Questions to Ask When Hiring an SEO Company
For business owners and marketers vetting SEO agencies. Twenty questions that separate firms with a repeatable process from ones selling rankings, plus how to read the answers and what to check in the contract.
The questions
Open any question for the note
Which of your current clients look most like us in size, industry, and market?
Why ask it
The answer tells you whether you would be an ordinary client here or the account where they learn something new. An agency that mostly serves national ecommerce brands will bring the wrong playbook to a three location dental practice.
What results did you get for those clients, and can you show me the analytics behind the case study?
Why ask it
Slide deck percentages are easy to write and hard to verify, so ask to see a screen share of the actual traffic, conversion, or revenue chart. Note whether the growth started after they arrived or was already underway.
Who will actually do the work day to day, and how much of it is subcontracted?
Why ask it
Many agencies sell with a senior strategist and deliver with a junior coordinator plus outsourced writers. Get names, get the split between strategy and execution, and ask how many other accounts that person carries.
What is your pricing model, what is included at that price, and what triggers an extra invoice?
Why ask it
Retainer, project, and hourly models fail in different ways, and vague scopes are where change orders hide. Ask specifically whether content production, developer time, tools, and paid placements sit inside or outside the fee.
What do the first 90 days look like, deliverable by deliverable?
Why ask it
A credible answer names concrete artifacts with dates: technical audit, keyword and page map, prioritized fix list, first content batch. Vague talk about strategy and optimization in month one usually means there is no repeatable onboarding.
What access will you need, and which accounts stay registered in our name?
Why ask it
Your domain, analytics, Search Console, Google Business Profile, and CMS should be yours with the agency added as a user. Agencies that insist on registering these under their own accounts can hold your history hostage later.
How do you decide which keywords and pages to prioritize for us?
Why ask it
You want to hear about buyer intent, business value, and how hard the current results are to beat, not just search volume. A keyword tool export with no mention of your margins or sales cycle means the targeting will drift toward easy wins.
Do you implement technical fixes yourselves, or do you hand our developers a list?
Why ask it
This determines whether you need internal engineering hours you have not budgeted for. Ask which platforms they work in directly and how they prioritize fixes when your development queue is already full.
How do you build links, and can you show me five links you built for a client last quarter?
Why ask it
Live examples are the fastest way to tell genuine placements and digital PR from paid guest posts on sites nobody reads. If they cannot name one example or get evasive about paying for placements, treat that as the answer.
How much of the content you deliver is written by a human, and who checks it for accuracy?
Why ask it
Generated content at volume is now the most common way an agency hits a deliverable count while adding nothing. Ask about editing and subject matter review, then read two published pieces start to finish before you sign.
What will the monthly report contain, and can I see a real one with the client name removed?
Why ask it
A sample report shows you what they consider proof of value. Rankings and impressions with no leads, calls, or revenue anywhere in it means you will be shown motion rather than results.
Which numbers should I judge you on at month three versus month nine?
Why ask it
Strong agencies separate early leading indicators, such as crawl fixes, indexed pages, and impression growth, from the lagging revenue numbers that take longer to move. Anyone promising revenue by month two is guessing.
How do you handle attribution between organic, paid, direct, and branded search?
Why ask it
Agencies that also run your paid search have an incentive to blur the lines, and branded search often gets counted as an SEO win it did not earn. Establish exactly which conversions they will claim before the first report.
What did you find when you looked at our site before this call that you think is holding us back?
Why ask it
This is the closest thing to a live work sample, and prepared agencies separate themselves within a minute. Specific findings about your site structure, thin pages, or a competitor beating you show they did the homework unpaid.
What do you need from us each month, and how many internal hours should we budget?
Why ask it
Most stalled engagements stall on the client side: approvals, expert interviews, developer tickets, product data. An agency that cannot state its asks plainly has not thought about how the work actually ships.
Do you work with any of our direct competitors, and how do you handle the overlap?
Why ask it
Overlap is not automatically disqualifying, but you need to know whether your strategy gets pitched down the street next month. Ask about exclusivity by geography or category, then get whatever they promise into the agreement.
Tell me about an engagement that did not work out. What happened, and what did you change afterward?
Why ask it
Every agency has lost a client, so a claim that all of them succeeded means they are either new or not being straight with you. The signal is whether they can name their own contribution instead of blaming the client.
Have any sites you worked on lost significant traffic to an algorithm update or a manual action?
Why ask it
Anyone with real tenure has lived through a bad update, and the recovery story reveals their judgment under pressure. Listen for whether they diagnosed a cause and changed course, or simply waited and hoped.
If we stop working together, what do we keep: the content, the research, the dashboards, the links?
Why ask it
Some agencies host content on their own subdomains, keep research locked in proprietary tools, or rent links that disappear when payment stops. Settle ownership in writing before you sign, not on the way out.
What is the contract length and notice period, and what happens if we want out in month three?
Why ask it
Long lock ins with heavy early termination fees move all the risk to you before you have seen a single deliverable. A confident agency will accept a shorter initial term or a clear performance based exit.
How to Vet an SEO Agency
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Best Practices
Give Every Finalist the Same Written Brief
Send all three or four candidates one page: your site, how you make money, your top two competitors, your budget range, and what you would call success in twelve months. Identical inputs make the proposals comparable, and the questions they ask you back are usually more informative than the proposals themselves.
Make One Question a Live Work Sample
Asking what they already found on your site turns a sales call into a short audition. Strong candidates will have run a crawl, checked which competitor outranks you on your money pages, or requested Search Console access. Weak ones offer a free audit once you sign.
Ask for a Former Client, Not Just a Current One
Current references are hand picked and often still in the honeymoon. Ask for one client who left in the past year and actually call them. Ask why they left, whether the handoff was clean, and whether the traffic held up for the six months after.
Confirm Account Ownership Before Any Work Starts
Domain registrar, analytics property, Search Console, Google Business Profile, and CMS admin all belong in accounts you control, with the agency added as a user. Removing a user takes a minute. Recovering a property registered under somebody else's email address can take months.
Read the Contract Before the Proposal
The proposal is marketing and the contract is the deal. Check the initial term, notice period, auto renewal, what legally counts as a deliverable, who owns the work product, and whether you can pause if your site goes into a rebuild. Negotiate the term down before you negotiate the price.
Question Sequences by Situation
A 20 Minute First Call
- 1Which of your current clients look most like us?
- 2What did you find on our site before this call?
- 3Who would do the work day to day?
- 4What does month one produce, specifically?
- 5What is the initial contract term?
Local Service Business
- 1How much of the work is Google Business Profile and map pack versus the website?
- 2How do you handle review generation, and do you ever write or filter reviews?
- 3How do you build pages for multiple locations without producing near duplicate content?
- 4Is your citation and directory work a one time cleanup or an ongoing line item?
Ecommerce or Software
- 1How do you handle faceted navigation, pagination, and thin category or variant pages?
- 2How will you split effort between category pages, product pages, and the blog?
- 3How will you set up tracking so we see organic revenue and not just sessions?
- 4What is your approach to comparison and alternative pages against competitors outranking us?
Recovering From a Traffic Drop
- 1Looking at our Search Console data, what is your first hypothesis for the drop?
- 2How would you tell an algorithmic change apart from a technical or migration problem?
- 3Have you recovered a site from something similar, and how long did it take?
- 4What would you tell us to stop doing immediately?
- 5At what point would you tell us recovery is unrealistic and we should rebuild instead?
How to Read the Answers
- A guarantee of a number one ranking means either they are selling terms nobody searches or they do not grasp that nobody controls the ranking. That one is a walk away, not a negotiation.
- Watch how they discuss the last algorithm update. Detailed observations about which pages moved and why is expertise. Blaming Google with no diagnosis is not.
- "We have a proprietary process we cannot disclose" is nearly always a way to avoid describing tactics that would not survive daylight.
- Notice whether they ask about your margins, capacity, sales cycle, or what a lead is worth. An agency that never asks what a customer is worth will optimize for traffic you cannot bank.
- If deliverables are counted in units, ten posts and twenty links a month, ask what the units are for. Volume commitments usually mean the plan is quantity standing in for strategy.
- Discomfort at the question about who does the work is real signal. Confident agencies introduce the account lead during the sales process, not after the invoice.
- Discounts that expire this week, and reluctance to shorten the initial term, both point the same direction: their retention depends on the contract rather than the results.
- A candid story about a client that failed, including their own share of it, is one of the strongest positive signals available in a sales call.
Common Pitfalls
Choosing on Monthly Price
SEO retainers span an enormous range, and the cheap end is usually a fixed content quota with no strategy or technical work attached. Compare what the money buys: who does the work, at what seniority, for how many hours. A cheap retainer that produces nothing for a year is the most expensive option on the table.
Skipping the Technical Conversation
If your site cannot be crawled properly, loads slowly, or renders content only through JavaScript, content spend leaks away. Ask what needs fixing before anything new gets published, and be wary of any plan that opens with a content calendar and never mentions site structure.
Accepting Rankings as the Headline Metric
Rankings vary by location, device, and personalization, and results pages keep pushing organic links further down. Set the reporting expectation up front around qualified organic sessions, conversions, and revenue, with rankings and impressions as supporting detail rather than the story.
Letting Them Own the Content
Content hosted on an agency subdomain, published through their platform, or handed over without source files is leverage against you. Require everything to live on your domain and in your CMS, with drafts and keyword research delivered in a format you keep.
Expecting Results Without Internal Capacity
Approvals, expert interviews, product data, and developer tickets all sit on your side of the line. Assign owners and turnaround times before signing. Plenty of engagements that looked like agency failure were four months of unanswered approval requests.
Judging Them Only by Their Own Rankings
An agency that ranks for nothing is worth a question, but busy agencies legitimately deprioritize their own marketing while referrals keep coming. The stronger check is asking which client sites you may look at, then evaluating those in the search results yourself.