Questions to ask an SEO agency before you sign

"What is your process?" and "can you guarantee results?" are the two questions almost every buyer asks, and both have rehearsed answers that every agency delivers competently. A process description sounds identical whether the work behind it is excellent or nonexistent, and no agency answers the guarantee question with anything except a version of "nobody can guarantee rankings".

The questions that discriminate are the ones an agency has not scripted, because answering them honestly costs them something. Every question below has that property: a good answer is specific and slightly uncomfortable, and a bad answer is smooth.

These matter more than anything about method, because they determine whether leaving is possible. An agency can be excellent and still leave you unable to go anywhere, and that is usually decided at the start rather than discovered at the end.

An agency that has never turned work away is an agency that takes whatever arrives, which means at least some of its clients are being sold something that will not work. These questions establish whether there is any floor.

1. 1.What kind of business would you tell not to do SEO at all? A real answer names a situation — a startup needing customers this quarter, a business whose category has no search volume, a site whose conversion rate makes traffic worthless. "We can help anyone" is the wrong answer.
2. 2.Which of the phrases we want to rank for do you think are not winnable? Every brief contains at least one aspiration that is not realistic at the available budget. An agency that agrees with all of them either has not looked or has decided not to say.
3. 3.What would you tell us to fix before spending anything with you? A good answer usually names something outside their own scope — the enquiry form, the response time, the offer. An agency whose recommendations all happen to be things they sell is describing a proposal rather than an assessment.
4. 4.When have you told a client to stop or reduce spend? If the answer is never, ask what happens when a client is not getting value. The answer to that is the actual answer.

Case studies are curated by definition and everybody shows their best. These questions get behind that without asking anybody to breach confidentiality.

• Can you show me a client where it did not work, and tell me why? The reason matters more than the example. Agencies that have never had one either have very few clients or are not counting honestly.
• What does month one actually consist of? Specific deliverables, not "discovery". If the first month is entirely research with nothing shipped, ask why.
• Who is doing the work, and are they in this meeting? The gap between the person who sells and the person who delivers is where most disappointment originates.
• How many clients does the person doing my work handle? A number that sounds too high probably is.
• What will you report on, and can I see an example report from a real client with the names removed? Reporting quality is visible immediately and predicts a great deal.
• What happens in month seven, when the obvious work is done? This is where retainers quietly become maintenance, and an agency that has thought about it will say so.

Most warning signs are matters of judgement. These three are not, and each one is common enough to be worth naming explicitly.

The first is a guarantee of rankings or positions. Nobody controls search results, guarantees are either meaningless or attached to phrases so obscure that ranking for them is worthless, and an agency offering one is telling you what their sales process is like rather than what their work is like.

The second is refusing to work in your own accounts. There is no legitimate reason for analytics, Search Console or an ad account to live with an agency rather than with the business paying for it. The reason given is always operational convenience and the effect is always a switching cost.

The third is being unwilling to show you the search terms report or its equivalent. That document shows exactly what you paid for, including the parts that were wasted. An agency that will not show it is managing your impression of the work rather than the work.

The questions run in both directions, and an agency that asks nothing commercially is planning to optimise something other than your revenue. Expect to be asked most of these before anybody quotes.

• What is a customer worth to you, and how long do they stay? Without this, nobody can tell you what a click is worth or what a sensible budget looks like.
• What is your close rate on enquiries? A site producing twice the enquiries is worth nothing if half of them are already being mishandled.
• Who inside your business will own this? Approval cycles and content sign-off delay more SEO programmes than competition does.
• What have you already tried, and what happened? Repeating a failed approach because nobody asked is a common and avoidable waste.
• What would make you consider this a success in twelve months? If neither side answers this at the start, the review at month twelve becomes an argument about what was meant.