Ten questions to ask an SEO agency before you sign anything

By Shaun Carvill, Managing Director of Clickingmad Ltd, the company behind Click. Published [DATE NEEDED: set at publication].

Take these ten questions into every agency meeting. Each has a good answer and a bad one, and the bad ones should end the meeting. You do not need technical knowledge to use them: every question is about money, people, proof or ownership, and every answer can be checked afterwards.

Why these ten

I have sat through twenty five years of these meetings from the agency side, which means I have heard every evasion on the list below delivered with complete confidence. The questions are ordered so that the expensive discoveries come early. Ask them in order, write the answers down, and treat a refusal to answer as an answer. One practical note before you start: put the questions in an email as well as asking them in the room, because a written answer is harder to soften later and easier to hold someone to. An agency that answers differently in writing than it did across the table has answered a question you had not thought to ask.

Questions one to three: the money

1. What does it cost, and what would change the price?
A good answer is a number, or a published price list, plus a plain account of what moves it: market competitiveness, site size, content volume. Nielsen Norman Group found price is the single piece of information visitors most want and that firms concealing it read as evasive, and the same applies in a meeting room. A bad answer is that it depends on your goals, followed by a question about your budget. If the price is built from your budget, it is not a price.

2. What exactly will you do each month for that money?
A good answer is an itemised list: pages written, technical work completed, links earned, each one visible in the monthly report. A bad answer is ongoing optimisation, continuous improvement, or any phrase that describes activity without naming it. You are buying work, so the work should have names. If the list changes month to month, that is fine, provided each month's report shows what was actually done in its place.

3. How long before we see results, and what will we see first?
A good answer is staged and slightly unexciting: technical improvements within weeks, movement on less competitive terms within a few months, competitive terms taking longer, with enquiries as the measure throughout. A bad answer is a guaranteed page one position. Google offers no such guarantee to anyone, so an agency promising one is either lying to you or planning to rank you for terms nobody searches.

Questions four to six: the people and the work

4. Who will actually do the work on our account?
A good answer is names and roles, including an honest account of anything subcontracted. A bad answer is our team, delivered warmly and without a single name attached. The person who pitched is very often not the person who delivers, and you are entitled to know who is. It is also worth asking how many other accounts your named person carries, because a strategist spread across forty clients is a strategist in title only.

5. What links will you build, and how?
A good answer describes links earned through content, relevance and outreach, with every link listed in your report for inspection. A bad answer is a monthly quota, links from our network, or vagueness about where links come from. Bulk links are cheap to buy and expensive to be caught holding, and it is your site that carries the penalty, not the agency. Ask to see three links they built for a current client, with the pages they point at, and watch how long the answer takes to arrive.

6. How are you preparing our content for AI search?
A good answer is grounded in evidence rather than excitement. Ahrefs studied 1.4 million ChatGPT prompts and found 88% of citations come from pages already ranking in ordinary search, and Princeton University researchers found statistics, quotations and cited sources lift AI answer visibility by 30 to 40%, so the good answer is that AI search is folded into the standard work of ranking well and structuring content properly. A bad answer sits at either extreme: dismissing AI search entirely, or selling it back to you as a separate package at a separate price.

Questions seven and eight: the proof

7. Can I see a sample report, and can I speak to two current clients and one former one?
A good answer is yes to all three without hesitation, with a report you can read unaided that leads with enquiries and revenue. A bad answer is polished case studies in place of live references, or client confidentiality deployed as a shield. Happy clients are an agency's best asset, and agencies do not hide their best asset.

8. How quickly do you respond when a client raises a problem?
A good answer names a standard, a named contact and a number that gets answered. Harvard Business Review found the average firm takes 42 hours to respond to an enquiry and 23% never respond at all, and in my experience agencies are not the exception to that finding once the contract is signed. A bad answer is any variation of we pride ourselves on communication, unaccompanied by a measurable commitment.

Questions nine and ten: the exit

9. What is the contract length, and what is the notice period?
A good answer is a rolling monthly agreement or a short initial term, with notice measured in weeks. A bad answer is a twelve month minimum with automatic renewal and a ninety day notice window. An agency confident in its work does not need a contract that makes leaving difficult, so a contract that makes leaving difficult is telling you about the work.

10. If we part company, what do we keep?
The good answer is one word: everything. The site, the content, the Google Business Profile, Analytics, Search Console and the advertising accounts, all in your name from the start. A bad answer is any pause before that word, or a clause under which content remains agency property until some further payment. I have watched businesses discover at the point of leaving that they own nothing they paid for, and it is an avoidable discovery.

What to do with the answers

Score it simply. One bad answer deserves a follow up question, because good firms have off days and junior salespeople. Two bad answers deserve a shorter meeting than the one scheduled. Three mean you thank them for the biscuits and move on to the next firm on your list. Keep the written answers from every meeting, because the agency you eventually hire should be held to what it said in the room, and eighteen months in, when the contact has changed and the reports have thinned, that piece of paper is the most useful document you own.

Ask us the same ten

We would rather you asked these questions everywhere, because we do well out of them. Our answers are on this site already: published prices from £395 to £2,500, named people, monthly reports that lead with enquiries, rolling agreements, and everything yours from day one. For the rest, ask in person: call 01746 769612 and put all ten to us.