How to spot a poor SEO company

As someone who recently made the change from his SEO company (the old company was no longer going to be able to handle clients) I wanted to share something that I came across on my journey for a new company. These are two definite red flags that I think people should be aware of:

- The SEO company promises to deliver results. How is this even possible? You cannot guarantee results, you can only do your best. How could you guarantee something that another company runs (Google in this case) without resorting to blackhat tactics?

- Clichés. You would not believe how many times I have had people try to ‘talk over me’ using lingo and clichés. I realize that you are the SEO company, but if you are trying to b.s. me (sorry I did not have a nicer way to put it) I am going to know.

Anyone else have any red flags?

What you do to your own website in terms of optimizing it only accounts for about 15% of your success rate in getting top listings with Google. The other 85% comes from off-site optimizing, such as the number and quality of the websites, using "deep links", that are linking back to you. Example, I've seen a website with a PR of 1 get indexed on the the first page of Google with other websites that were PR 4-6, because the website with the PR 1 had a 1,000+ other websites linking to it.

Regards,
Steve