About The SEM Report

I started this site because many SEO agencies are not effective. Having worked as a contractor at poorly run SEO agencies, as a freelancer, and as a business owner, I’ve seen the industry from all sides. I've witnessed poor management, poor data practices, and disappointing SEO performance. The problem is, most business owners don't know what questions to ask to keep SEO agencies accountable for their performance. Until now, there hasn’t been a reliable way to compare SEO agencies beyond the polished sales pitches they deliver.

Too often, agencies take on clients they can't genuinely help, overpromise, and underdeliver. For business owners, this means thousands of dollars wasted on ineffective SEO. For ethical SEO agencies, this means dishonest competitors steal clients, leaving those clients disillusioned with SEO entirely.

I decided to research which agencies actually drive results. By doing so, I aim to empower business owners, restore their trust in SEO, and help maintain honesty in the marketplace.

If you reach out to a firm. Please do so via the site, it helps me to track performance, improve user experience and I may follow up with you on your experience with the agency.

Methodology

To start, I performed searches on the most valuable key terms in three industries: personal injury, mental health therapy, and HVAC. (More industries will be added; please contact me if there’s an industry you’d like to see investigated.) In each industry, I run searches across 5000 geographies for both mobile and desktop, analyzing over 274,285 SERP results per industry.

I take these results and check whether the websites served are in the same zip code as the search geolocation. From that, I assign scores based on the rank of the sites in the results, weighted according to the expected click-through rate of those placements. The weights are as follows:

Next, I crawl the footer (and other metadata) of each site to find the agency that manages it. I found 4,234 agencies from this data and used them in my analysis. From this data, I can identify which of these 4,234 agencies deliver the best SEO visibility for their clients, which is how I assign my SEO Score.