What Does an SEO Agency Do? The Work, the Team and the Month by Month Reality

An SEO agency is hired to make a business appear in search results for the things it sells, and it does that through four kinds of work: diagnosing and fixing what stops search engines using the site, deciding which searches are worth winning, producing and improving the pages that answer those searches, and earning references from other websites so the site is treated as credible. Around that sits research, reporting and the project management that keeps it moving. A good agency behaves like an outsourced department with a plan you can read, not a supplier that sends charts.

This page explains what the work actually looks like week to week, who does it, what you should have in your hands at each stage, and how to tell a strong agency from a well presented one.

The people inside the agency, and what each one changes

Knowing the roles helps for one practical reason: it tells you who you are actually buying when the pitch team leaves the room.

In a small agency two people cover all five. That is not a weakness, as long as you know it. The thing worth checking is whether the senior person who impressed you in the pitch is on the account afterwards, and for how many hours a month.

The four kinds of work, in the order they pay

1. Technical work

The agency crawls the site the way a search engine does and finds what is blocking it: pages that cannot be reached, pages that duplicate each other, incorrect canonical tags, blocked resources, slow or unstable rendering, broken redirects left over from an old site. This comes first because every other improvement is multiplied or cancelled by it. The deliverable is a prioritised issue list where each item names the fix, the pages affected and who implements it. Our technical SEO checklist is the same ground a competent audit covers.

2. Research and the keyword map

The agency works out which searches your buyers actually use, what kind of page the results currently reward for each one, and which of your existing URLs should own which query. The output is a single document with one row per target search, mapped to one page, with intent and current position. This document is the whole strategy in one table, and an agency that cannot produce it is improvising.

3. Content and on page work

Then the pages get written or rewritten: a clear title, one subject per page, the answer high up, the internal links that tell the engine which page is the authority on what. On an established site, rewriting what already half ranks beats publishing new material, which is why a good agency starts by improving rather than adding.

4. Links and digital PR

Finally, earning references from other sites. Done properly this is a PR discipline: original data, expert commentary, genuinely useful resources, relationships with publications in your field. Done badly it is paid placements on sites that exist for the purpose, which Google's published spam policies name directly as link schemes. Ask to see every live link, with the page it points to and how it was earned. Our page on what earns links now and how to tell if one is worth anything gives you the judgement criteria.

A realistic first quarter

• Month one. Access and audit. Full crawl, indexing picture, analytics and Search Console review, competitor read, keyword map drafted. A documented baseline, so later questions about what changed have an answer. Quick technical wins shipped.
• Month two. The technical blockers fixed in order of pages affected. Titles, headings and internal links corrected on your commercial pages. First rewritten pages live. Content calendar agreed.
• Month three. Publishing cadence running. Link and PR work underway with named targets. First real report comparing against the baseline, with the next quarter's priorities proposed.

What you should feel by the end of month three is not a traffic spike, it is clarity: you know what was broken, what was fixed, which pages are being built and why, and what the next ninety days will contain. Traffic follows that, on the timeline our guide to how long SEO takes sets out.

What an agency should hand over every month

• The work done, as named items: URLs published, tickets closed, links earned, listings corrected.
• The numbers that matter, against the baseline: pages indexed, impressions, clicks, queries you appear for, and conversions or enquiries.
• An explanation of anything that moved sharply, in either direction.
• What happens next month, and what they need from you to do it.

A report that is screenshots of a tool with no decisions in it is a status update, not analysis. Our five part report clients actually read and the companion guide to SEO KPIs cover what to insist on and which numbers quietly mislead.

Agency, consultant or in house

Our page on what a freelance SEO specialist covers, and when an agency fits better works through that choice properly. If you are a smaller business, the five point test for choosing an SEO company is the shortest route to a decision.

What Google says about hiring one

Google publishes guidance for businesses considering SEO help, and the single most useful line in it is this: no one can guarantee a number one ranking in Google. An agency that promises positions is promising something outside its control, and that one sentence filters a shortlist faster than any other question.

Google's guidance also recommends asking for examples of previous work and references, and being cautious with anyone who will not explain clearly what they plan to do and why. It adds that SEO changes can take months to take effect, which is useful context for both sides of the relationship: it sets a fair expectation and it removes an excuse.

Red flags, and the better question to ask instead

• A promised position or traffic figure. Ask instead what work will be done in each of the first three months.
• Links by the hundred for a flat fee. Ask to see ten live examples from a current client's programme.
• Accounts and content held in the agency's name. Ask for everything to be created in yours, from day one.
• A secret method. Ask them to walk you through the last audit they delivered, with the client's name removed.
• A report with no decisions in it. Ask what they would stop doing if the budget were halved.

And one question worth asking everybody: what would make you advise us to spend this money somewhere other than SEO? An agency that has an honest answer is an agency that will tell you the truth later, when it is expensive to.

an SEO Agency Do? The Work, in practice: the usual questions

What exactly do I get for a monthly SEO retainer?

Capacity against an agreed plan: a set number of hours or deliverables covering technical fixes, content, links and reporting. Get the deliverables written into the agreement by name. A retainer described only as "ongoing optimisation" is impossible to hold anyone to.

Do SEO agencies write the content as well?

Many do, either in house or through writers they manage. Some produce briefs and expect you to write, which works well when you have real subject expertise internally. Settle this before signing, because content is usually the largest single cost in the programme and the most common gap in a scope.

How do I know whether the agency or the market caused a change?

Baselines and segments. Compare your trend against the queries and pages you were working on, rather than sitewide totals, and look at whether competitors moved too. Google Search Console is the shared source of truth here, and you should have your own access to it.

Should the agency have access to my website?

Usually yes, and it should be scoped: a content role for publishing, and either developer access or a ticketing route into your development team for technical changes. Keep ownership of the accounts, the domain and the analytics property with you at all times.

What happens if we stop working with them?

Whatever the contract says, so read it now rather than later. The pages, the links and the data should remain yours and keep working. Check specifically for content licensing clauses and for anything that keeps your tracking or landing pages on the agency's own infrastructure.

How much of the work could we do ourselves?

More than most owners expect. Search Console, your business profile, review replies, and the honest answers to your most common sales questions are all internal work, and doing them makes bought help go further.

This page covers what an SEO agency does and how to judge one. For what the monthly number is made of, see our pricing and package guides; for the local search element specifically, see the local method guide.

The thing to ask an agency that few are ready for

Here is a question worth putting to any agency you shortlist in 2026: what do you know about how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI panel choose which companies to name? Buyers increasingly ask an assistant instead of typing a search, and the reply contains two or three businesses rather than a page of ten. Those names are drawn from sources the model can read, so the same technical and content work feeds it, and an agency can be doing a good job on Google while an assistant recommends a competitor. The answer you get to that question tells you a lot about how current the agency is. Checking your own result takes a few minutes: AI Knows Us asks the assistants the questions your buyers ask and shows which sources the answers came from.