What experience level should an SEO company have?
Enough of the right kind, held by the people who will actually do your work. Years in business are a weak measure on their own: a young company staffed by people with long experience elsewhere can be stronger than an old one that has repeated the same methods for a decade. What tells you more is what the experience contained, whether it matches your situation, and whether the company changed its methods when search changed.
Experience of change
Search changes, and experience is most useful when it includes adapting to that. A clear, dated example is Google’s March 2024 core update. In its announcement of the March 2024 core update and new spam policies, Google described a change in how it identifies helpful content, saying there is “no longer one signal or system used to do this” and pointing site owners to its guidance on people-first content. It also introduced “three new spam policies against bad practices we’ve seen grow in popularity: expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse, and site reputation abuse.”
A company with real experience can tell you what it changed after events like these: which methods it stopped using, which clients it had to help recover, and what it does differently now. A company that says its approach has never needed to change in years of work is describing ten years of the same year, not ten years of experience.
Experience that fits your situation
The experience that counts is experience with problems like yours. A local service business needs a company that has handled local listings, reviews, and location pages. An online store needs experience with product and category pages, faceted navigation, and duplicate content. A site that has been hit by a manual action needs a company that has taken sites through cleanup and reconsideration. Ask for examples of work on comparable sites, with the problem, the work done, and the result, and check them with the clients where you can.
Experience of the people on your account
The experience shown in the sales process may belong to people who are not involved once the work starts. Ask who will actually do the work on your account, what each person’s background is, and how much of their time your account will get. Ask too who reviews junior staff’s work and how often senior people are involved after the start. The experience that matters is that of the people making the decisions about your site.
Testing experience with specifics
Ask what the company changed in its methods after a specific Google update, which comparable sites it has worked on, who will work on your account and what their experience is, and how senior oversight works. An answer with specifics, dates, and names is the evidence; a number of years on a website is not.