Questions to Ask an SEO Agency Before You Sign

Insights

The questions to ask an SEO agency are the ones that force specifics out of a sales conversation: what gets done in the first 90 days, which named human does the work, and how the agency will connect its activity to revenue. Almost every agency can describe SEO well. Far fewer can tell you what they will do on your site next Tuesday, and that gap is where most wasted retainers begin.

What to Judge an SEO Agency On Before You Ask Anything

The questions to ask an SEO agency fall into four groups: strategy, staffing, reporting, and exit terms. Ask what they will do in the first 90 days, who handles the work day to day, which metrics they tie to revenue, and what you keep if you cancel.

Those four groups matter because they map to the four ways an SEO engagement usually fails. A vague strategy means the agency is selling a package, not a plan. Unnamed staffing usually means an offshore production team you never meet. Reporting built on rankings and impressions means nobody is accountable for pipeline. And a contract that keeps your Search Console access, your content, or your backlink work locked to the agency means leaving costs you everything you paid for.

Judge the answers on how quickly the agency gets specific. A good one will name pages, name tools, and name people inside the first ten minutes. When we sit in on these calls with clients, the proposals that later work out are the ones where the agency asked us harder questions than we asked them.

The 8 Questions to Ask an SEO Agency, and What a Good Answer Sounds Like

These eight questions separate agencies that have a method from agencies that have a deck. Ask all of them in one call and take notes on how fast each answer arrives, because hesitation on staffing and reporting is the most reliable warning sign in the whole conversation.

1	What will you do in the first 90 days, and in what order? You want a sequence, not a service list. A good answer names the technical audit, the pages they will rewrite first, and why those pages. A weak answer describes SEO in general and promises a strategy after onboarding.
2	Who does the work, and can I meet them? Ask for the name and role of the person in your Search Console every week. A good answer introduces a strategist and says plainly which pieces are subcontracted. A weak answer says “our team” four times.
3	Which metric will you be judged on in month six? A good answer picks something commercial: qualified leads, booked calls, revenue from organic. A weak answer offers rankings and impressions, both of which can climb while your phone stays quiet.
4	Show me a client in a similar situation and what happened. Similar means comparable size, sales cycle, and starting authority, not the same industry. A good answer includes a case where results came slowly and explains why. Nobody has an unbroken record.
5	How do you build links, specifically? This is the question that exposes risk. A good answer describes digital PR, partnerships, or original research. If the answer involves buying placements or private blog networks, you are being sold something that violates Google’s spam policies.
6	Who writes the content, and does AI touch it? There is no wrong answer here, only an undisclosed one. A good agency tells you exactly where models assist and who edits and fact checks afterward. Ask to see two published pieces from the last quarter.
7	What do you need from us, and what happens if we are slow? SEO stalls on client side approvals more often than on agency effort. A good answer quantifies it: two hours of your time a month, subject matter interviews, a 5 day review window on drafts.
8	If we cancel in month four, what do we keep? You should keep your content, your Google Analytics and Search Console properties, your Google Business Profile, and any accounts created in your name. Get that in writing before you sign, not after the relationship sours.

Red Flags That Should End the Conversation Early

Some answers are disqualifying on the spot, and the clearest one is a ranking guarantee. Google states in its own documentation on hiring an SEO that no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and calls agencies that promise it a warning sign. Every line below is a reason to stop the process.

✓	A guaranteed number one ranking, or a guaranteed position for any specific keyword.
✓	Refusal to name the people who will work on the account, or to let you speak with them.
✓	A 12 month contract with no exit clause and no performance checkpoint before month six.
✓	New Analytics or Search Console properties created under the agency’s own account, not yours.
✓	Reporting that leads with impressions and keyword counts and never mentions leads or revenue.
✓	A proposal that arrives without a single question about your business, your margins, or your best customers.

What SEO Costs, So You Can Judge Whether a Price Is Fair

Most small and mid sized businesses pay between $1,500 and $7,500 a month for an ongoing SEO retainer, and the number tracks seniority far more than effort. Knowing the bands ahead of the call means you can hear an answer like “$800 a month, all inclusive” and understand immediately what is being left out.

Engagement	Typical monthly	What it realistically buys
Local, single location	$1,000 to $2,500	Profile and citation work, a few pages a quarter, light reporting
Small business, competitive market	$2,500 to $5,000	Technical fixes, 2 to 4 content pieces a month, a named strategist
Multi location or ecommerce	$5,000 to $12,000	Template level fixes at scale, digital PR, dedicated analyst time
One time audit	$2,500 to $10,000 once	A prioritized fix list your own team or developer executes

Ask any agency quoting below $1,000 a month exactly how many hours that buys. The honest ones will tell you it is four or five, which is enough to maintain a Google Business Profile and little else. Our full breakdown of how much SEO costs covers what each band includes, and digital marketing agency pricing shows where SEO sits against paid and creative work.

How to Compare Proposals That Look Nothing Alike

Score every proposal on the same five dimensions instead of reading them end to end, because agencies deliberately format proposals so they cannot be compared side by side. Give each dimension a score from 1 to 5, total them, and the winner is usually obvious within twenty minutes.

Dimension	A 5 looks like
Diagnosis	Names problems on your actual site, with URLs
First 90 days	A dated sequence, not a list of services
People	Named strategist with hours, subcontracting disclosed
Measurement	A commercial metric with a month six target
Exit	30 day notice, you keep every account and asset

One more habit worth stealing from procurement: send all three agencies the same written brief so their answers are actually comparable. The same scoring logic drives our guide to writing a website RFP, and it works just as well for a marketing retainer. If local visibility is the point of the engagement, ask specifically how they handle Google Business Profile optimization, because that work is cheap, fast, and frequently skipped.

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