How to choose an SEO agency, and what to ask before you sign

Choosing an SEO agency is hard because the work is hard to inspect from outside. Anyone can produce a deck. Very few can show you a live account and talk you through what went wrong as well as what went right.

These are the questions that get you to the difference.

Before you talk to anyone

Write down what you actually want, in business terms rather than SEO terms. More enquiries from a particular city. Stock moving that currently does not. Less dependence on one marketplace. If the goal is "better rankings", every agency will agree with you and none of them will be accountable for anything.

Also get access to your own accounts first. Search Console, analytics, the website admin. You would be surprised how many businesses find out mid project that a previous agency still owns their property.

Eight questions worth asking

1. What would you look at first on my site, and why that? A real answer is specific to your site and names a priority. A vague one means they have not looked.
2. Can you show me a live Search Console account, on a call? Not a case study. The actual interface, with the filters applied in front of you.
3. What is in the monthly work, in hours or in deliverables? "Ongoing optimisation" is not a deliverable. "Four pages rewritten and five placements" is.
4. How do you build links, and can I see the last ten you placed? If the answer is evasive, the links are bought in bulk. Ask to open them yourself.
5. What have you tried that did not work? Everyone has failed campaigns. Anyone claiming otherwise is either new or not telling you the truth.
6. Who does the actual work? The person in the meeting is often not the person doing the task. That is fine, as long as you know.
7. What happens to the work if I leave? Logins, content, reports and any properties built should be yours.
8. What would make you tell me not to hire you? The best answer here is a real one, and it tells you more than the other seven.

Answers that should end it

• A guaranteed position. Nobody controls Google's results. A guarantee means either dishonesty or tactics that will cause a problem later.
• A link count with no sources. "Five hundred backlinks a month" describes a volume, not a service. Ask where from, and watch what happens.
• Refusing to name the methods. Proprietary process is a normal thing to have. Refusing to say whether links are bought is not.
• Results they cannot show live. Screenshots are editable. Accounts are not.
• Pressure to sign this week. SEO takes months. A deadline on the contract is about their month, not your results.

What to check in the contract

• Notice period. Twelve month lock-ins are common and rarely in your favour. Month to month means the agency has to keep earning it.
• Ownership. Content, accounts, and any properties created should be yours on day one, not on good terms at the end.
• What the deliverables are, in writing, so "we optimised the site" is not a month of work.
• Reporting cadence, and whether you get raw access or only a summary.

Big agency, small agency, freelancer

None of these is better in general, and the honest trade off looks like this.

• A large agency brings process, cover when someone is ill, and specialists. You will usually not be talking to the person doing the work, and small accounts get the junior staff.
• A small agency is the middle ground. You get the senior people, with enough structure that work still ships when somebody is away.
• A freelancer gives you the most direct access and often the sharpest judgement, with the obvious single point of failure.

What matters more than size is whether they will tell you something you do not want to hear. If you want to see how we answer these ourselves, the about page says who does the work and the pricing page shows the numbers without a call.

And if you are still working out whether you need an agency at all, what an SEO agency actually does covers the work and the cases where hiring one is the wrong move.