We want to get SEO services, but the package contents vary wildly — what are we actually paying for?

Cut all ties immediately with the agency promising 150 backlinks a month. They'll likely blast automated links from hacked networks or link farms. Your site might get a temporary boost the first month, but by month four you'll be completely wiped from the search results; you'll spend two years cleaning up that mess.

The biggest headache for e-commerce sites is filter pages and variants. If you have 10 different filters under "stainless steel workbench" and they're opened up to search engines incorrectly, your index gets bloated. Any technical service you buy must cover canonical tags, sitemaps, and fixing pagination architecture.

For our B2B site, we hired an agency 8 months ago that strictly focused on content and technical infrastructure. They wrote 4 in-depth product guides a month. Our total organic quote requests tripled in 8 months, and we didn't buy a single link package.

I love agencies that guarantee first-page rankings; Google can't even guarantee that to its own employees, but our local agencies must have the algorithm in their back pocket. You can gently drop that proposal straight into the trash.

Your products aren't everyday impulse buys; commercial kitchen supplies are a serious B2B market. Buyers look for technical drawings, durability certificates, and sheet metal thickness. btw that's why having a team that truly understands the trade write your category and product descriptions is the most critical part.

the one that just hands you a tech audit and walks away is useless too, if you dont have an in-house dev whos gonna impplement the fixes? you need a team that handles both the strategy and supplies content to the site.

Make sure these are clearly stated in the contract: 1) A minimum quota of original content published to the site every month. 2) The agency personally testing and validating all technical bug fixes. 3) A transparent link report provided for every external outreach or PR mention.

The third agency's content-first approach fits your industry best. Still to verify their grasp of industry terminology before signing, ask for a paid trial covering 3 categories to see the quality firsthand.

There's also a measurement aspect to this. Merge instead of deleting; deleted content doesn't come back.

I'm also curious if anyone does it differently.

Saved.

The opposite happened to me, that's why I'm writing. Just because everyone does it doesn't mean it's right.

Timely topic.

My perspective changed after experiencing that. Start with a small trial; don't commit to everything at once.

Everything goes well for the first three months; problems arise in the fourth. If you post the result here, it will help others too.

Timely topic. If you get three different answers on a topic the question was asked wrong.

The real issue isn't the number but what it's based on.

I have a question, don't want to go off-topic though. When making decisions, write down the worst-case scenario too, not just the best.

Let's separate the concepts, they're getting mixed up. Any comment made without a control group is just a guess.

If you have questions, write them; I'll answer as best I can.

I went through the same thing two years ago. Start with a small trial; don't commit to everything at once.

This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.

Following.