[INSERT CASE STUDY 1]A client willing to be named and contacted as a reference: sector, starting position, result, timeframe, method.
A buyer's guide
How to Choose the Best SEO Company in India
We are one of the companies competing for this search, so treat this as interested advice. It is still the checklist we would use if we were buying.
[INSERT TRUST BAR]Client logos, years in operation, or a verified results figure.
Every agency ranking for this term nominated itself
Search "best SEO company in India" and you will find agency pages claiming the title, and listicles ranking agencies, most of which are either paid placements or written by one of the agencies listed. There is no independent body assessing this. The ranking you are reading is a marketing asset, including this one.
So the useful question is not who is best. It is how you tell a competent agency from a confident one before you have paid them for six months. India has genuinely excellent SEO teams and a very large number of firms selling activity reports, and from the outside on a sales call the two are close to indistinguishable. What follows is how to tell them apart.
The eight questions that separate them
Ask these of us and of everyone else you shortlist. The answers are more revealing than any proposal.
01
"Show me a client whose traffic went down."
Everyone has one. Algorithm updates, migrations, seasonal collapses. An agency that claims otherwise is either new or editing. What you are testing is whether they can explain what happened and what they did, which is where actual diagnostic ability shows.
02
"Who specifically will do the work?"
Ask for names and ask whether they are on the call. A great deal of Indian SEO is sold by one team and delivered by another, or subcontracted onward entirely. That is not automatically bad, but you should know before you sign, not discover it in month three.
03
"What will you not do?"
A competent agency has refusals: link schemes, dubious directories, guaranteed positions, content volume for its own sake. An agency with no boundaries has no method, only capacity.
04
"How will we know in ninety days whether this is working?"
The answer should be specific, measurable and agreed before you start, and it should not be "traffic". Impressions on target queries, qualified enquiries, indexed pages against a baseline. Vagueness here is the single strongest predictor of a wasted year.
05
"What did you find on our site before this call?"
Anyone seriously interested has looked. If they arrive with no observations about your specific site, you are in a volume sales process and the proposal will be a template.
06
"What is the contract, and how do I leave?"
Long lock-ins exist because SEO takes time, which is fair, and because they protect the agency from consequences, which is not. Ninety days then rolling is reasonable. Twelve months with no exit is a transfer of all the risk to you.
07
"Do you own or resell the links you build?"
Ask where links come from and ask to see recent examples. Paid link networks are still widely sold in this market and they carry a real, deferred risk that lands on your domain, not on the agency's.
08
"Can I speak to a client who left?"
Almost nobody offers this and the reaction tells you a lot. A current client reference is a curated one; a former client is the honest read on how an engagement ends.
What good and bad look like from the outside
Neither column is about size or price. Some of the worst work in this market is expensive and some of the best is not.
What you are comparing
The pattern to avoid
MyInscribe
The first meeting
A deck about them
Findings about your site
Reporting
Tasks completed
Outcomes against a baseline
Bad months
Not mentioned
Explained, in writing
Rankings shown
Terms nobody searches
Terms tied to enquiries
Links
Source undisclosed
Every source listed
Contract
Twelve months, locked
Ninety days, then rolling
What SEO should cost in India, honestly
We do not publish rates, and neither should you trust the ones you find, but you can reason about the range from first principles.
01
Very cheap is a staffing maths problem
Work out how many hours a monthly fee can buy at a wage a competent specialist would accept. Below a certain price the arithmetic only closes if the work is junior, templated or automated. That is the honest reason cheap SEO underdelivers, not a lack of effort.
02
Very expensive is not automatically senior
Price signals positioning as often as it signals capability. Test the fee against the eight questions above rather than assuming it correlates with quality.
03
Scope drives the number more than the agency does
One service in one city, or forty product categories across three countries. Two quotes are only comparable if the scope behind them is, and it usually is not.
04
Ask what is fixed and what is variable
Strategy and management are near-fixed. Content, outreach and development are variable. An agency that cannot break its own fee down this way has not costed the work.
05
Watch for marked-up media and tools
Ad spend and third-party tool costs should be visible and unmarked. Hidden margin there is the most common quiet overcharge in this market.
What you are committing to
Compare scope, not headline fees
Ask what is fixed and variable
Check for marked-up spend
We quote on the call, once we have seen the site. If you would like our number to compare against others, that is a fair reason to book one.
Results, with the working shown
Every number here comes with the client name, the timeframe and the method. If we cannot show you how it was measured, we do not publish it.
[INSERT CASE STUDY 2]A client willing to be named and contacted as a reference: sector, starting position, result, timeframe, method.
[INSERT CASE STUDY 3]A client willing to be named and contacted as a reference: sector, starting position, result, timeframe, method.
Questions buyers actually ask
There is no defensible answer, and any page giving you one is selling something, including this page. There is no independent audit of Indian SEO agencies, and the listicles are overwhelmingly paid or self-published. What exists is a set of agencies that are a good fit for your sector, budget and working style. The eight questions above are how you find yours.
Mostly not. Ask yourself who published it and how a company gets on it. Directory-style lists frequently charge for placement, and agency-published lists exist to rank the publisher. Use them to build a shortlist to investigate, never as a verdict.
Bigger usually means more process and more continuity, and it also often means your account is run by whoever is most junior and available. Smaller usually means the people who sold it do it, and a real dependency on a few individuals. Neither is safer in general; ask who is on your account either way.
Ninety days is enough to judge the working relationship, the quality of the thinking and whether leading indicators have moved. It is rarely enough to judge revenue impact in a competitive category. Agree in advance what the ninety-day evidence will be, so the review is against a standard rather than a mood.
Paying for activity rather than outcomes, in a contract long enough that the mismatch is only obvious once leaving is expensive. The reports are full, the meetings happen, and nothing that matters moves. This is why the ninety-day question and the exit terms matter more than almost anything on the proposal.
It is a well-established arrangement and the cost difference is real. The things to check are time zone overlap, written English quality on actual published work rather than in the proposal, and how data access is handled. Our outsourcing and white-label pages cover that in more detail.
Because we will show you findings about your site before you pay anything, name who does the work, report against a baseline you agreed, and let you leave after ninety days. That is the standard we are arguing for here, so it is the standard to hold us to.
Put us through the checklist
Book a call and ask the eight questions. You will get findings about your site either way, and if another agency answers them better, take that as the guide working.
hello@myinscribe.com
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