Who publishes this
This site is written, edited and paid for by Eye To Ad Media, a search-marketing agency that has worked from Denver since 2012. The office is at 1001 Bannock Street, Suite 660, Denver, Colorado 80204, a few blocks from the Art Museum in the Golden Triangle. The phone number is 1-800-481-8638 and email reaches the same people at info (at) eyetoad.com.
We are not a neutral party. We sell the service this guide teaches you to buy, and on one page we say so and link to ourselves. We have tried to earn the right to publish a buyer's guide in three ways: by disclosing the relationship at the top of every page rather than in a footer, by building a scoring method that can be checked against evidence rather than our opinion, and by never naming or ranking other Denver firms. If you read this guide and hire someone else, it has worked as intended.
Why we wrote it
A good proportion of the businesses that contact our agency are on their second or third SEO provider. The stories are similar: a listing they could not get back, content that vanished when they stopped paying, a 12-month contract that renewed itself, a report full of rankings and empty of customers. Almost none of it required bad luck. It required signing before asking a few specific questions. We wanted one place that asks those questions in order, in plain language, with the Denver details filled in, and that owners could use with any agency, including ours.
How the scoring method was built
The 10-point scorecard started as the questions we were asked by prospective clients who had been burned, cross-checked against the complaints we hear most often from businesses leaving other providers. We then filtered the list by one rule: every criterion has to be something a buyer can verify in a sales conversation or a contract review without specialist knowledge. That is why the scorecard asks whether you were shown a live Google Business Profile rather than whether the agency "knows local SEO", and whether the contract names you as owner rather than whether the agency "seems trustworthy".
The 0–5 scale and the four verdict bands were chosen for usability over precision. In testing with owners, a ten-item card with equal weights could be completed in the final minutes of a call; weighted schemes could not. The two hard-stop rules, on ownership and contract terms, exist because those are the only criteria where a single bad answer can cost more than the whole engagement fee.
Pricing figures on the benchmarks page come from proposals that prospective clients have shared with us, rate cards published by Denver-area firms, and conversations with owners during 2025 and 2026. They are observations, not a statistically designed survey, and are labelled as such. We update them when the observed ranges move.
Where we refer to Google, we rely on its public documentation for site owners: its guidance on hiring an SEO, its spam policies and its search-quality guidelines. We paraphrase rather than quote, and we encourage you to read the originals, which are free and clearer than most agency summaries.
What this guide does not do
- It does not rank, review or recommend specific Denver agencies, including the publisher.
- It does not accept payment, affiliate commissions or sponsored placements of any kind.
- It does not use fabricated testimonials, invented client names or awards from pay-to-list directories.
- It does not give legal advice. Sample clause language is a starting point for your attorney, not a substitute for one.
- It does not track you. There is no analytics script, no advertising pixel and no third-party request on any page; see the privacy page.
Who writes and edits it
The pages are drafted and edited by the agency's founder and senior strategists, the same people who sit in client calls and read the contracts prospective clients forward to us. No page is outsourced, and no page is generated and published without a person reading it against the standard we hold other agencies to on the content criterion of the scorecard.
Corrections and updates
If a pricing range looks wrong, a question has aged badly, or Google has changed something we describe, tell us using the form below. We correct errors on the page and note the change in the "updated" date in the header of each article. Suggestions for additional criteria are welcome but held to the same test: a reader must be able to verify it without taking anyone's word.
Contact the editors
Use this form for corrections, questions about the methodology, or to ask about the scorecard in a specific situation. It goes to the agency's shared inbox and is read by a person. If you would rather talk about hiring Eye To Ad Media, say so and we will treat it as a sales enquiry, which means applying the scorecard to ourselves in the first conversation.
Prefer the phone? Call 1-800-481-8638 during Mountain Time business hours. Or write to Eye To Ad Media, 1001 Bannock St #660, Denver, CO 80204.
Reusing this material
Nothing on this site is behind a login or a form. You may print the checklist and scorecard for your own use, share links to any page, and quote short passages with attribution to the Denver SEO Buyer's Guide. Please do not republish whole pages. Agencies are welcome to send this guide to prospective clients; if you do, we would take it as a compliment if you let them score you with it.