Delhi Local SEO Notes

Twelve months is the normal length of an SEO engagement in India and it is a reasonable one — the work does not produce much in eight weeks and judging it at that point is unfair to everybody. But twelve months is also long enough that a bad fit costs you a year, so the questions you ask before signing matter more than the price.

Here are the ones that actually separate a good engagement from an expensive one, in the order I would ask them.

What are the first three things you will change, and why those three?

A proposal that cannot answer this has not looked at your site. Anybody who has spent an hour on a real site has a list — the canonical tags are pointing at old URLs, the service pages are four hundred words, half the catalogue is not indexed. If the answer is a list of deliverables rather than a list of problems, that is a template, not a plan.

Which pages are we trying to rank, and for what?

The answer should be a short table: page, keywords, current position. Not “we will target 30 keywords”. Thirty keywords with no pages attached is a line item; the same thirty mapped onto six specific URLs is a strategy, and you can hold it to account at month six.

Be suspicious of any plan where the homepage is the target for a city keyword. If you want to rank for your city, you need a page about your city.

What does the monthly report contain?

Ask to see a real one from another client with the name removed. If it is a list of activities — posts written, links built, errors fixed — it tells you what was done but not whether it worked. The report you want has positions for the agreed keyword set, impressions and clicks for the agreed pages, indexed page count, and enquiries attributed where attribution is possible.

An activity report is not a performance report, and twelve months of activity reports is how a year goes by without anybody noticing nothing moved.

Who does the work, and will I speak to them?

In a lot of Indian agency arrangements the person who sells is not the person who executes and neither is the person who writes. That is not automatically bad, but you should know the structure, know who writes the content for your industry, and have a direct line to whoever makes technical changes to your site.

What access do you need, and what will you change without asking?

Reasonable answers: Search Console, Analytics, a CMS login, and a written process for anything that touches templates or redirects. Unreasonable: full server access with no change log, or content published on your domain without review.

Equally, decide what you are willing to let them change quickly. An engagement where every title tag edit needs a week of approvals wastes the retainer on waiting.

What happens to the work if we stop?

Content on your own domain stays yours. Links built to your site stay. But accounts created on third-party platforms, tracking configurations, and the documentation of what was done frequently walk out of the door with the agency. Ask for a handover list up front and it costs nothing; ask for it at the end and it rarely arrives complete.

What are the realistic timelines for my specific situation?

A site with existing authority moving from position 15 to position 6 is a different timeline from a new domain trying to reach page one. Any answer that does not distinguish between those two is a sales answer. Expect the honest version to include a quarter where very little visible happens.

What is not included?

The most expensive surprises in SEO contracts are the exclusions: content beyond a certain word count, development work, design, paid promotion of content, local listings management, the cost of tools. Get the exclusions in writing before you sign, not in month four.

The one red flag that matters most

Guaranteed positions. Nobody controls Google's ranking, and anybody who promises a position is either misunderstanding their own work or counting on you not checking. A guarantee of effort, of a specific scope, and of reporting transparency is reasonable. A guarantee of position one is not available for sale.

If you are a business in the city going through this exercise and want an outside read on a proposal before you commit a year to it, the full scope breakdown is set out here.

A companion piece on reading the numbers once an engagement is running: the monthly SEO report line items that actually predict revenue.