Search Console still shows the same excluded URLs from June and the last partner never asked for implementation access.
That is the usual wreckage after a bad hire. A deck. A keyword spreadsheet. A monthly PDF of positions that never became enquiries. You are not shopping for a nationality stamp. You are trying to find a partner who will crawl the site, name the blockers, get into the CMS and change what Google actually indexes.
Choosing an SEO agency in the Philippines is a delivery test. Can they read Search Console with you. Can they write a scope that names URLs. Can they take implementation access without turning every fix into a ticket war. If those three fail, the rest of the pitch is noise.
Start from the crawl, not the deck
Open the last crawl report before you open another proposal. Look at excluded URLs, duplicate titles, 404s on money pages, canonical loops, and anything marked discovered-not-indexed. That list is the job. An agency that starts with “we will target these 40 keywords” has not looked at the site.
Ask them to talk through one crawl. Not their case-study crawl. Yours. If they cannot explain why a commercial URL is out of the index, they cannot fix it. Slide design is not a substitute for that conversation.
We start every serious conversation from the crawl and from Search Console. If those two sources contradict the sales story, the sales story loses.
Search Console access is non-negotiable
Do not hire anyone who will only work from third-party rank trackers. Search Console is the record of how Google fetched, indexed and served the site. Coverage, enhancement reports, page experience, the query set that already brings impressions - that is the brief.
Give view access for the evaluation. A serious partner will ask for it. A weak one will talk around it and send a competitor-keyword map instead. If they cannot sit in Search Console and point at indexation problems in your own property, they are guessing from the outside.
Keep owner access. Share the property. Revoke it if the fit dies. The agency that flinches at that arrangement is not ready to be in the account.
What the audit has to prove
A useful audit is not a 90-page dump of every Lighthouse warning. It has to prove three things: what is blocking crawl and indexation, which commercial URLs are underperforming and why, and what has to change in the next 90 days for enquiries to have a chance.
That is why we treat an SEO audit as the first real deliverable, not a free teaser attached to a retainer. The audit should name templates, parameters, robots rules, internal links, title patterns and content gaps against the queries you already almost win. If the document cannot be handed to a developer and a content lead without a translator, it is a sales artefact.
Ask who will present it. If the person on the call did not look at the site, you are buying a process, not a diagnosis.
Scope that names URLs and work
A scope that says “on-page SEO” and “content” is not a scope. It is a category. The document you sign should name the templates, the URL patterns, the markets, the CMS, and who implements.
Technical work: what gets fixed in robots, sitemaps, canonicals, hreflang, pagination, JavaScript rendering, and internal linking. On-page: which page types get titles, headings, copy and schema rewritten. Content: which gaps get briefs, who writes, who publishes, and how that maps to the query set in Search Console. Local, if you actually have locations. A migration, if you are actually moving host, domain or template. AI search / GEO / AEO only if that is in the brief, not as a bolt-on slogan.
Pricing stays inside a private proposal after we have seen the site, the market and the access. Anyone quoting a package before that has not scoped the work.
Implementation access or nothing ships
SEO that stops at recommendations is a report. The site does not change. Indexation does not change. Enquiries do not change.
Ask, in the first call, who publishes. Do they need staging, a developer queue, Shopify or WordPress access, a tag manager container, Search Console verification, and a named person on your side who can say yes to a title change. Write that into the scope. If the agency is happy to “send recommendations for your team,” check that your team actually has hours. Most do not.
We will not pretend a PDF of fixes is delivery. Implementation access is the filter. No access, no retainer conversation. The work has to land on the live templates or it is theatre.
Referring domains without the theatre
Ask how they think referring domains get earned on your site, in your market, with your current digital PR reality. Then listen for specifics. A list of “high DR guest posts” is a commodity pitch. A plan that starts from the pages that already attract links, the assets worth citing, and the outreach you will actually approve is work.
Bought links dressed up as digital PR will show up later as a risk, not a shortcut. You do not need a lecture. You need them to say what they will not do, and to show referring-domain movement from work that can sit next to your brand.
If link acquisition is in the proposal, it should have its own scope, its own reporting, and a named owner. Buried inside “SEO activity” it becomes unaccountable.
Enquiries, not vanity rankings
Agree the score before the kickoff. For most commercial sites that score is enquiries, qualified form fills, calls, or revenue from organic landing pages you can see in analytics. Rankings on a vanity head term are a lagging screenshot.
Set the reporting around landing pages, queries that already convert, and the technical fixes that unblock those pages. A monthly pack that leads with average position and ends with “we published four blogs” is how retainers drift.
We report against the work in the scope: crawl and indexation movement, the URLs that were changed, the content that went live, and the enquiry trend on the pages that were supposed to do the job. If a metric cannot be tied to a URL and a change, it does not lead the pack.
How to read a Philippines SEO proposal
Location is not quality. Manila, Cebu, Clark or a British-led team in the Philippines can all ship serious work or all ship noise. Read the proposal as an operator.
Who is on the account after week two. Who crawls. Who writes. Who speaks to your developer. Timezone overlap with your market - Philippines, Australia, the UK, the US - and whether that overlap is a named person or a shared inbox. White-label only if you are an agency buying production, not if you are a founder who needs a direct lead.
The commercial work you are actually buying is the Philippines SEO services stack: technical SEO, on-page and content, local where it applies, migrations when the site is moving, and AI search work when that is in the brief. A proposal that cannot map those lines to your templates is a template itself.
Ask for the assumptions. CMS. Rendering. Markets. Implementation access. What happens if the developer queue is six weeks. What happens if legal blocks copy. Those clauses tell you more than the methodology section.
Technical work before content volume
Content volume on a site that cannot be crawled is a cost. Fix robots, canonicals, parameter handling, duplicate templates and internal links first. Then brief content against queries Search Console already shows you almost winning.
A partner who wants to publish forty articles in month one, before the category templates are cleaned up, is selling production. Watch for that in the first 30 days of any plan. Technical SEO is not a phase you skip because it is less visible in a client meeting. It is the reason new URLs get indexed at all.
Migrations sit in the same bucket. If you are changing domain, HTTPS, CMS or template, the agency needs a mapping, a crawl of staging, a Search Console plan and a rollback. If they treat a migration as “we will monitor rankings,” they have not done one they had to own.
White-label, local and AI search only when they apply
Do not let the menu choose the work. Local SEO matters if you have locations, Google Business Profiles and a geo-modified query set. It does not matter if you sell one national product from a single domain. White-label matters if you are an agency that needs production under your brand. It does not belong in a founder pitch.
AI search, GEO and AEO belong in the conversation when your pages need to be extractable, citable and clear under the questions people now ask in AI results. They do not replace crawl, indexation and on-page. An agency that leads with AI search and cannot talk about your coverage report is chasing a headline.
We will put those lines in a proposal when the site and the market need them. We will leave them out when they are decoration.
Questions that end a bad call in ten minutes
Use a short list. Who will have Search Console access, and who will look at it weekly. Show me three excluded URLs on our site and what you would do. Who implements titles and template changes. What does the first audit contain, and who writes it. How do referring domains get earned here, specifically. What does reporting look like against enquiries, not average position. What is out of scope.
Listen for names, URLs and constraints. Vague answers are the answer. A good partner will push back on access, on legal copy, on a migration date that is fantasy. That pushback is useful. Cheerfulness plus a keyword list is not.
Google's guidance on hiring an SEO is the other filter worth reading before the second call. Google's guidance on hiring an SEO is blunt about understanding the work, avoiding ranking promises, and treating anyone who talks only in secret methods as a risk. Read that page, then make the agency walk your own Search Console. If those two pictures do not match, stop.
The next useful step
Shortlist from evidence. Crawl notes. A sample audit. A named person. A scope that lists URLs and access. One call where they disagreed with you about something real on the site.
If that evidence is there, ask for the audit and a scoped proposal. Not a retainer on the call. The audit should show whether they can see the site. The proposal should show whether they can price the work without hiding it inside a package name. Scope and pricing stay private until we have the site, the market and implementation access in front of us.
You are hiring for crawl, indexation, the pages that should win, and a partner who will still be in Search Console after month three. Choose on that. Then put the access in writing and start.
