SEO Agency Scorecard

Choosing an SEO provider involves more than comparing proposal design, case-study logos or a monthly fee. You need to understand how the provider thinks, what work it can actually deliver, how it diagnoses problems, how it measures progress and whether the proposed team and commercial model fit your organisation.

The Wild Creek SEO Agency Evaluation Scorecard turns those questions into a repeatable worksheet. It does not decide which provider you should hire. It helps you compare the evidence you have collected in a consistent way.

The 30 criteria are grouped into five areas:

1. Strategy & Business Understanding
2. Technical SEO
3. Content & Authority
4. Measurement & Learning
5. Working & Commercial Fit

Why Evidence Coverage Matters

A score is only useful when enough of the underlying questions have been answered.

The previous version of this tool had a serious weakness: if a user rated a single criterion 5/5 and left everything else unanswered, the calculation could produce 100/100. That looked precise while representing almost no evidence.

The rebuilt scorecard tracks coverage separately. Unanswered applicable criteria remain visible, and the overall interpretation stays provisional until at least 70% of applicable criteria have been rated.

N/A should be used only when a criterion genuinely does not apply. It should not become a way to remove difficult or unknown areas from the assessment.

How to Score a Criterion

Use the 1-5 rating as an evidence scale rather than a reaction to the sales presentation.

A strong score should be supported by something concrete: an example deliverable, an explanation of process, a case study with enough context, a reference, a technical answer, a sample analysis, a contract commitment, or another piece of evidence you have actually reviewed.

If you do not know, leave it unanswered and ask the provider. Unknown information is itself useful during due diligence.

Strategy & Business Understanding

This section looks at whether the provider understands the business before prescribing SEO tactics. It covers discovery quality, search intent and journey mapping, opportunity prioritisation, search competition, topical/internal-link planning and awareness of modern search surfaces.

The modern-search criterion deliberately avoids treating AI search as a separate magic discipline. A capable provider should understand AI Overviews, AI Mode and other changing surfaces while grounding recommendations in crawlability, useful content, clear entities, authority, measurement and other durable search fundamentals.

Technical SEO

The technical section asks whether the provider can diagnose crawling and indexing issues, architecture, Core Web Vitals, structured data, migrations and technical prioritisation.

The important word is prioritisation. A crawler can export thousands of warnings. The value of an SEO provider lies in deciding which problems matter, why they matter and what should be fixed first.

Content & Authority

This section looks beyond keyword insertion. It covers research quality, distinctive information, editorial standards, AI-content governance, on-page optimisation and legitimate authority development.

A strong provider should be able to explain how it will create or improve information that deserves to exist, not simply how many pages it plans to publish.

Measurement & Learning

Reporting should help a team make decisions. The criteria cover measurement design, GA4, Search Console, change diagnosis, connection to business outcomes and decision-oriented reporting.

A monthly dashboard that says traffic went down is not enough. The provider should investigate likely causes, explain confidence and uncertainty, and show what action follows from the finding.

Working & Commercial Fit

The final section looks at scope clarity, transparency, communication, team capacity, risk practices and commercial value.

This is where a technically capable provider can still turn out to be the wrong partner. A proposal should make clear who will do the work, what is included, what dependencies exist, how risks are handled and what the fee buys.

Category Importance

Each category can be weighted from 1 to 5. Use the same weighting scheme when comparing multiple providers so their scores remain meaningfully comparable.

Do not change weights after seeing a provider’s result simply to make the preferred agency score better.

How to Use the Scorecard

1. Define your category importance before evaluating providers.
2. Review proposals, meetings, work samples, references and other evidence.
3. Rate only criteria you can support.
4. Leave unknown criteria unanswered and turn them into follow-up questions.
5. Use N/A only for genuinely irrelevant criteria.
6. Wait until coverage is substantial before comparing overall scores.
7. Review low individual scores even when the overall result looks strong.
8. Complete normal commercial, legal, reference and security due diligence outside the tool.

What the Overall Score Means

The result summarises the ratings you supplied. It is not an industry certification or objective measure of agency quality.

At 70% or more evidence coverage, the interpretation describes the pattern as strong, mixed or showing substantial gaps. It deliberately avoids a universal “hire,” “shortlist” or “pass” command because different organisations can tolerate different weaknesses.

A provider with a lower overall score may still be the right specialist for a narrow technical project. A provider with a high score can still be unsuitable because of one critical contract, risk or team issue.