South Florida has more marketing agencies per square mile than almost anywhere in the country. Here is how to tell them apart before you sign anything.
Everything here is what we do for clients. If you use it yourself and never call, that is a good outcome.
Agencies use the same words for very different work. "SEO" can mean a full local program with profile management, content, reviews, and citations, or it can mean a monthly report and a blog post. Ask precisely what is delivered each month and what happens if it is not.
The same is true of web design. A site built to look good and a site built to rank are different products with different prices, and most buyers do not learn which one they bought until six months later.
Local SEO in South Florida commonly runs from roughly $700 to $3,000 a month. Websites for local businesses range from around $1,000 to well past $12,000 depending on page count and content.
Very low prices usually mean volume: templated work, shared account managers, and no custom content. That can be fine for a simple business and is a poor fit for a competitive category.
Very high prices should come with proportionate specifics. If a $5,000 monthly retainer cannot be broken into concrete monthly deliverables, that is a question worth pressing.
Who exactly will do the work, and where are they? Many local agencies subcontract everything offshore, which is not automatically bad, but you should know before you sign.
What is the contract length and what happens if I leave? Long lock-ins usually exist to protect the agency from its own results.
Do I own the website, the domain, the hosting, and the Google Business Profile at the end? If the answer is anything other than yes, walk.
What will you show me every month, and will it include calls and leads rather than only rankings and traffic?
Can you show me the local search results for my category right now and tell me who is beating me and why? An agency that cannot do this live has not looked.
Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google. Where a specific position is guaranteed, it is almost always for a term nobody searches.
Vague deliverables. "Ongoing optimization" is not a deliverable. Ask what will exist at the end of the month that does not exist today.
Ownership taken hostage. Agencies that register your domain in their name or build on a proprietary platform you cannot export are holding a deposit against your leaving.
No mention of your Google Business Profile. For a local business, an SEO proposal that does not lead with the profile is not a local SEO proposal.
Pressure to sign tonight. Marketing is a months-long commitment and no legitimate opportunity expires in an afternoon.
A local agency should know your market: which competitors rank, how the season affects your category, and which neighborhoods search differently. Test this in the first call by asking about your specific city.
A national agency may bring more specialized skill and more resources, and will not know that the Boca season starts in October or that hurricane preparation restructures a contractor's year.
Neither is automatically right. What matters is whether the work is specific to you, and specificity is easy to test before you pay for it.
A complete Google Business Profile with the correct category, full services, current photos, and active posts.
A measurable increase in review volume with responses to all of them.
New pages on your website for the services and cities you want, each written specifically rather than templated.
Consistent listings across the major directories and the ones specific to your industry.
A report showing rankings by area, calls, and leads, and an honest account of what has not worked yet.
A common benchmark is 5 to 10% of revenue, higher when growing aggressively. More useful than the percentage is knowing your cost per acquisition and the lifetime value of a customer, because those tell you what a lead is worth.
In house makes sense once the work is a full-time job and you can supervise it. Below that, an agency gives you several specialists for less than one salary. Many businesses do both, with an internal coordinator and outside execution.
Paid advertising can produce leads within days. Local SEO typically shows movement in 30 to 60 days and meaningful results in four to six months. Anyone promising fast organic results is describing something that does not exist.
Ask for the data, ask what changed, and set a specific deadline with specific expectations. If your agency cannot explain what has been done and what it produced, that is your answer.
Sometimes. If the site has a page for each service and city, loads quickly, and matches your profile, it can support SEO as it is. If it renders content with JavaScript or has one page listing everything, the foundation has to change first.
Free 30-minute strategy call. We'll run your category live and show you exactly where you stand.