The short answer
A good SEO agency tells you what it will change on your site, who implements it, how progress will be measured and how long it may take. What it doesn't do is promise rankings. Google's guide to hiring an SEO is blunt on this: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."
This guide covers what the work should include, what to ask, how to read a proposal and what changes when your business, or your market, is in Colombia.
What an SEO agency should actually do
Google's guide lists the services an SEO may offer: reviewing your content and site structure, technical advice on hosting, redirects, error pages and JavaScript, content development, keyword research, SEO training, expertise in specific markets and geographies, and optimizing for generative AI. In practice, a serious proposal covers five areas.
Technical SEO
Making sure Google can crawl, index and understand your pages: robots.txt, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, status codes, speed, structured data and an architecture where each important topic has one page. If you're changing platforms or domains, it includes the redirect map (see website migration).
Keyword research and content by language and country
Research is done for the market you sell in, in the language people search in. A keyword study built for Mexico or Spain, or translated from your English keywords, doesn't carry over to Colombia as is.
Links and digital PR, within the rules
The legitimate version is earning links from media, trade associations and partners because you have something worth citing: your own data, expert commentary, a real project. Google's spam policies treat as link spam, among other things, buying or selling links, excessive link exchanges, automated programs that create links, low-quality directories and sending someone a product in exchange for a write-up with a link. A paid link isn't a violation if it's qualified with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".
Local SEO with Google Business Profile
If you serve customers in person in Bogotá, Medellín, Cali or any other city, your Business Profile matters as much as your site. Google's tips for local ranking say local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and that prominence takes into account things like how many websites link to the business and how many reviews it has. Google adds: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."
The Business Profile guidelines set limits an agency has to respect: the profile name is the business's real-world name, without added keywords or taglines; virtual offices aren't eligible; businesses that serve customers at their locations hide their address; and there should be one profile per business.
Reporting tied to revenue
Search Console's Performance report shows clicks, impressions, CTR and average position, grouped by query, page, country and device. Joined with your inquiries (form submissions, WhatsApp clicks, calls), that's what matters. A report that only shows positions for keywords the agency picked doesn't tell you whether SEO brings in customers.
Questions to ask before you hire
The first seven are adapted from Google's own list. The last three are often missing:
- Can you show me previous work and put me in touch with clients?
- Do you follow Google Search Essentials?
- What results do you expect, in what timeframe, and how will you measure them?
- What experience do you have in my industry, in Colombia and in my city?
- Have you worked on sites in more than one language or country?
- How long have you been doing this?
- Will you tell me about every change you make to my site, and why?
- Who implements the changes: you, my team or my developer?
- What access do you need, and whose name are the accounts in?
- What happens to access, content and reports if we stop working together?
Google also suggests noticing whether the agency is curious about your business: what makes it different, who your competitors are and how customers find you. During an audit, it recommends granting read-only access to Search Console, not write access. And remember that you're ultimately responsible for what the company you hire does: if it puts deceptive content on your site, the site can be removed from Google's index.
Promises that are red flags
- Guaranteed rankings. First page in a month, top three assured. Google rules this out.
- A special relationship with Google, or priority submission. Google warns about both. Ads don't help either: the same guide says advertising with Google has no effect on your organic results.
- Backlink packages sold by volume. Ask where they come from: bought links and low-quality directory links are link spam.
- Hundreds of mass-produced articles. Google calls generating many pages without adding value for users, with AI or without it, scaled content abuse.
- One page per city with the same text. Near-identical pages for "SEO in Bogotá", "SEO in Medellín" and "SEO in Cali" that funnel visitors to one place are doorway abuse, and blocks of text listing cities are keyword stuffing.
- Buying expired domains to repurpose their history: expired domain abuse.
- Unsolicited emails from firms you've never heard of, or offers to submit your site to thousands of search engines. Google says to be wary of both.
- Secret methods. If they can't explain what they'll do to your site, don't hire them.
Under the spam policies, a site that violates them may rank lower or not appear in results at all.
How to read a proposal
Price depends on scope, so two quotes only compare well once you know what each one includes.
| Item | What to look for | Red flag |
|---|---|---|
| Deliverables | A list with quantities and dates: audit, keyword-to-page map, technical fixes, new pages | Monthly optimization with no detail |
| Who implements | In writing: who makes changes on the site and who approves them | PDF recommendations nobody applies, or changes made without notice |
| Access and ownership | Search Console, analytics and Business Profile in your company's name; the agency as a user | Accounts controlled only by the agency |
| Baseline | Starting point measured before the first change | Nothing to compare against |
| Metrics | Queries, clicks and pages that generate inquiries | Only rankings or total visits |
| Reporting | Monthly, with interpretation and next steps | Automated exports with no reading |
| Links | How they're earned and from what kind of sites | Packages by volume |
| Content | Who writes it, who reviews it and for which country | Article count as the only measure |
| Timelines | Expectations by stage: technical fixes verify quickly, rankings take longer | A fixed date for page one |
| Term and exit | Notice period, handover of documents and removal of access at the end | Long lock-in with no exit clause |
On timelines, Google's SEO Starter Guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months, and that you'll likely want to wait a few weeks before judging whether a change helped.
On exit terms, two details are easy to miss. In Search Console, removing an owner doesn't revoke their verification tokens, so check the unused ownership tokens too (managing owners, users and permissions). And if the agency created your Business Profile, taking it back means they have to add you as an owner and then transfer ownership. Simplest is to have everything in your name from day one.
What's different about Colombia
Colombian Spanish needs its own research
Don't assume people in Colombia search the way people do in Mexico or Spain, or that your English keywords translate one to one. Whether buyers type "página web" or "sitio web", "cotización" or "presupuesto", is something to check in Colombian data. An agency should show you real queries from Colombia, for example Search Console grouped by country, before deciding which page answers which search. This matters most if you're a foreign company entering the Colombian market with an English-first site.
Local businesses and B2B are different projects
A clinic, restaurant or school in Bogotá or Medellín depends on its Business Profile, reviews and pages that match what people search for nearby. A B2B company needs clear service pages, content that answers what buyers ask before requesting a quote, and measurement of qualified inquiries rather than traffic. If an agency proposes the same plan for both, it hasn't understood your business.
If you also sell outside Colombia
Each language or country version needs its own URL, and Google recommends against redirecting visitors automatically based on their language or location (managing multi-regional and multilingual sites).
Hreflang annotations tell Google which pages are versions of each other. Its guide to localized versions says each version must point to itself and to every other version (Google ignores a tag unless the page it names points back), and codes must follow ISO standards: es-CO fits that format, while es-419 (Latin American Spanish) isn't supported. Google also doesn't use hreflang or the lang attribute to detect a page's language; it reads the visible content. More on multilingual websites.
AI search: what can and can't be promised
Many proposals now include some form of "AI SEO". Google's documentation on AI features and your website makes several points:
- There are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Standard SEO best practices apply.
- To be shown as a supporting link, a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet.
- You don't need new AI text files, special markup or special schema.org structured data.
- That traffic is counted in Search Console's Performance report, under the Web search type, and Search Console's generative AI performance report shows how your site performs in those features on its own.
An agency can commit to crawler access, indexable pages, key information in text and the same measurement every month. It can't promise that an AI system will cite or recommend you, because each platform decides that. Be wary of anyone selling a file or special markup as a guarantee of appearing in Google's AI answers.
How Dardo approaches SEO
Dardo is a three-person studio in Bogotá. We do technical SEO for new and custom-built websites in English, Spanish or both: keyword research per language and market, URL structure, indexing, structured data, hreflang and monthly reporting against a baseline. We don't buy links or guarantee rankings, and if you need high-volume article production, a dedicated content agency will serve you better.
For visibility in assistants like ChatGPT and Google's AI features there's AI search optimization, on the same terms: we measure, but we don't sell guaranteed mentions. If you'd like us to look at your site, get in touch.