Choosing an SEO Company in Dartford: 9 Questions to Ask Before You Sign Anything

Search “SEO Dartford” and you’ll find no shortage of companies promising to put your business at the top of Google. Some of them are excellent. Some will take a monthly fee for a year and leave you with nothing you can point to. From the outside, they can look identical.

This guide is for business owners in Dartford, Bexley and the surrounding area who are thinking about paying someone for SEO — search engine optimisation — and want to know what to ask before signing anything. You don’t need to understand the technical side to ask good questions. You just need to know which answers should reassure you and which should send you back out the door.

First: what local SEO actually involves

For most local businesses, SEO isn’t about ranking nationally for broad terms. It’s about showing up when someone nearby searches for what you do — “accountant Dartford”, “electrician near me”, “wedding venue Bexley”. That usually comes down to a handful of things:

• Your website’s technical health — whether Google can crawl it, whether it loads quickly on a phone, whether each page has a clear title and description.
• Your content — whether your pages clearly say what you do and where you do it, in the words your customers actually use.
• Your Google Business Profile — the listing that appears on Google Maps and in the local results, with your hours, photos and reviews.
• Consistency and reputation — whether your name, address and phone number match everywhere you’re listed, and whether real customers are leaving reviews.

A good SEO company should be able to explain which of these matter most for your business, and why, in plain English. Which brings us to the questions.

Nine questions to ask an SEO company in Dartford

1. “What exactly will you do each month?”

You’re looking for specifics: pages written or improved, technical issues fixed, Google Business Profile updates, reports delivered. “Ongoing optimisation” on its own isn’t an answer. If the monthly work can’t be described, it probably can’t be measured either.

2. “Can you guarantee a first-page or number-one ranking?”

This one is a test. The right answer is no. Google’s own guidance on hiring an SEO says plainly that no one can guarantee a number-one ranking. Rankings depend on your competitors, on Google’s constantly changing systems, and on things no agency controls. A company that guarantees positions is either overpromising or planning to use tactics that can get your site penalised.

3. “How will you build links to my site?”

Links from other websites still matter, but buying them, or joining link networks, breaks Google’s spam policies and can do lasting damage. Good answers involve earning links: local directories that genuinely matter, suppliers and partners, local press, community involvement. Be wary of vague answers or numbers like “50 backlinks a month”.

4. “Who owns the accounts and the work?”

Your Google Business Profile, Google Search Console, Google Analytics and your website should all be in your name, with the agency given access — not the other way round. If you part ways, you should keep everything. Ask this before signing, not after.

5. “What will the reports show?”

Useful reports connect activity to outcomes: which searches your site appeared for, how many people clicked through, calls and enquiries from your Google listing, and what changed as a result of the work. A page of rankings for keywords nobody searches for is not a report.

6. “How long is the contract, and what’s the notice period?”

SEO takes time to show results, so a sensible minimum term is reasonable. But a long contract with no break clause puts all the risk on you. Ask what happens if you’re unhappy after three months.

7. “What does my website need before SEO will work?”

If your site is slow, hard to use on a phone, or built on a platform that makes simple changes difficult, monthly SEO will struggle to deliver. An honest agency will tell you when the website itself is the bottleneck — even if it means less monthly work for them.

8. “Can I see work you’ve done for businesses like mine?”

Ask for real examples you can check yourself: live websites, Google listings, before-and-after search visibility. Be cautious of case studies with impressive percentages but no business name you can look up.

9. “What can I do myself?”

A good partner will point out the things you’re best placed to do — asking happy customers for reviews, adding photos to your Google listing, keeping opening hours up to date. If an agency makes everything sound too complicated to touch, ask why.

Red flags worth walking away from

• Guaranteed rankings, or guaranteed traffic numbers.
• Cold emails claiming your site has “critical SEO errors”, with no detail.
• Refusing to explain their methods because they’re “proprietary”.
• Setting up your Google accounts in their own name.
• Reports that only ever show rankings, never enquiries.

The website underneath the SEO

It’s easy to treat SEO as something separate from your website. In practice, most of what helps a local business get found — a fast site, clear page structure, well-written service pages, proper page titles, accessible content — is decided when the website is built. Getting those foundations right first often makes ongoing SEO cheaper and faster to show results, and sometimes means you need much less of it.

Livicode Tech Solutions builds websites for businesses across Dartford, Bexley and Bromley with local SEO foundations built in from the start — fast, accessible, and structured so Google can understand what you do and where you do it. If you’re not sure whether your current site is holding back your search visibility, tell us about it — no obligation, and no assumption that the answer has to be expensive.

Livicode Tech Solutions — Your Local Digital Solutions Partner
www.livicode.com · info@livicode.com · WhatsApp: +44 7708 803980