SEO Service Checklist: What You Should Get for Your Money

Most SEO buyers do not lose money because SEO “doesn’t work”. They lose money because the SEO service they purchased was missing core deliverables, lacked measurement, or was never tied to revenue outcomes.

This checklist is designed for BOFU decision-making: use it to compare agencies, freelancers, and hybrid providers, line by line, so you can confirm what you are actually getting for your money.

Start with scope

Before you evaluate deliverables, lock the scope. Many bad engagements look “cheap” because key work is excluded.

Make sure your proposal clearly states:

• Website scope: number of domains, subdomains, languages, and key templates (home, category, product, blog, docs, location pages).

• Market scope: target countries, languages, and whether local SEO is included.

• Conversion scope: what counts as success (demo requests, trials, purchases, calls, sign-ups) and which pages matter most.

• Operational scope: who implements changes (your dev team, their team, or both), and expected turnaround times.

If any of the above is fuzzy, ask for a rewritten scope before you sign.

Deliverables you should expect

A solid SEO service should cover four pillars: technical, content, authority, and measurement. The exact mix depends on your business, but you should be able to point to concrete artifacts.

Core deliverables

If a provider cannot show examples of these artifacts (redacted is fine), that is a major risk signal.

Audit checklist

An SEO audit is only valuable if it turns into a prioritized plan your team can execute. Ask specifically what format you will get, and whether they will re-audit after implementation.

Technical audit

Your SEO service should check (and document) at minimum:

• Crawlability and indexation: robots.txt, sitemap health, index coverage patterns, noindex rules, canonical behavior.

• Site architecture: depth to key pages, orphan pages, internal link distribution.

• Performance and UX: Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering issues, template bloat.

• Structured data: validity, coverage, and template-level schema opportunities.

• International (if relevant): hreflang correctness, language targeting, duplicate clusters.

For baseline standards and policy alignment, it’s reasonable to expect your provider to reference Google’s guidance, including Google Search Essentials and the Search Spam Policies.

Content and intent audit

A real content audit is not “these posts are short”. You should get:

• A URL inventory grouped by page type and intent.

• A keep / update / merge / remove recommendation.

• A cannibalization review (multiple URLs competing for the same query set).

• A gap analysis tied to revenue pages, not just top-of-funnel ideas.

Competitive audit

Expect the provider to answer:

• Who are the SERP competitors for your money queries (often different from business competitors)?

• Which page types are winning (comparison pages, templates, programmatic pages, guides)?

• What is your realistic win strategy: content depth, internal links, links, better UX, better product-led pages?

If their competitor analysis is just “Domain A has more backlinks”, it is incomplete.

Strategy checklist

You are paying for decisions, not just tasks. The strategy layer should be explicit and testable.

Keyword mapping

You should receive a mapping that connects:

• Keyword cluster → intent → target URL → content format

This avoids the most common waste in SEO services: producing content that has no clear ranking target or conflicts with existing pages.

Page type plan

A strong provider will specify what page types they will build or improve, for example:

• Landing pages (use-case, industry, integration)

• Product and category templates (e-commerce)

• Comparison and alternatives pages (high intent)

• Documentation and help articles (SaaS)

• Blog clusters that support money pages via internal linking

If the plan is “we’ll publish blog posts weekly” without stating how those posts will support conversion pages, you are buying activity, not a growth system.

Execution checklist

Execution is where SEO services often underdeliver. The proposal should state exactly what gets implemented and how.

Technical implementation

You should know which of these is included:

• Direct implementation in your CMS or codebase

• A dev ticketing workflow (Jira, Linear, GitHub issues)

• QA after release (crawl validation, structured data tests, indexation checks)

Ask for examples of their tickets. Good tickets include:

• The issue and why it matters (impact)

• Steps to reproduce

• Acceptance criteria

• Risk notes (what could break)

Content production

Content deliverables should include more than a draft.

You should expect:

• A content brief template (shared ahead of time)

• Editorial QA rules (sources, claims, screenshots, product truth)

• On-page basics (title, headings, internal links, schema where relevant)

• A publishing workflow (draft, review, publish, refresh)

If content is part of the SEO service, ask who owns:

• Fact-checking

• Brand voice consistency

• Legal review (if you are regulated)

Authority checklist

“Link building” can mean anything from PR to spam. Make it concrete.

A safe authority plan usually includes:

• Linkable asset strategy (data studies, tools, original insights)

• Digital PR or partnerships aligned to your niche

• Unlinked mention reclamation

• Resource page outreach

It should also explicitly exclude risky tactics that violate policy. Your contract should not incentivize manipulative link schemes, and your provider should be comfortable referencing Google’s guidance on link spam.

What to ask for:

• Sample outreach emails and target lists (redacted)

• Quality standards for placements (relevance, traffic signals, editorial control)

• Anchor text approach (should be diverse and natural)

• Attribution and ownership of acquired links and assets

Measurement checklist

Reporting should not be a vanity deck. It should help you decide what to do next.

Minimum tracking setup

Your SEO service should validate, or help you set up:

• Google Search Console for search performance and index coverage

• Google Analytics 4 for engagement and conversions

• A rank tracking approach (even a small, curated set is fine)

What a monthly SEO report should include

Also insist on a “next actions” section. If every report ends with “traffic is up/down”, you are not getting senior-level SEO.

Ownership checklist

This section protects you when you switch providers.

You should own:

• All content produced (drafts, briefs, images if applicable)

• All accounts and properties (GSC, GA4, ad accounts)

• All tracking (tags, events, dashboards)

• All access keys stored in your password manager

Your provider should document:

• What they changed (change log)

• Where it was changed (CMS templates, plugins, CDN rules)

• How to roll it back

If a provider resists clean ownership terms, that is a deal-breaker.

Timeline checklist

SEO takes time, but professional services should still create early proof.

A realistic plan often looks like:

First 14 days

• Access, baseline metrics, quick crawl and indexation checks

• Prioritized backlog with impact estimates

• 3 to 10 quick wins identified (titles, internal links, indexation fixes)

Days 15 to 45

• First wave of technical fixes shipped

• First cluster or page type shipped (not random posts)

• Reporting cadence established, with annotations for all major releases

Days 46 to 90

• Expand what is working (more clusters, better internal linking)

• Refresh underperforming pages

• Authority work begins compounding

If someone promises page-one rankings in 30 days for competitive terms, treat it as marketing, not a plan.

Red flags

Some red flags are operational, others are ethical. Both cost money.

Proposal red flags

• Guaranteed rankings or guaranteed traffic numbers

• Vague deliverables like “on-page optimization” with no definition

• Reporting limited to keyword positions only

• No mention of cannibalization, internal linking, or indexation

Process red flags

• No access checklist, no kickoff, no baseline

• No QA step before publishing or pushing code

• No change log

Policy red flags

• Private blog networks (PBNs) or “guest posts at scale” with identical footprints

• Paid links without disclosure and quality controls

• Doorway pages and spun content

How to compare providers fast

If you only have 30 minutes, ask every provider to answer these five questions in writing:

• What will you ship in the first 30 days?

• How will you decide what to do first (what signals, what scoring)?

• What does your monthly report look like (show a sample)?

• Who implements changes, and what is your QA process?

• If we stop working together, what do we keep?

You are looking for specificity, not confidence.

Where automation fits

Many SEO services bundle content production because it is labor-heavy. That is also where delivery often breaks: missed deadlines, inconsistent quality, and slow publishing.

A practical modern approach is to keep strategy and QA human-led, then automate repeatable production work.

For example, BlogSEO is an AI-powered platform that can automate parts of the SEO content engine, including content generation, internal linking, auto-scheduling, and publishing to multiple CMSs. If you want to reduce the “ops tax” of content, you can use automation to increase velocity while keeping humans in control of:

• Strategy and prioritization

• Editorial standards and factual accuracy

• Brand and legal review

• Final approval

If you want to see whether an automated publishing workflow fits your team, you can start with BlogSEO’s 3-day free trial at blogseo.io or book a demo call here: Book a demo.

Use this checklist as a contract addendum

The simplest way to protect your budget is to turn this checklist into your engagement terms:

• Attach a one-page “deliverables list” to the contract

• Define what “done” means (artifact, implementation, QA)

• Define the reporting cadence and the KPIs you expect

• Add ownership language for content and accounts

If your provider can deliver on these basics, you are not just buying an SEO service. You are buying a measurable growth system.