Most agencies aren't lying to you on purpose - they're repeating what they were taught. The problem is who did the teaching.
Where SEO myths come from
We built FBi on a foundational truth that the rest of the marketing industry actively tries to hide: Google’s own core instructions to website owners haven't fundamentally changed since they were first published in 2002. For over two decades, Google’s official documentation has boiled down to the same basic premise: build clean, fast infrastructure, provide genuine value, and be ‘real’.
Done right, marketing is a mix of science and art, with a sprinkling of discipline - not a retainer that never ends. A multi-billion-dollar SEO software empire was built by distorting Google's genuine intent. These ‘SEO Platforms’ took basic public guidelines and expanded them into an ecosystem of manufactured metrics, arbitrary scores, and over-engineered nonsense - all designed to pad their own billing and keep business owners trapped in a cycle of perpetual anxiety. Your agency learned SEO from those dashboards. Then it billed you to chase them.
Consider the industry's obsession with "E-E-A-T" (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). For years, agencies have billed thousands of dollars to "optimize your E-E-A-T score." Yet, in Google’s own basic guide, it is explicitly listed as something you should not focus on.
“Thinking E-E-A-T is a ranking factor… No it’s not.”
Source: Google SEO Starter Guide
As search evolves, the software grift simply invents new acronyms to keep the billing machine moving. Google’s documentation on third-party tools calls this out directly:
“There's plenty of third-party SEO advice on the internet related to SEO, search listings, and AI experiences (sometimes called AEO for 'answer engine optimization' or GEO for 'generative engine optimization'). While some advice is helpful, others may misinterpret or make claims about what 'Google says' or how Google ranking systems work.”
Source: Google Search Central Documentation
More myths - each one answered in Google's own words - are on our SEO myths list.
How do I know if my SEO agency is doing a good job?
You don't need to learn SEO to answer that. You already feel the symptoms. Here are six you can check yourself - no login, no software, no sales call.
1. Your cost per customer isn't going down.
What you spend is a choice - some owners simply pay what they have to pay. But cost per customer is a score, and lower is better. Good search work makes every customer cheaper over time. If your cost per click or lead only goes one direction, your agency is renting you traffic - not building you anything.
2. You can't explain what they did last month.
While you're paying, you should be growing. Ask for one sentence: how much did we grow? If the answer isn't a simple "X%," they didn't do anything of value - no matter how thick the report is.
Those detailed printouts are designed to engage you - to make you feel a part of it. They built engagement. For you, not your customers.
3. Your report is full of scores Google doesn't use.
"Domain Authority," backlink counts, "SEO score," "E-E-A-T score" - proprietary numbers invented by software companies. Google has said publicly that it doesn't use any of them. If that's what your agency celebrates, they're grading their own homework. See Google's own words.
4. Your customers are waiting at the door.
Run your site through Google’s own speed test, PageSpeed Insights. It’s free and takes two minutes. Anyone who builds websites should get you a score of 90 or better; I put my clients in the top 3%. If you’re below 90, it’s ignorance, laziness, or a commission. Most slow sites are weighed down by apps and plugins doing jobs that should be built into the site. Every one of those makes your customer, Google and AI wait to read your page, and every day you’re slow, you fall further behind.
5. You're paying for five services to run one website.
SEO, PPC, Local SEO, Content Marketing, "Website Optimization" - each on its own invoice. These aren't separate services. Done properly, they're one job for one provider, and strong SEO turns the rest into minor chores. It's only a full-time job when someone is avoiding the foundational work.
6. You're not the one people find first.
When someone searches for what you sell, is yours the first name they see? How often you show up is called impression share, and it's the only scoreboard that matters. If it isn't you, someone else is getting your customers. You're the market leader, or you're not - the rest is excuses.
Website foundation: why your tech stack decides your SEO
No business would block its own front door. Online, most do it every day - and pay an agency to hang a bigger sign over it.
Your choice of code and hosting provider can limit your success before you ever spend a dollar on marketing. Sadly, that decision is usually made by web designers biased by myths and app culture - tools that pay them a small residual income, at your expense.
Site speed is what that foundation delivers. A fast site keeps people. People who stay, click and come back create the engagement search engines watch. Better engagement earns better rankings. Better rankings bring more people. Then it repeats. That loop is the whole game, and almost every myth on the market is a distraction from it.
“Google's core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience.”
Source: Google Search Central | Page Experience
Every app you bolt on blocks your doorway.
Plugins, third-party apps, chat widgets, pop-ups, trackers - each one loads its own code before your customer sees a thing. Nearly all of it can be replaced with clean, hand-written code on proper infrastructure.
Has your SEO agency built anything your customers use?
Or only reports you read? That one question separates marketing from paperwork.
Blogs on a schedule aren't for your customers.
The "four blog posts a month" package is activity you're billed for, not something your customers use. If it's worth publishing, it's worth making a permanent, foundational page on your site.
What I build instead.
Once the foundation is right, I build things people actually use - because use is what search engines reward. For Designer Limo, that meant giving customers a reason and a one-click way to share their ride, so they promoted themselves and the business at the same time. For AASA Sourcing, a simple interactive factory map told every visitor, at a glance, these people are real and they're big.
Neither one was in a software dashboard. Both moved the numbers that matter. Again: most agencies are engaging and upselling you - not your customers.
An SEO agency that works for you, not for itself
I came up right after the dot-com bubble, running a marketing firm and a tech company side by side - rolling out the kind of infrastructure the modern internet was built on. That put me in rooms most marketers never see. VCs courted us. Presidents of every kind sat across the table - from the sitting US president to the heads of companies like Sony and Blizzard.
I sat there watching important people introduce other important people, everyone working hard to impress everyone else - and not one person at that table was talking about me or my business. It was all about them. I found it boring then, and that same model runs most of the internet now.
That's the industry your agency was trained by. It's built to impress itself.
Google originally envisioned a democratic digital landscape where the best, most valuable content naturally rose to the top - and at FBi, that’s still what we do, and have done for decades - building tangible Web Equity that Google’s core engineering demands and your consumers deserve.
Google controls the clock, so good work takes some time to show. That's the only reason I'd ever keep you on a retainer - it's shorter than everyone else's, it's optional, and I only bill when my work makes things better. You'll keep growing without it.
You don't have to learn any of this, and you don't have to change how you run your business. You run your business. I'll handle what's under the hood.
Tell me about your business →
If I can't make you the market leader, I'll tell you that too.