Legitimacy Along with what the company provides, you’ll want to vet them as well. Everyone is going to promise the best work so check them on that before the hire.
- Legit Reviews: Check their google reviews, facebook, yelp if they have one and any others. You can also do a google search for their domain name to see which site’s they have linking to them or talking about them. For our site you would type “Raptor Digital Marketing” with the double quotes to see all websites talking about the company. Your goal isn’t to necessarily go nuts but to at least see if there are some major warning signs before hiring them.
- Audit their internal processes: Call the main line of the business and see what happens. If they don’t answer it’s a big red flag. I know that sounds funny but the amount of clients we get that had a bad experience of their company never answering or calling back is absurd! So call the main line and if you do get someone ask if you could talk to one of the developers, or the content creators etc. Ask how many people are on their team, how long they’ve worked there etc. Just figure out if they are a legit company or maybe a one-man show who’s hoping to bill you and run with your money.
OK if the company passes those two checks you can safely move on to the next 5 checks: Minimal Metrics or Work Every SEO company is going to provide you a ranking report and will promise backlinks or citations or whatever secret sauce they have. That’s all fine and dandy but you’ll need a bit more to see actual growth:
- Contracts: A solid SEO company should want to protect you and themselves. This usually involves a contract. You can either draw it up or they will probably have one on hand. It shouldn’t be anything too crazy like them owning your digital channels or expense exit clauses but a normal timeline to see effectiveness, minimal work promised etc. is normal.
- Monthly Reports: You should be getting at least monthly an executive summary or some kind of report outlying your results and metrics that actually matter. At Raptor we measure quite a few metrics that are important including:
- Traffic and growth of traffic to your site
- # of leads
- # of qualified leads
- # of new customers
- Online presence growth in search engines, Ai, social etc.
- Monthly Meeting: Along with the report you should have a standing monthly meeting so you can go over you perspective. This should be a time where you can share concerns and wins with your SEO company. They can’t do a better job if they don’t know what is and isn’t working. Generally you’ll have certain items that need to be completed each month to increase your visibility online, but per the contract, those should be adjustable so you can pivot to what’s working better if needed.
- Minimal Tasks Completed: In order for your company to do well in google or Ai you’ll really need to have specific measurable tasks completed each month. These could include:
- Backlinks or citations
- Social Media Posts
- GMB or Yelp posts
- Blogging
- Videography and course creation.
- Gut Instinct: I’m going to get some flak for this one but I don’t care. Depending on how long you’ve been in business this will either come as second nature or maybe take a little work. The goal is that you should “feel” good about the company you’re hiring naturally just by the way they talk with you, respond to your emails, their patience etc. There is no one size fits all but the company you don’t feel totally great about up-front isn’t going to naturally get better with time. Chances are they will get a lot worse.
Summary These are just our opinions here at Raptor. We execute based on the items we’ve listed above but you may find some of them unnecessary or maybe even outdated, but we’ve found they are holding water pretty well in 2026. Best of luck in your hiring!
