Every agency claims results. Very few will show you the working. This is what to ask for, and what the answers tell you.
What a proven track record should look like on paper
A case study that says "300% growth" is not evidence. Growth from what, over how long, on which searches, and was anything else running at the same time?
What is evidence: a named search term, the position before and after, the date range, and what was changed to cause it. Agencies who have done the work can produce that in a meeting. Agencies who have not will send you a testimonial instead.
Ask specifically about a campaign that did not work. Every agency has one. How they describe it tells you more than any success story: whether they diagnosed it, what they changed, and whether they told the client before or after the client noticed.
How to read a reporting sample
Ask for a real monthly report with the client details removed. Four things to look for:
- Rankings against business searches, not vanity ones. If the tracked list is full of long, specific phrases nobody searches for, the report is designed to look good.
- Conversions, not just sessions. Traffic that does not enquire is a cost, not a result.
- A written summary. Numbers without interpretation mean the agency is not thinking about your account between invoices.
- What is planned next. A report that only looks backwards is an invoice with charts.
Our own approach to this is described under SEO audit and reporting, including what the monthly report contains.
Three myths that still cost UAE businesses money
"SEO is a one-time project." Competitors publish, Google updates, your own site changes. Positions are held, not won once. The work can slow down after the foundations are fixed; it does not stop.
"More keywords means better rankings." Targeting fifty searches with one page is the fastest way to rank for none of them. One page, one intent, is the rule that fixes more sites than any other single change.
"Results should be immediate." Technical fixes can show in weeks. Competitive commercial searches take months. An agency promising page one in thirty days is either targeting searches nobody runs or doing something you will have to undo later.
The questions that separate agencies
- Which of our pages should never have been published, and why?
- What are our three closest competitors doing that we are not?
- What would you stop doing if the budget were halved?
- What does month twelve look like if everything goes to plan, and what does it look like if it does not?
The value of these questions is not the answer. It is whether the agency has looked at your site closely enough to have one.
Written by the SEO team at Dubyte AI Solutions, Dubai Silicon Oasis. Ask us about your own site.
