How to Choose an SEO Company in Uzbekistan: A Practical Guide

Start with the business goal, not the vendor

Before you collect proposals, decide what search traffic should do for you. An online shop needs product and category pages, a clinic needs service pages and reviews, and a construction firm in Samarkand or Namangan needs local queries that turn into phone calls. If you have not defined the goal, the vendor will pick one, usually whichever is easiest to show in a report.

Write down three things: which products or services actually make money, where enquiries come from today (Instagram, Telegram, OLX, phone) and what counts as a result for you, whether that is a Telegram message, an order paid through Click or Payme, or a visit to your office. With that, every conversation with a vendor becomes concrete.

Questions to ask before the contract

A good specialist welcomes questions because they help to understand your business. A weak one falls back on phrases like “comprehensive approach”. Put these to several companies and compare the answers:

• What exactly will you do in the first month, and what will I receive at the end of it?
• How do you pick queries and pages for my business instead of using a ready template?
• Who edits the website, who writes the copy, and who checks the facts in it?
• What happens to the texts, changes and access rights if we part ways?
• How do you count enquiries that came specifically from search?
• Who is my permanent contact, and how often do we talk?

Methods: what a vendor should be able to explain

Ask how they plan to earn links to your site. Bought links from dubious platforms can give a short-lived bump and later cause visibility problems. A sensible answer sounds like building your own content, mentions in industry directories and media, and partner publications.

The same goes for artificially boosting behavioural signals and for “secret methods”. If nobody will explain what is being done to your site, you will carry the consequences, not the contractor. Transparency matters more than any promise.

Reporting and access

A report that lists only keyword positions is a weak report. Positions vary by city, device and personalisation, and on their own they do not pay anyone’s salary. Ask to see search traffic over time, enquiries and their sources, and a list of completed work with the reason for each item.

Your website, analytics and Search Console should belong to your company, with the vendor added as a user rather than as an owner. Register the domain and hosting in your company’s name as well. If a contractor insists that analytics are “better kept on our side”, stop and think.

Red flags and good signs

These warning signs usually show up in the first meetings:

• a guaranteed position or “top 1” by a certain date;
• a price far below the market combined with a huge list of promises;
• refusal to show examples of work or introduce current clients;
• reports that are not tied to enquiries or sales;
• reluctance to give you access to analytics.

Test the vendor in practice

A good sign is when they ask questions back: about your customers, seasonality, product range and competitors. A realistic contractor says SEO pays off gradually and will not name a turnkey deadline without looking at your site.

If you are unsure, begin with a paid audit as a separate stage. Its quality shows how well the vendor understands your website: whether they find technical errors, page structure problems and content gaps, and whether they rank the work by its likely effect on enquiries. You can also compare the audit against offers from other companies.

In the contract, fix the scope of work, the report format, the notice period for ending the cooperation and who owns the materials. If you are looking for a partner for SEO optimisation in Uzbekistan, the markdev team is ready to discuss your task, walk you through our audit approach and explain how we tie the work to enquiries.