Most guides to hiring an SEO company list qualities you cannot verify — "look for experience", "check their portfolio", "make sure they communicate well". Useful advice, and completely unfalsifiable. Every agency claims all three.

This is the other kind of guide: specific questions with right and wrong answers, so you can tell a competent proposal from a confident one. It is written from the perspective of an agency in Jaipur, which means we are describing the market we compete in — read it with that in mind.

First, understand what you are actually buying

SEO is three quite different jobs sold under one word, and agencies vary enormously in which they are good at.

Technical SEO makes a site crawlable and understandable: site architecture, page speed, structured data, fixing the things that stop Google indexing what you have. It is engineering work, it is measurable, and it usually produces the fastest visible improvement — because it is unblocking something rather than building something.

Content is producing pages that answer what people search for. It is slow, it compounds, and it is where most budgets are actually spent.

Authority — other sites linking to yours — is the hardest and the least controllable. It is also the largest single factor separating page one from page three on any competitive term.

An agency strong in one is not automatically strong in the others. Ask which of the three they think your site needs most, and why. If the answer is "all of them, we do a complete package", they have not looked at your site.

The question that filters fastest

Ask: which of my target keywords do you think we should not chase?

Any honest SEO audit of a Jaipur business produces a list of terms that are not worth pursuing directly. Some are dominated by directories and aggregators — search "digital marketing agency in jaipur" and the top results are Clutch and Semrush's agency directory, not agencies. Those SERPs exist to answer "give me a list", an intent a single business cannot satisfy no matter how good its page is. The correct move there is to get listed and reviewed on those platforms, not to spend twelve months trying to outrank them.

An agency that cannot name a single term to avoid is either not looking, or is happy to bill you for a target they know they will miss. The answer to this question tells you more than any case study.

How to read a ranking report

Ranking reports are the easiest deliverable to make look good, so learn where the padding hides.

Check the keyword list for volume. A report showing forty first-page rankings is meaningless if those keywords are phrases nobody searches. Ask for search volume beside every ranking. Terms with negligible volume are easy to rank for precisely because no one competes for them.

Check for branded terms. Ranking first for your own company name is not an achievement; you would rank there anyway. If branded keywords make up a meaningful share of the report, the non-branded picture is weaker than it looks.

Ask how rankings are measured. Google personalises results by location and history. A rank check run from an agency's office, logged in, is not what your customers see. Reports should state the location and device the check was run from.

Look for enquiries, not just traffic. Traffic is a means. The report that matters connects keywords to enquiries — which searches produced someone filling in a form or calling. If nobody has connected those two datasets, nobody knows whether the work is paying.

Guaranteed rankings

Nobody controls Google's index. An agency guaranteeing a position is doing one of three things: guaranteeing a term so obscure that ranking is trivial, quietly counting paid ads as "rankings", or planning to apologise later.

What can legitimately be committed to is process: a documented plan, an agreed reporting cadence, defined deliverables per month, and a clear statement of which methods will not be used. That last one matters more than it sounds.

Ask what they will not do

Some tactics still produce short-term movement and carry real risk: bought links, private blog networks, mass-generated location pages that differ only by city name, review markup for reviews the business collected about itself.

Google's spam policies name most of these explicitly. An agency should be able to tell you which they refuse and why. If the answer is vague, ask directly whether they buy links. The response is informative either way.

Questions specific to Jaipur

Do they handle Hindi and Hinglish search? A large share of commercial search here is transliterated or spoken, and voice search skews further that way. English-only keyword sets systematically under-capture demand, and the vernacular terms are usually far less contested.

Do they understand your sector's seasonality? Tourism and hospitality demand is researched months before travel. A campaign that ramps up during the season is arriving after the decision has been made. If you are in hospitality and the proposal has no seasonal shape, they have not thought about your business.

Are your customers even in India? Jaipur's jewellery, handicraft and textile exporters often sell mostly overseas. That changes language, platform mix and time zones completely — and a proposal built around local search will miss almost all of it.

How do they handle the map pack? For any business with a physical location, the local map results often matter more than the organic listing beneath them. They are won differently — Google Business Profile completeness, review velocity, consistent name/address/phone across Indian directories — and an SEO proposal that never mentions them is incomplete.

What a proposal should contain

A proposal worth signing has: the specific keywords targeted and their volumes; what will be delivered each month, in countable units; how success is measured and from where; an honest timeline; and what is expected from you. That last item is the one clients skip and then wonder why nothing moved — most SEO work stalls on the client side, waiting for content approval or developer access.

A proposal that is mostly adjectives is not a plan.

Timelines, honestly

For a local or neighbourhood-level query in Jaipur, meaningful movement usually appears within three to five months. Competitive city-wide terms take longer — commonly nine to twelve months of sustained work. National terms longer still, if they are winnable at all.

Anyone quoting faster on a competitive term is describing paid ads, which do work in days and are a perfectly reasonable thing to run alongside. They are not SEO.

What SEO costs, and why it varies so much

Quotes vary widely because the work varies widely. A single-location business chasing district-level terms genuinely needs less than a manufacturer competing nationally. Anyone quoting a price before seeing your site and your targets is quoting a package, not a plan.

When comparing quotes, compare deliverables rather than headline numbers. Two proposals at the same monthly figure can differ by an order of magnitude in content produced, technical work included, and whether reporting is a dashboard export or an analysis someone actually wrote.

The short version

  • Ask which keywords they would not chase — the answer reveals whether they looked.
  • Demand search volume beside every ranking claim, and strip out branded terms.
  • Treat guaranteed rankings as disqualifying.
  • Ask what tactics they refuse to use.
  • Check they have thought about Hindi search, your seasonality, and the map pack.
  • Compare deliverables, not headline prices.
  • Expect three to five months locally, nine to twelve on competitive city terms.

If you are weighing up proposals and want a second read on one, we are happy to look — including if the conclusion is that the agency you are already talking to has it right.