Am I Getting Ripped Off for SEO Services?

It is a horrible question to have to ask. Most of us do not enjoy feeling suspicious, especially when someone is speaking confidently about something we do not fully understand.

SEO is full of technical language. It changes constantly, results can take months to appear and, even when things are going well, it can be difficult to see what is actually happening. That makes it very easy to keep paying for months, or even years, without stopping to ask whether the work is making a difference.

The problem is that expensive SEO is not necessarily good SEO, and cheap SEO is not automatically bad. What matters is whether someone is carrying out the work they promised, whether they can explain it and whether it is helping your business.

Good SEO can be expensive

There are brilliant SEO specialists who earn every penny they charge. They spend hours researching competitors, understanding how customers search, improving websites, solving technical problems, creating content, monitoring performance and adapting when things change.

That is skilled work, and this article is not about begrudging good people fair payment. It is about paying for something you cannot see, cannot verify and nobody seems able to explain.

The biggest warning sign is not the price

It is vagueness.

If you asked your accountant what they had done that month, you would expect an answer. If you asked a builder what they had been working on, you would expect them to point at the wall, roof or slightly worrying hole in your kitchen.

Now ask your SEO provider:

What did you change this month?

If the answer is clear, specific and easy to understand, brilliant. If it disappears into a cloud of jargon, percentages and mysterious “optimisation”, keep asking.

Good SEO professionals should be able to explain complicated work in plain English. You do not need to understand every technical detail, but you should understand what was done, why it mattered and what happens next.

Fear sells

Unfortunately, it can also sell SEO.

I have heard business owners being told that they will disappear from Google, lose their customers or be left behind by AI unless they sign up immediately. Could your visibility reduce over time if competitors improve their websites while you do nothing? Of course. That does not mean you should sign the first contract waved in front of you.

Good advice should help you make a sensible decision. It should not leave you frightened enough to enter your card details before you have worked out what you are buying.

Reports should not be a mystery

If you are paying someone every month for SEO, I would normally expect you to receive a monthly report without being charged an additional fee to find out what happened.

It does not need to be glossy or twenty pages long. It needs to answer three basic questions:

• What did you do?

• What changed?

• What are you doing next?

  
  

The report should also tell you where the figures came from and compare them with a sensible starting point. A collection of colourful graphs is not useful if nobody explains what they mean.

Do not be blinded by impressive numbers

One of my favourite examples is:

“Your visibility increased by 200%.”

Wonderful. How much visibility did you have before?

One.

Now you have three.

Technically, that is a 200% increase. It is also why percentages should be shown alongside the actual numbers.

Reports may mention impressions, clicks, rankings, website visitors, enquiries and sales. These are different things. An impression means your page appeared in a search result. It does not mean anyone clicked it, read it or bought anything.

A ranking only matters if it is for something a potential customer might genuinely search for. Being number one for a long and peculiar phrase that nobody uses may look lovely in a report, but it is unlikely to pay the electricity bill.

Are they measuring anything useful?

SEO should support the business rather than the reporting dashboard.

I would rather know that five ideal customers contacted me than discover that a thousand people visited an article with very little connection to what I sell. More traffic can be useful, but only when the right people are arriving and finding something relevant when they get there.

Before the work begins, you should agree what success looks like. That could mean more enquiries, bookings, purchases, calls, qualified visitors or people reaching a particular service page.

Without that agreement, almost any number can be presented as good news.

Can Google actually see your website?

Before worrying about rankings, backlinks or AI visibility, check that Google has indexed the important pages on your website.

Search Google for:

site:yourwebsite.co.uk

Replace the example with your own website address.

This is a basic check rather than a full audit, but it should show some of the pages Google knows about. A one-page website may correctly show one page. If you have a website with dozens of pages and only the homepage appears, however, you need to ask why.

This should have been checked at the beginning of the work. It should not be an unpleasant surprise several months into a paid contract.

Do you control your accounts?

Your business should own or control its website, Google Search Console, Google Analytics and any other important accounts used for the work.

Your SEO provider can be given access, but they should not be the only person who can reach your website and data. If the relationship ends, you should not lose everything with it.

Google Search Console is particularly important because it shows how Google sees your site, which searches are producing impressions and clicks, and whether important pages have indexing problems.

If you are paying for SEO but cannot access Search Console, ask why and get it sorted.

AI has made reporting much easier

This is the part that has really got my heckles up.

Producing a clear report has never been easier. Search Console and Analytics already contain much of the information, while AI can help organise it, compare periods and turn it into something readable very quickly.

That does not make expertise unnecessary. Someone still needs to choose the right figures, check the data, understand what it means and decide what should happen next.

But if a provider knows what they are doing, reporting should not be treated as an enormous additional burden or a mysterious luxury. I would be particularly concerned if someone taking a monthly fee was reluctant to show the client what had been achieved with it.

Whenever I have done good work for someone, I cannot wait to show them.

What about AIO, GEO and AI visibility?

You may now be paying for services described as AIO, GEO, AI SEO, LLM optimisation or AI visibility.

Some valuable work can be done in this area. Clear information, useful articles, accurate structured data, credible evidence and a technically accessible website can help AI systems understand a business.

However, AI answers change. Different people can receive different results, and no provider can guarantee that ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or another system will recommend you.

Ask which platforms are being monitored, what work is being carried out, how the tests are run and what evidence is being used. Be cautious of a single unexplained “AI visibility score” being presented as definitive proof.

You can also carry out a quick test yourself. Ask Google what your business is and who you are. Then ask a friend, who has not spent months discussing your business with ChatGPT or Claude, to run the same questions and send you the answers.

This is not a complete AI visibility audit, but it may reveal whether these systems understand who you are and what you do.

Are you being ripped off?

One missing report or disappointing month does not prove that someone is ripping you off. SEO can take time, tracking can break and sensible strategies do not always work as expected.

A good report may sometimes contain bad news. It may say that progress has been slow, a previous assumption was wrong or the strategy needs to change. That is still useful. Honest reporting is far more valuable than a report engineered to look impressive.

The concern begins when there is a pattern:

• nobody can explain what your payment covers;

• you cannot access your accounts;

• there was no recorded starting point;

• reports are missing or incomprehensible;

• impressive claims cannot be traced back to real figures;

• and nobody can tell you what was actually changed.

That may mean you are being taken advantage of. It may also mean the provider is inexperienced, out of date or simply delivering the wrong service for your business. Either way, you need answers.

Is SEO still worth the money?

Even when the work is genuinely being completed, you should still ask whether it is the best use of your marketing budget.

Hundreds of pounds each month could also pay for advertising, PR, direct outreach, events, sales support, printed materials, local publications or partnerships. SEO can be a very good investment, but it is one route rather than the compulsory answer for every business.

Once the technical foundations and main website pages have been sorted, I believe a genuinely useful weekly blog is one of the quickest and lowest-friction ways for many small businesses to keep building search and AI visibility.

You cannot invent a new service page or produce a new case study every week. You can regularly answer another question that your customers are already asking.

Five questions to ask your SEO provider

If I were paying someone every month, I would ask:

• Can Google see the important pages on my website?

• What did you change this month?

• How are you measuring success?

• Can I see the original data?

• What are you doing next?

A capable provider should not be worried by those questions. They may need to explain that results take time or that a particular figure is less important than it appears, but they should be able to give you a sensible answer.

You do not need to become an SEO expert. You need to know what you are buying, what has been done and whether there is evidence that it is helping your business.

You are paying for work, judgement and evidence. If nobody can show you any of those, it is time to start asking why.