Vetting an SEO company in New Orleans before you sign

Agencies with a verified published price

A vetting sequence you can run in a week

1. Check what the firm publishes against what it says on the call. Read the website first and note the claimed services, the named clients and any stated minimum. Then take the call and see whether the story matches. Discrepancies between the two are the cheapest early signal available, and they surface before you have spent anything but an hour.
2. Ask for a client in your category you may contact. Not a case study, a phone number. Ask the reference three things: what changed in the first ninety days, what the reporting actually looks like, and whether anything was subcontracted without being mentioned up front. Firms that cannot produce a reference in your category after a decade of trading have told you something.
3. Require read access rather than granting write access. Google's guidance on deciding whether you need an SEO recommends giving a candidate read access to your analytics and search data for an audit rather than write access to your site. A firm that accepts this without argument knows the standard practice. One that insists on control of the site before a contract exists is worth declining.
4. Get the definitions and the ownership terms in writing. Agree what counts as a lead, which queries will be tracked, who owns the content produced, and who holds the analytics property, the search console access, the domain and any call tracking numbers. Every one of those should sit with your business, with access granted to the agency and revocable by you.

What local search work actually involves in this market

For a business serving customers in the metro area, most of the available result comes from a small number of unglamorous things done consistently. The business profile must match the storefront and the hours, the service pages must name the jobs people actually search for, reviews must arrive steadily rather than in bursts, and the site must describe location and service area in a form search engines can read. Google publishes local business structured data for exactly that purpose, and it separately documents the requirements for displaying review snippets on your own pages.

Where a New Orleans engagement gets genuinely harder is multi location coverage. A firm serving Uptown, Mid City, Metairie and the North Shore is competing in several distinct local results at once, each with its own competitor set. That is more work than a single location engagement and should be priced as such rather than absorbed silently into the same retainer.

The claims that should slow you down

Three promises recur and all three are warning signs. A guaranteed first position on a named term, since nobody controls the ranking system. A fixed number of links per month, because volume commitments push a firm toward the link schemes Google's spam policies describe as violations. And a promise of results within thirty days for a competitive category, which is a claim about a timeline the firm cannot influence.

There is also a quieter one: a proposal built entirely around traffic growth with no reference to enquiries or revenue. Traffic is a means, and in a market where a handful of queries carry almost all the commercial value, a chart that goes up while the phone stays quiet is a familiar and expensive outcome.

What our index records, and how to use it

For every firm we record what it publishes on its own site with the date captured: services claimed, published starting price where one exists, stated minimum engagement, and named clients. That is deliberately narrow, because it is the part that can be verified independently rather than taken on trust. Use it to build a shortlist and to check consistency between the pitch and the public record, then do the reference calls yourself. No directory, including this one, can tell you whether a particular team will suit yours.

Questions people actually ask

What is the single most useful vetting question?

Who will actually do the work, and what else are they working on. Sales conversations are frequently run by someone you will never speak to again, and the difference between a senior practitioner with four accounts and a junior with twenty is the difference between the two outcomes you are choosing between.

How do I check a firm's own search performance?

Look at it, but weight it lightly. Agencies that rank well for competitive agency terms have demonstrated something real, yet plenty of good firms grow entirely on referral and never bother. Treat it as supporting evidence rather than a test, and pay more attention to results they can show for clients in your category.

Should I be worried if the firm subcontracts?

Not by itself. Content, development and digital public relations are commonly subcontracted across the industry and the arrangement often works. What matters is that it is disclosed, that you know who is accountable when something breaks, and that the margin stacking is not so deep that the person writing your pages is paid almost nothing.

What should the first ninety days produce?

A technical audit acted upon rather than merely delivered, the local profile and listings corrected, the priority pages rewritten or built, and a reporting view you can read without help. If a proposal cannot say what will exist at day ninety, ask for that before you sign rather than discovering it at the first quarterly review.

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