Telling Good Search Work From Bad

The evaluation problem

Search work is difficult to assess from outside. The effects are delayed, they are affected by things nobody controls, and the vocabulary is unfamiliar.

Which means a business hiring for it is largely trusting, and that is uncomfortable.

What can be assessed: the promises made, the way work is explained, whether the reporting connects to anything that matters, and whether the practices carry risk.

Those four are visible without any technical knowledge, and they distinguish careful work from the rest reliably enough.

Promises that cannot be kept

The clearest signal available.

Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls search results, they differ by person and location, and they change. A guarantee of position is a promise about somebody else's system.

A specific position by a specific date. The same problem with a timeline attached.

A special relationship with a search engine. No such arrangement exists. Advertising accreditation is a separate thing and does not affect unpaid results.

Immediate results. Search work takes months to show effects, and anything producing an immediate jump is usually either paid advertising presented as search work or something risky.

Performance claims in advertising also have to be supportable, which means a guarantee of results is a claim somebody would have to substantiate.

Practices that carry risk

Worth recognising, since the consequences land on you rather than the provider.

• Buying links, or link schemes described as outreach.
• Publishing large volumes of near-identical pages, particularly location pages with the name swapped.
• Content generated at volume with no review and nothing specific to your business.
• Text hidden from visitors but present for search engines.
• Directory submissions in bulk, which produces listings you do not control.
• Anything the provider will not explain in plain terms.

The last is the general test. A provider who describes their approach as proprietary and will not say what they actually do is asking you to accept unexplained risk on your own domain.

The consequence matters: search guidance addresses these practices, and the site affected is yours. A provider can end a contract; you cannot end a site's history.

What good work looks like

Unglamorous, which is part of why it is hard to sell.

Fixing technical problems that prevent pages being found. Writing pages that answer real questions specific to your business. Improving what already ranks rather than only adding. Making the site faster and usable on a phone. Earning mentions from genuinely relevant local sources. Getting the business listing right.

Most of it overlaps with making the site better for visitors, which is a useful heuristic: work that would help a customer even if search engines did not exist is generally sound.

The reporting question

Where the difference becomes visible without technical knowledge.

Reporting built on rankings for terms you did not choose, impressions, and general activity is describing motion.

Reporting built on enquiries, which pages produce them, and what they cost is describing outcomes.

A provider who asks you for your own enquiry and booking numbers is trying to measure something real. One who never asks is optimising toward whatever the tool displays.

Rankings deserve particular scepticism, since results vary by person and location, and a screenshot of a top position proves very little on its own.

Questions worth asking

1. What will you actually do in the first three months?
2. How will we know whether it worked?
3. What do you need from me?
4. Who owns the content and the accounts?
5. What happens to the work if we stop?
6. Can you show me a page you wrote for another client?

The third is diagnostic. Good search work needs input from the business, because the material that differentiates a site comes from the work you do. A provider who says they need nothing from you is planning to produce content that could belong to anybody.

The fourth matters practically. Content and accounts should be yours, on your domain and in your name, so that ending the relationship does not remove what was built.

The timeline, honestly

Worth setting before starting.

Technical fixes can show effects within weeks. New content takes months to establish. Competitive terms in an established market can take considerably longer, and some are not realistically winnable for a small business at all.

A provider who sets that expectation is more trustworthy than one who does not, even though it is a less appealing sales conversation.

And the honest position on some terms is that the effort is better spent elsewhere, which is a judgement a good provider will make rather than sell around.

The check after six months

Not on rankings.

On whether enquiries from unpaid search increased, whether the pages produced are ones you would be happy for a customer to read, and whether you understand what was done.

If the answer to the second is no, the work is filling a site rather than improving it, and the honest conversation is worth having before another six months, which needs your own enquiry records to answer, as described in running ads yourself or paying somebody.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.