Promises that should end the call
Guaranteed rankings: nobody controls Google, so a guarantee is either a lie or a plan to rank you for terms nobody searches. 'We know people at Google' is a lie with a suit on. And permanent results promised from a three-month sprint misunderstands the entire discipline.
The vanity keyword trick
Month one: rankings achieved! For 'best affordable quality widgets sheffield south yorkshire', a phrase searched by no living human. Insist on seeing estimated search volumes and, better, organic conversions. Rankings without traffic are trophies without prize money.
Activity theatre
Fifty directory submissions. Four hundred 'optimisations'. Ten blogs a month written by nobody about nothing. Volume metrics exist to fill reports when value is absent. One technical fix that unblocks crawling can beat a year of that. Ask what changed and what it was expected to earn.
What honest SEO looks like
A diagnosis before a prescription. Clear priorities: technical health, then pages that match commercial searches, then content and authority earned slowly. Reporting on organic revenue and enquiries, not just positions. And the humility to say some of it takes months. Slow and true beats fast and fake in every market we've worked.