How to Choose an SEO Agency for a B2B Export Website: Six Questions With Verifiable Answers

Hiring an SEO agency for a B2B export website goes wrong in a predictable way: the agency reports rankings, the exporter waits for enquiries, and twelve months later the two have never been connected. This guide is written for manufacturers and trading companies choosing an SEO agency — including whether to choose us — and it comes down to six questions, each of which has a verifiable answer. It uses our own Search Console data and a September 2026 test of what AI assistants recommend when asked for an agency, so you can see what buyers actually find.

What the agency’s own numbers should look like

Before asking an agency about your site, ask about theirs. Any SEO agency runs its own website; its Search Console data is the one case study it cannot fake. Ours, for the record: over the 16 months to September 2026, tianwenwangluo.com received 543,305 impressions and 7,460 clicks in Google Search, an average click-through rate of 1.37% at an average position of 15.8. Those are not glamorous figures, and we publish them because the point of the number is that you can compare it with what any agency shows you. An agency that will not show its own Search Console will not show you your site’s either.

Six questions, and the answer that disqualifies

1. “What will you report to me every month?”

The wrong answer is a ranking table. The right answer names three things: indexed product pages (from Search Console’s Pages report), impressions and clicks for buyer-intent queries (not all queries), and the number of enquiries that reached your inbox with their source. If enquiries are not in the report, the agency is not accountable for them.

2. “Which queries do you think my buyers type?”

Ask for ten. A serious answer includes product terms with a commercial modifier — “custom metal parts manufacturer”, “waterproof connector supplier” — and excludes vanity terms with volume but no buyers. Then look at your existing Search Console query table: on many industrial sites fewer than a tenth of impressions come from buyer queries at all, and an agency that has not looked at that table before quoting is quoting blind.

3. “Who writes the English?”

If the agency is in China — as we are — the English must be written or edited by a native speaker, not machine-translated. Test it: read two paragraphs from any English site in their portfolio. Google’s guidance on automatically generated content is explicit that machine-translated text published without review is a spam signal (Google Search Essentials: spam policies).

4. “What do you do about AI answers?”

Buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews for supplier recommendations instead of scrolling results. We measured this two ways. First, 500 Chinese-language B2B queries tested in 2026 returned an AI Overview 80.9% of the time (method and query list). Second, in September 2026 we ran 72 questions through a clean AI environment — no access to our own files — asking, among other things, which Chinese agencies build export sites and do Google SEO. The assistant named 18 companies across the answers; our own site was cited three times, each time as a checklist source for choosing an agency, never as a recommended agency. We publish that because an agency claiming it can “get you recommended by AI” should be able to show a measurement like this, and most cannot.

5. “What is in the contract, and what is not?”

A usable SEO contract lists the deliverables by name — technical fixes, pages, articles, links — with a monthly count, states who owns the content and the accounts, and says what is excluded. It does not promise a ranking, a traffic figure or a number of enquiries; nobody controls those, and an agency that guarantees them is describing a refund policy, not a service. Our quotes are written per project and we do not publish a fixed price, because a five-page single-language site and a three-language catalogue with 200 products are not the same job.

6. “Can I verify the work myself without a technical background?”

Yes, in under an hour a month. Open Search Console and check three things: whether product pages are indexed, whether buyer queries are gaining impressions, and — from your phone — whether a test enquiry through the site’s form arrives. The twelve-point version of this check is on our research site: SEO audit for a B2B export website: the 12 checks we run.

Red flags in one table

What to expect in the first 90 days with any competent agency

Days 1–14: technical fixes that stop Google from indexing product pages, plus the enquiry-path test. Days 15–45: the buyer-query list agreed and the first pages rewritten around it. Days 46–90: first impressions on buyer queries visible in Search Console; enquiries, if the product has demand, usually follow impressions by weeks, not days. If after 90 days the agency cannot show buyer-query impressions rising in Search Console, the strategy is wrong, however busy the reports look.

Three things a good agency will refuse to do

Buy links. Paid placements and automated link networks are the fastest way to lose a site that was working. Google’s link spam policy treats them as manipulation, and the penalty lands on your domain, not the agency’s. When an agency’s proposal includes a monthly link count with no list of where those links will be, that count is the price of the penalty.

Publish at scale with a model. Two hundred articles a month on a manufacturer’s site, written by a model from a keyword list, produce exactly the pattern Google’s scaled content abuse policy describes. The sites we maintain publish fewer pages, each built around a buyer question and at least one fact we measured; the volume is decided by how many such questions exist, not by a content quota in the contract.

Promise enquiries. An agency controls the site; it does not control whether the market wants the product this quarter. What it can promise is that the enquiry path works, that buyer queries are being targeted, and that both are visible in Search Console every month. That is what our own contracts say, and it is the standard we suggest you hold any agency to.

If you are comparing us

Our SEO services page describes deliverables and reporting; Google Ads management covers paid search, which we treat as a separate contract; and tianwenseo.com holds the studies behind the numbers above, including the ones that show where we fell short. Apply the six questions to us the same way you would to anyone else.