The questions to ask an SEO agency before you sign

Most agency calls are run by the agency. They present, you listen, you ask a few polite questions at the end, and you leave with an impression rather than evidence. Reverse that. Book forty five minutes, send three or four questions in advance so the team can pull real numbers instead of improvising, and send the same script to every candidate so the answers stay comparable. The goal is not to catch anyone out. It is to hear how a team thinks about a problem you already understand well, which is the best predictor of the next twelve months.

Evidence comes first: it is the only part of a pitch a designer cannot rewrite. Ask the agency to open Google Search Console live during the call, on a client property, and walk you through sixteen months of clicks, impressions and average position. Anonymisation is legitimate: the domain hidden, the account name blurred, the query list filtered. What is not legitimate is having nothing at all to show. Search Console data comes from Google rather than from the agency, which is what makes it worth asking for, and the agency leaderboard applies the same standard.

Expect some agencies to offer third party estimates instead. Those tools are useful for competitive mapping, but they model traffic rather than measure it, and routinely miss a large share of real clicks, especially on long tail queries. So the follow up matters more than the first question: is this figure measured or estimated, and what is the source. Then read the curve and ask what happened at each inflection point: an update, a migration, a seasonal peak. Our guide on how to choose an SEO agency covers the sourcing stage before these calls.

The most common disappointment in agency work is not incompetence, it is substitution. The senior strategist who runs the pitch is often the founder or the head of growth, and the delivery lands with a junior account manager and a shared production team. That model can work perfectly well, but only if you know about it before you sign. So ask for names, roles, years of experience and, above all, the monthly hours committed to your account. A retainer without an hours figure is a number with no unit attached.

Do the division yourself. Take the monthly fee, subtract a realistic margin and overhead, and see how many senior hours it plausibly buys at local market rates. If a proposal implies twenty hours of senior strategy for a fee that could only cover five, someone is either losing money or planning to use cheaper hands than the ones in the room. Ask how much of the work is subcontracted, to whom, and in which country, then ask who reviews that work before it ever reaches you.

Continuity questions belong here too. Ask what happens when your account manager leaves, how many accounts each strategist carries, and how handovers are documented. A small agency carrying eight accounts per strategist behaves very differently from one carrying twenty five. Ask too how quickly they answer in a normal week, because response time is what you feel every month. If the honest answer is that one person will do everything, you may simply be buying a freelancer with an agency markup, in which case comparing directly against independent SEO consultants is the fairer test.

Technical questions are the fastest way to distinguish a practitioner from a presenter, because the vocabulary cannot be faked for long. You do not need to be technical yourself. You need to ask a concrete question, listen for a concrete answer, and notice when the reply is a definition rather than a decision. Ask them to look at your site during the call and name three problems they would investigate first, with a reason attached to each. Fifteen minutes of live crawling beats any slide about methodology.

The best probes force a trade off rather than a recital. Ask how they decide which pages should be excluded from the index rather than improved, because that answer reveals whether they think about crawl budget and quality signals or only about adding pages. Ask how they detect two of your own pages competing for the same query and what they do about it, which separates people who have consolidated real page sets from people who have read about cannibalisation. Ask what they check before, during and after a domain or platform migration.

Listen for ownership of implementation. Many recommendations die in a backlog, so ask who writes the tickets, whether they can work directly in your content management system, and how they handle a development team that has no capacity for the next six weeks, which is the normal situation rather than the exception. A team that plans around your constraints beats one that produces a perfect audit nobody executes. Our technical SEO audit checklist lists what a serious audit should cover, and the SEO services page shows how providers scope that work.

Content is where most of the budget goes, so the process behind it deserves more scrutiny than the sample article in the deck. Ask who writes, whether the writers are employees or a freelance pool, and how many pieces each one handles per month. Ask to see a real brief, not a finished post. A brief exposes the thinking: search intent, the questions to answer, the internal links planned, the sources required and the subject matter expert to interview. Finished prose can be bought anywhere, briefs cannot.

Then ask about AI directly and specifically. The useful question is not whether they use models, because in 2026 nearly everyone does somewhere in the chain. The useful question is where exactly: research and clustering, first drafts, outlines, meta descriptions, translation, or full publication with no human pass. Ask what percentage of published words a human rewrote, who fact checks claims, and how they handle a topic where your business has proprietary knowledge no model can produce. Our piece on AI content and Google covers where the real risk sits.

Finally, ask about maintenance and approval. A team that only produces new articles will slowly build a library that decays, so ask how much of the monthly output goes to refreshing existing pages, and how they choose them. Clarify the approval workflow: how many review rounds are included, what happens when your expert disagrees with a draft, who signs off in the end, and who owns the content and the source files if the relationship ends. The content marketing services page is a useful reference for what a full scope should include.

Link acquisition is the part of SEO where your risk is highest and your visibility is usually lowest, so this block deserves blunt questions. Ask them to name the last ten links they built for a client in a comparable market, and to send the actual URLs after the call. Vague categories like quality publications and niche relevant sites mean nothing on their own. Real answers come with real domains, and a team that is confident in its own work has no difficulty producing that list within a day of the call.

Then ask about money and disclosure, because that is where the differences hide. Ask whether placements are paid, and if so whether the fee is included in the retainer or billed separately, what the average cost per placement is, and whether the publishers mark the links as sponsored. Ask what share of links come from digital PR, from partnerships, from guest contributions and from directories. A team that refuses to explain its sources is asking you to accept an unquantified risk on your own domain.

Add two protective questions. First, what would they do if they inherited a profile containing paid links from a previous provider, since the answer shows whether they can assess risk rather than just build volume. Second, what happens to those links if you leave, because some providers rent placements that disappear the month after the contract ends, taking any gains with them. Get both answers in writing. Our overview of link building in 2026 explains the current landscape, and SEO contract red flags covers the clauses that matter.

Ask to see a real monthly report from an existing client, anonymised, before you discuss what yours will look like. Reports reveal priorities. If the first page shows visibility scores, domain authority and social shares, the agency is optimising for the appearance of progress. If it shows clicks, conversions, indexed pages and the specific work delivered, it is optimising for the business. Ask which three numbers they would put on the first page of your report, why those three, and who inside your company they expect to read that page each month.

Separate leading from lagging indicators explicitly, because the mismatch between them causes most of the friction in month four. Leading indicators move early: pages crawled and indexed, impressions, average position, keywords in striking distance, briefs delivered, links earned. Lagging indicators are the ones your board cares about: clicks, qualified leads, revenue. A competent team commits to leading indicators quickly, treats lagging ones as a forecast with a range, and tells you which month the two should start to converge. Our guide to SEO KPIs and reporting sets out a workable structure.

Then ask the question that most buyers skip: what happens if we are six months in and the numbers have not moved. You are listening for a process, not reassurance. Good answers include a diagnostic review, a written hypothesis about why, a change of allocation between technical, content and links, and an honest statement of what is outside their control. Ask how they would tell you, in writing or in a call, and whether the contract lets you reduce scope or exit without a penalty at that point.

A few answers are disqualifying on their own, whatever else the agency does well. A guaranteed position is the clearest: nobody controls the ranking system, so a guarantee is either meaningless, unenforceable or dependent on tactics that put your domain at risk. Promises of results in thirty days belong in the same category, as does any refusal to name the people who will do the work or the number of hours your fee buys. These are not negotiating positions, they are answers to a factual question.

Opacity is the second family. A proprietary method that cannot be described, link sources that cannot be named, content that cannot be shown before publication, or access to your own analytics granted only through their dashboard: all of these transfer the risk to you while keeping the information with them. Also treat as serious a proposal with no discovery questions about your margins, your sales cycle or your capacity to fulfil demand, because an SEO plan that ignores unit economics tends to generate traffic you cannot monetise.

None of this requires confrontation. Ask the questions calmly, take notes, compare candidates on the same grid, and let the weak answers speak for themselves. Then verify what you were told against independent evidence before signing: request the link URLs, the report sample and the named team in writing, and cross check candidates against verified performance data, whether you are hiring SEO agencies in France, agencies in the United Kingdom or elsewhere. A good agency finds these questions normal, because it asks the same kind of them.