How to Choose an SEO Company in Egypt

Someone in a WhatsApp group recommends an SEO company. They send a price list, it looks reasonable, you sign. That's how a lot of Egyptian businesses hire for SEO. Six months later there's a monthly PDF full of green arrows and the phone still isn't ringing.

An hour of the right questions avoids most of that. Choosing an SEO company in Egypt comes down to three checks: do they know what they'll do each month, can they show you real results from real sites, and will they be honest about what they can't promise. Below is how to check each one, including what we think a client should expect from us on our SEO service.

Here's what this covers:

• What a good SEO company actually does
• Red flags in Egyptian SEO offers
• Questions to ask before you sign
• What the contract should say
• How to read their reports
• Agency, freelancer or in-house
• Where to start

What a good SEO company actually does

Before you judge anyone, know what the job is. Real SEO work, month to month, includes:

• Fixing technical problems that stop Google from crawling or indexing your pages
• Researching what your customers type, in Arabic, English or both
• Writing and improving service pages and articles around those searches
• Improving titles, descriptions, internal links and page structure
• Managing your Google Business Profile if you have a physical location
• Earning real mentions and links from relevant sites
• Reporting on traffic, leads and what's planned next

If an offer doesn't touch most of these, it's not full SEO, whatever it says on the price list. If you're new to all this, our plain guide on what SEO is is a good ten-minute read before your first meeting.

Red flags in Egyptian SEO offers

Some patterns show up again and again in local offers. Any one of them is a reason to ask harder questions.

A ranking guarantee. "First page in 30 days" or "number one or your money back". Google itself says no one can guarantee a ranking.

A big backlink number. "1,000 backlinks a month" for a few thousand pounds means automated links from spam sites. That kind of link usually does nothing, and sometimes it gets your site penalized.

Keywords chosen by them, not you. If they promise to rank 5 keywords but won't say which, they'll pick ones nobody searches, rank them, and call it success.

No access to your data. If they say they'll handle Search Console and Analytics "on their side" and you can't log in, walk away. You need to see the numbers yourself.

They want to own your stuff. Domain, hosting, Google Business Profile, Analytics: these should be registered to you. It's common for a business to lose access to its own Google Maps listing because an old agency set it up under someone's personal Gmail.

Everything is a package. Your clinic and a fashion store don't need the same plan. If the scope never changes no matter what you tell them about your business, they're not listening.

Questions to ask before you sign

Bring these to the meeting. A good company will answer all of them without getting defensive.

1. What will you do in the first month, and in months two to six?
2. Can you show me Search Console results from a site similar to mine, with permission from that client?
3. Who writes the content? Do they know my industry? Arabic, English, or both?
4. Who implements the changes on my website, you or my developer?
5. Which numbers will you report on, and how often?
6. What can't you promise me?
7. If we stop working together, what do I keep?

Pay attention to question 6. The honest answer sounds like "we can't promise positions, timelines depend on competition, and if your site is slow we'll need a developer to fix it." A company that says "nothing, we guarantee everything" just told you what you need to know.

What the contract should say

Get the scope in writing, not just a price. A decent SEO contract or proposal states:

• The monthly deliverables: number of pages optimized, articles written, technical tasks, report frequency
• Which keywords or topics are the focus, agreed with you
• That all accounts and content belong to your company
• The minimum term and how to exit it (a one-month notice is normal after the first period)
• What's not included, like paid link buying, website development, or content beyond the agreed number

For pricing, see our breakdown of SEO cost in Egypt. If a quote is far below the typical ranges, ask what's been left out.

How to read their reports

A monthly report should answer one question: is this bringing us more business? So look past the rankings table.

The numbers that matter are organic clicks and impressions from Search Console, the pages bringing that traffic, and the leads that came from it: form fills, calls, WhatsApp clicks from the site. Rankings are useful as a sign of direction, but a report that only shows positions for keywords you didn't choose is decoration.

The report should also say what was done last month and what's planned next, in plain language. If you read it and still don't know what they worked on, ask. And remember that the first months are mostly groundwork. Our article on how long SEO takes explains what's normal at each stage so you can tell slow from stuck.

Agency, freelancer or in-house

A good freelancer can be excellent for a small site with a clear focus: one clinic, one service, one language. Usually cheaper, often very skilled. The risk is capacity. One person can't write, fix code and report for five clients at once without something slipping.

An agency makes sense when you need several skills at the same time: technical SEO, writers in two languages, design, and someone who can tie SEO to your ads and social media. You pay more, and you should get more hands for it.

In-house works once SEO is a big enough channel to justify a full salary, and usually still with outside help for tools and content. Many companies in Egypt end up with a hybrid: one marketing person inside who owns the strategy, and an agency doing the heavy work.

Where to start

Shortlist three companies. Send each the same short brief: your business, your main services, the areas you serve, the languages your customers use, and your monthly budget. Ask for a written scope, not just a price, and run the seven questions above.

Then pick the one that explained things most clearly, not the one that promised the most. If you'd like us to be one of the three, here's how our SEO service works, or reach us through the contact page.