How we rank, and what we are not going to pretend
Six criteria, published weights, and every score traced to a page on the company's own site. Reviewed 12 September 2026.
The six criteria
Weights are out of 100. Nothing here scores performance, because we cannot verify another company's results and neither can you. Everything scores what is published and checkable before you sign a thing.
| Criterion | Weight | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|
| HVAC specialisation Do they work on HVAC, or on everything? | 20 | Count the industries the company lists in its own navigation. 5 means HVAC or the trades and nothing else. 1 means a general agency with one HVAC landing page. |
| Contract terms Can you find out how to leave before you sign? | 20 | Four things: the initial term, the notice period, who owns the site and the data and the ad accounts, and any territory clause. Scored on how many are documented and how the documented ones read. A term nobody publishes scores as not published, never as a bad term. |
| HVAC client work you can check Can they show you a named HVAC client? | 20 | Count the case studies that name the business, name the trade, and give a number over a stated period. A running total on a homepage, however many hundreds of contractors it claims, counts for nothing here, because you cannot ring up a total. |
| Reporting you can picture Do they say what is in the monthly report? | 15 | Whether the company names the metrics its report carries, says how often it lands, and says whether a person walks you through it. |
| Named practitioner Do you know who will actually do the work? | 15 | Whether people are named with roles, whether the person doing the SEO is named rather than only the salesperson, and whether the company says the work is done in-house. |
| Tenure How long have they been trading? | 10 | The founding year the company publishes, checked against the oldest dated thing we could find from them. Weighted lightest of the six: a 2004 founding date says nothing about who is on your account in 2026. |
What is deliberately not a criterion
- Domain Rating and Domain Authority. Both are third-party estimates invented by tool vendors. Google does not publish a score like that and does not use one. Ranking SEO companies on a made-up number would be a strange way to argue that measurement matters.
- Where these companies rank for their own keywords. We are competing for the same searches. Scoring rivals on a result we benefit from getting wrong is not a criterion, it is a conflict.
- Review counts and star ratings. Not comparable across platforms and easy to buy.
- Anything we would have to make up. No client counts, no revenue figures, no results attributed to a named company that the company has not published itself.
The displayed order follows the score
There are no manual positions. The weighted total determines the order, including TradeOps Consulting. Funding terms and the current TradeOps score are stated on the disclosure page.
Where the numbers come from
Every score was read off the company's own website on 12 September 2026, and the pages used are linked on each profile. Three limits worth knowing about, because they affect what you are reading:
- Some sites block us. RYNO Strategic Solutions, Scorpion, Rocket Media, CI Web Group, KickCharge Creative refuse automated access, in one case even from an ordinary browser profile. Their unreadable criteria are left unscored and shown as a dash. They are ranked on what could be read, and the row says so. An unscored criterion is never quietly recorded as a zero.
- Tenure is softer than it looks. Domain registration records were useless here: the registrar returned the same placeholder date for every address we checked. So tenure comes from the founding year a company publishes, checked against the oldest dated thing we could find from them. It is the lightest criterion at 10 points partly for that reason.
- Not published is not the same as bad. A company that says nothing about its notice period scores low on contract terms. That is a score about disclosure. It is not a claim that the notice period is unfair, and nothing on this site should be read that way.
What gets a score moved
- Publishing the initial term, the notice period and who owns the site.
- Publishing a case study that names an HVAC client, with a number and the period it covers.
- Naming the person who does the SEO rather than only the salesperson.
- Saying what the monthly report contains before you are a customer.
- Dropping or adding industries, which moves the specialisation score.
Corrections are welcome and they are cheap to make. If something here is out of date about your company, the fix is usually a link to the page that proves it.