Six questions worth asking any link building, content, or SEO vendor before a brief or a payment goes anywhere near them.
The SEO services market has no shortage of vendors, and the difference between a good one and a bad one usually isn't obvious from a pricing page. A short round of questions before paying anything can save months of wasted spend on a link profile or content library that never should have gone live.
1. Can they show real, verifiable work?
Ask for live examples of past deliverables — actual published guest posts, actual client sites they've worked on — rather than screenshots or vague case study summaries. If everything is anonymized or unverifiable, that's a fair reason for caution.
2. Do they explain their process, or just their promises?
A vendor who can walk through exactly how they source sites, vet relevance, and place links is showing you something a vague "we have relationships with high-authority sites" answer never will.
3. What happens if a link gets removed or a page gets deindexed?
Links do occasionally get taken down, and pages occasionally get deindexed. A vendor with a clear replacement or refund policy for this is meaningfully different from one who treats it as your problem once payment has cleared.
4. Are they transparent about where links will actually go?
A trustworthy vendor will tell you the site, or at minimum the type of site, before a link goes live — not after. If they won't disclose placements until after you've paid, that's a sign worth taking seriously.
5. How do they handle communication when things slow down?
Response time during the sales conversation is often a preview of response time once you're a paying client. A vendor who's slow to answer questions before you've committed rarely gets faster afterward.
6. Do their prices make sense for the work described?
Genuinely relevant, editorially placed links take real time and real relationships to secure — pricing far below what that process typically costs is usually a sign the "link building" on offer is closer to a low-quality directory blast than an actual placement on a real site.