How to choose an SEO company.

People search for the best SEO company hoping for a name. No such name exists, because the right choice depends on your site, your budget and what a customer is worth to you. A plumber who needs calls from three towns and a store with 2,000 products need different people.

So choose in this order: decide what you want SEO to do, draw up a shortlist of three, put the same questions to each, and judge them on the answers. Ratings and lists can help you build the shortlist, but they should not make the decision.

Write down one sentence before you contact anyone: more calls from your town, more orders from a certain product line, a recovery after traffic fell, or a site that Google can actually index. A company that hears a clear goal can propose a plan. One that hears "we want to rank" can only sell a package.

Work out roughly what one new customer is worth. It tells you how much SEO can reasonably cost before it stops making sense, and it keeps you from judging a quote by size alone.

Gather a few things before the first call: your website address, read access to Google Search Console and Analytics if you have them, your main services or products, and any SEO work paid for in the past. If an earlier company left you with a bad experience, say so plainly. It tells the next one what to avoid and how to earn your trust.

One: what is wrong with my site today, and what would you fix first. A real answer names pages, settings or templates on your site. Two: what exactly do I receive each month, and who does the work. Three: how will you report, and will the numbers be calls, leads and orders rather than rankings alone.

Four: do I own the accounts, the content and the settings if I leave. Five: what is the contract term, and how do I stop. Six: what would you refuse to do on my site. Seven: can I speak to a client in a business like mine.

Listen for specifics and for questions coming back at you. Good companies ask about your customers, your margins and what you tried before. Weak ones send a standard proposal within an hour.

Personal recommendations are worth more than an anonymous list. Ask the friend what changed in the business, not whether the company was nice. Recommended SEO companies are still a starting point: confirm that the client's situation resembles yours.

When proposals arrive, compare scope before price. One may include technical fixes, content and reporting while another is a monthly fee for unnamed activity. Ask each company to list the deliverables. If two quotes differ by a factor of three, the work almost certainly differs too.

Price depends on site size, how much is broken, how competitive your market is and whether the company writes content or only advises. Any honest company needs to see your site before quoting.

Be careful with anyone who guarantees a number one ranking, because nobody controls Google. Long contracts that lock you in before any result, reports full of jargon and no business numbers, and offers of hundreds of cheap links all deserve the same caution.

Any company that will not show you what it will change on your site, or that asks for access to everything on day one, is worth a second look. So is one that will not name who actually does the work.

Do not rush. Pressure to sign this week because a discount ends is a sales tactic, and SEO does not move on that timetable.

The fairest first step is small and clear. Ours is a free SEO evaluation: we look at your site, tell you what we find in plain English and rank the fixes by impact, usually in about two to three days. It is free every time, with no card and no obligation to hire us.

If you then want help, we scope the work and quote a fixed price in writing before anything starts. Ongoing SEO is optional, never bundled, and there is no retainer to sign. We never guarantee rankings. Technical fixes can show in weeks, and competitive terms usually take months.

We are a founder-led studio in Truro, Nova Scotia, working remotely across Canada in English and French. The founder has 25 years in IT, and we run VisaTalents, a site with more than 40,000 generated pages, so technical SEO is where we are strongest. We suit small and mid-sized businesses, online stores and sites with indexing or speed problems.

If you want a large team, a global campaign or paid advertising management, a bigger firm is the better choice. If you only want cheap link packages, we are not the right company.