What you pay an SEO agency for.

Why SEO in particular is hard to account for

With a website you can see the result: it exists or it does not. With SEO the result is delayed by months, depends on competitors and on things outside the contract, and the supplier can always say the work is under way and it needs more time. That is an arrangement in which no results can be indistinguishable from no work.

So the only sensible protection is not a promise of rankings but visibility of what is happening. You do not need to understand SEO to check whether anything is happening at all.

Questions worth asking

• What exactly was produced last month, and at what address can I read it?
• Do I have access to my own Google Search Console — as the owner, not through an intermediary?
• Which queries brought visits, and how has that changed year on year?
• What was changed on the site itself, rather than next to it?
• What happens to the things I paid for if we stop working together?

What should be visible without asking

Access to Search Console and analytics on your side, as the owner. A list of what was produced, with links. A note of what changed on the site and when. That is a minimum, not a privilege — it is your data about your website.

If a report is mostly unlabelled charts, lists of phrases nobody searches, or generalities like content optimisation, it is not a report. It is evidence of activity.

What it should cost

There is no single rate, but there are proportions. One article a month plus hosting does not justify a figure that would fund an entire new website within a few months. If you suspect that is your situation, add up a year of it and set that against what actually exists.

This does not mean cheaper is better. It means the price should map to identifiable work — and if nobody can map it, that is a question, not an accusation.