Questions to ask an SEO agency before you hire one

Why this list exists

I run a portfolio of sites and do the SEO work on most of them myself. I’ve also hired agencies for a few brands where I didn’t have the bandwidth, and I’ve fired two of them. Neither firing was because the agency was incompetent in some dramatic way. It was because I didn’t ask the right questions up front, and by the time I understood what I’d bought, three months and a few thousand dollars were gone.

This isn’t a list of trick questions meant to expose bad actors. Most people selling SEO services aren’t scammers, they’re just selling a process, and processes vary wildly in quality and fit. The questions below are the ones that tell you, before you sign anything, whether that process matches what your site actually needs.

Start by asking what they’ll audit, not what they’ll promise

Any agency worth paying should be able to look at your site and tell you, in plain terms, where it’s currently weak: crawl issues, thin pages, missing internal links, a backlink profile that’s either nonexistent or full of dead pages linking to you. If the first conversation is mostly about “our proven process” and “years of experience” without any specifics tied to your actual site, that’s a sales pitch, not an audit.

Ask them directly: what will you look at in the first two weeks, and what will you show me. A real answer sounds like “we’ll pull your indexed pages, check for crawl errors, look at your current backlink profile, and map your existing content against your competitors’ content.” A vague answer sounds like “we’ll do a comprehensive analysis of your online presence.”

Ask how they measure success, and get specific

Rankings for a handful of vanity keywords are the easiest thing to report and the least useful thing to optimize for. A page can rank #1 for a term nobody searches, or rank #1 for a term that never converts. Ask what metrics they’ll actually report on: organic traffic by page, conversions or leads attributed to organic, and rankings across a realistic basket of keywords, not just the three you’ll be impressed by in a monthly call.

Also ask how often they’ll report, and ask to see a sample report from another client with the identifying details removed. If they can’t produce one, they probably don’t have a consistent reporting habit, which means you’ll be flying blind for months at a time.

No one, including me, can tell you when a given page will rank or guarantee it will rank at all. Search engines weigh a lot of factors and they shift how they weigh them over time. Anyone who gives you a fixed timeline or a guaranteed position is either overconfident or not being straight with you. That includes me when I talk about my own sites: I can tell you what I did and what happened afterward, not what will happen on your site on a schedule.

Ask exactly what “link building” means to them

This is where I’ve been burned, and where I’ve seen other site owners get burned worse. “Link building” is one phrase covering a huge range of actual practices, and the range runs from genuinely useful to actively dangerous to your site.

Ask them to name the specific tactics they use. Digital PR and outreach for coverage, guest posts on relevant sites with real editorial standards, resource page placements, broken link building, that’s one category, slow and manual and defensible. Bulk link packages, private blog networks, link farms, or anything described as “we have relationships with 500 sites” is a different category. Those networks get found and devalued in waves, and when that happens the links you paid for stop counting or start actively hurting you, and you have no way to claw back the spend.

I’ve paid for placements on a “network” once, on a site I don’t run anymore, and watched the referring domains vanish from my link reports about four months later. Not because I did something wrong, because the network got caught. The agency selling it wasn’t lying about having relationships with those sites, they just didn’t tell me the whole model was rented, not owned. Ask the agency to walk you through where a link they’d build for you would actually come from and why that site would plausibly link to yours. If they can’t describe the editorial or business logic behind a placement, don’t buy it.

Ask who does the keyword research and how

A lot of “SEO strategy” is downstream of keyword research done badly. Ask what tools they use, how they decide which keywords to target, and how they weigh search volume against your actual ability to compete for a term. A small site chasing a keyword that’s dominated by five sites with a decade of authority is going to burn budget for nothing, and a competent researcher should tell you that instead of just handing you a list sorted by volume.

Ask them to show you, for your specific niche, three keywords they’d target in month one and why. If the answer is generic or they need to “get back to you,” that’s a sign the research hasn’t actually started, it’s being generated on the call.

Ask who owns technical SEO, and what happens when your dev team is involved

Technical SEO work, fixing crawl errors, cleaning up redirect chains, improving page speed, fixing broken internal links, often requires access to your CMS or your developer’s time. Ask upfront whether the agency does this work directly, or whether they hand you a list of tickets and expect your team to implement them. Both models are fine, but they cost very differently in terms of your own team’s time, and I’ve seen retainers stall for months because the agency was waiting on a dev team that was never told to prioritize the work.

Ask what access they need: CMS login, Google Search Console, analytics, and whether that access is read-only or whether they’ll be making changes directly. Get clear on this before you hand out credentials.

Ask what content they produce and who writes it

If content is part of the package, ask who actually writes it: an in-house writer, a freelancer pool, or AI-generated drafts with light editing. None of these are automatically bad, but the price and quality should match the method, and you should know what you’re paying for. Ask to see three samples from clients in a similar space to yours, not just their best work from an unrelated industry.

Ask what happens to the work if you leave

This one gets skipped constantly. If you end the contract, do you keep the content that was written for you. Do you keep access to whatever tracking or reporting dashboards they set up. Is there a transition document, or does six months of institutional knowledge about your site walk out the door with them. Get this in writing before you start, not after you’re trying to leave.

Red flags I’ve learned to walk away from

An agency that guarantees a ranking or a timeline. An agency that can’t describe its link building tactics in specific terms. An agency that talks about “Google’s algorithm” like they have privileged access to how it’s weighted this month, nobody outside Google has that, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling confidence, not information. An agency that won’t show you a redacted sample report. An agency whose pricing is far below what a manual, editorial approach to content and outreach would plausibly cost, since that gap usually gets filled with volume tactics that carry risk.

The short version

Ask what they’ll audit first, ask how they define success beyond rankings, ask exactly where links will come from, ask who does keyword research and how, ask who owns technical fixes, ask who writes content, and ask what you keep if you leave. None of these questions require you to know SEO yourself. They just require the agency to be specific instead of confident, and specificity is the thing that’s actually hard to fake.

If you’d rather see how this looks applied to a real site than hire it out, The SEO Desk walks through keyword research, link building, and technical SEO from the operator side, the same way we approach our own portfolio.