I’ll be blunt: the sales call is designed so you cannot tell the difference between competence and confidence. Both sound the same for forty-five minutes, and the proposal that arrives afterwards is written to be hard to compare against anyone else’s.
These questions break that. They are not gotchas — a good provider answers all of them easily. They are uncomfortable only for the ones counting on you not asking.
Quick answer: what to ask before hiring
Ask what a conversion is defined as, how many hours the retainer includes, who writes the content, what happens in month one that does not happen in month six, and who owns everything if you leave. Vague answers to any of these predict the engagement better than any case study will.
The five that matter most
1. “How do you define a conversion?”
The single most revealing question. If the answer is traffic, rankings, impressions or form loads, the reporting will be built around numbers that move without your revenue moving.
The answer you want involves qualified enquiries and phone calls over a length threshold. Anything else means the work will optimise toward the wrong outcome with complete confidence.
2. “How many hours a month does this include?”
Providers who track hours can answer instantly. Providers who cannot are telling you your account gets whatever is left after their larger clients.
Do the arithmetic yourself: divide the fee by a realistic hourly rate. If the result is three hours, no amount of process makes that a real engagement.
3. “What happens in month one that does not happen in month six?”
Technical work and profile setup are front-loaded by nature. If the answer is “the same activities every month,” the front-loaded work is not being done — you are buying a maintenance retainer described as a growth engagement.
4. “Who writes the content, and can I see something they wrote?”
Vagueness here means one of two things: unreviewed AI output, or an offshore writer with no knowledge of your market. Both produce pages that read as generic and rank accordingly.
Ask for a sample written for a business in a comparable trade, not a portfolio of clients in unrelated industries.
5. “If I leave, what do I take with me?”
You should own the domain, the hosting, the website code, the content, the Google Business Profile and the ad accounts. If any of these sit in the provider’s account, the monthly fee is not a service — it is rent on your own business assets.
Five more that expose the process
- “What will you not do?” Every honest provider has boundaries — verticals they decline, tactics they will not use, budgets below which they say no. A provider who does everything for everyone specialises in nothing.
- “Show me a client who did not work out.” Everyone has one. The answer reveals whether they understand their own failure modes or blame the client.
- “Who will I actually speak to?” If the person in the pitch is not the person doing the work, ask to meet the one who is.
- “How do you handle a core algorithm update?” The right answer involves diagnosing rather than panicking, and an acceptance that some volatility is normal.
- “What does the reporting look like?” Ask to see a real one with a client’s name removed. If it leads with rankings and traffic rather than enquiries, you now know what you will be receiving monthly.
The answers that should end the conversation
| What they say | What it means |
|---|---|
| “We guarantee first-page rankings” | Either for terms nobody searches, or they do not understand what they control |
| “We have a proprietary algorithm” | There is no proprietary access to Google. This is marketing language. |
| “You need a 12-month contract to see results” | Partly true, mostly protection from being judged in month three |
| “We’ll build you 500 backlinks” | Purchased links. A liability rather than an asset. |
| “SEO is dead, you need our AI system” | A rebrand of the same work with a premium attached |
What a good proposal actually contains
- Named deliverables with quantities. “Content” is not a deliverable; “two service pages a month, 800–1,200 words, written by us” is.
- A defined conversion, stated in the document rather than discussed on a call.
- A month-one plan that differs from the month-six plan.
- Clear ownership terms for every asset involved.
- An exit path — notice period, what transfers, what happens to work in progress.
- An honest timeline with ranges rather than dates.
Our own pricing sits on the service pages rather than behind a discovery call, for the same reason we would tell you to ask these questions: a provider confident in the work does not need the information asymmetry.
Sector-specific questions worth adding
If you are in a regulated or high-value vertical, one more question earns its place.
- Medical and dental: “How do you handle review requests within professional advertising rules?” Getting this wrong is a regulatory problem, not just a marketing one — see our dental marketing page for how we structure it.
- Legal: “How do you keep content useful without straying into advice?” Law Society advertising rules constrain what a page can claim.
- Trades: “How do enquiries reach me when I am on site?” An email to an inbox checked on Friday is not a lead system.
How to compare two proposals side by side
Proposals are written to resist comparison. Normalise them on five axes before deciding, and the differences become obvious.
| Axis | What to extract from each proposal |
|---|---|
| Real hours | Fee ÷ a realistic hourly rate. Compare the results, not the fees. |
| Named deliverables | Count only items with a quantity attached. Adjectives score zero. |
| Conversion definition | Written in the document, or absent. Absent is an answer. |
| Ownership | List every asset and who holds it at the end. |
| Exit terms | Notice period and what transfers on the way out. |
A cheaper proposal with four specific deliverables usually beats a more expensive one with twelve adjectives. The exercise takes twenty minutes and reliably changes which one people choose.
What to do in the first ninety days
Hiring well is half of it. The other half is holding the engagement to a shape you agreed at the start.
- Week 1 — access, not deliverables. Make sure you hold the admin accounts and grant access rather than transferring ownership. This one decision determines how painful leaving would be.
- Week 4 — ask what shipped. Not what was audited. What changed on the site or the profile, and can you see it.
- Week 8 — check the profile yourself. Services listed, areas drawn, reviews arriving, posts going out. All of this is visible to you without taking anyone’s word for it.
- Week 12 — query breadth in Search Console. More distinct searches producing impressions than in week one. If it is flat, say so before the renewal conversation rather than after it.
None of these require you to understand SEO. They require you to check things that either happened or did not.
The question to ask yourself before any of them
Every question above assumes you know what you are buying the outcome for. Plenty of businesses hire an agency because growth feels overdue rather than because a specific constraint has been identified — and that is how engagements end badly regardless of who is hired.
Three things worth settling first:
- What does a good month look like in numbers? Not “more leads” — a figure. Without it, no reporting can tell you whether the money worked, and every renewal conversation becomes a matter of impression.
- Can you handle the volume you are asking for? Marketing that works on a business already at capacity produces enquiries you cannot service and reviews from people you let down. Fix the capacity first.
- What is one customer worth? Average value multiplied by how many times they buy. This single number decides what you can afford to spend and settles most budget arguments before they start.
A provider worth hiring will ask all three on the first call. If nobody asks what a customer is worth to you, they are selling a package rather than solving a problem.
Frequently asked questions
Should I hire a local agency or a remote one?
Local rankings are decided by your business’s own signals — profile, service areas, citations, reviews — not by where your provider sits. What matters is whether they understand how your buyers search and whether you can reach a senior person directly.
How much should I expect to pay?
Credible local SEO runs roughly $600 to $2,400 a month depending on locations and competitiveness. Below about $500 the arithmetic does not support real work, whatever the proposal says.
What if I have already signed with someone underperforming?
Ask for the search terms report, the conversion definitions and the list of work completed in the last ninety days. Those three documents tell you whether the problem is the work or the timeline — and both are worth knowing before the renewal date.
Is it worth getting a second opinion on a proposal?
Yes, and a good provider will not object. Send the proposal to someone with no stake in it and ask which deliverables are specific and which are adjectives.
