How to Choose an SEO Agency in NZ (and the Red Flags to Walk Away From)

Most agencies are sold, not chosen

The typical process: a business owner gets a cold call, sits through a slick pitch full of charts, signs a twelve-month contract, and spends the next year not quite able to tell whether it's working. Here's how to avoid that.

Red flags — end the meeting

"Guaranteed page one." Nobody controls Google. Anyone promising a ranking is either lying or intends to rank you for something worthless.
They won't say what they'll actually do. "Proprietary methodology" usually means "we'd rather you couldn't check."
Long lock-in contracts. If the work is good, they don't need to trap you. We don't lock clients in for exactly this reason.
They talk about rankings and traffic, never leads. Traffic that doesn't convert is a cost, not a win.
They offer to buy you links, or sell you reviews. Both violate Google's policies. Fake reviews are also a Fair Trading Act problem in New Zealand — real legal risk, not just an SEO one.
The reporting is a wall of metrics. Complexity is often a place to hide.

The questions that actually reveal quality

"What would make you tell me to stop spending?"

The best question in the list. An agency that's genuinely performance-focused has a clear answer — a cost per lead ceiling, an unprofitable channel, a market that can't sustain the spend. An agency selling activity has never thought about it.

"Who does the work day to day?"

Being sold by a director and serviced by a junior is the oldest trick in the industry.

"Show me how you'd know a campaign was losing money."

This tests whether their tracking is real. If they can't explain how a conversion is defined, they're optimising blind.

"What's your read on my market specifically?"

A good agency will already have looked. If they can't tell you who's ranking, what the competition looks like, or what your customers actually search for, they haven't done the work — and they won't once they've got your money either.

What good looks like

They ask about your margins, not just your budget. A lead is only good if it's profitable.
They set up conversion tracking before they touch a campaign.
They'll tell you when a channel isn't the right fit — even one they sell.
Reporting is in plain English: what changed, what it cost, what came back.

One more thing

Check whether the agency ranks for anything itself, and whether their own site is fast, clear and convincing. It's not a perfect test — plenty of good agencies are too busy servicing clients to market themselves — but it's a reasonable signal.

If you want the honest version of this conversation, book a free discovery session. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so.