Choosing an SEO agency can feel a little like viewing a house after someone has turned every light on and baked bread five minutes before you arrived, everything looks great during the initial pitch.

A few incisive questions, however, can very quickly uncover whether the agency has a solid plan for your site or not. You can find out what the agency would actually do with your website, who will be working on it, if they measure success the same way you would, and more.

This article goes over the top 10 questions to ask when evaluating SEO agencies to see which one fits your specific situation the best. By the end, you should have a better idea of how the agency works and whether you’d be happy putting your website in their hands.

Why Choosing an SEO Agency Is Harder Than It Looks

SEO agencies are very difficult to compare before you hire one, especially if you have limited experience with how SEO works. Most agencies have very polished decks and big numbers, but the trouble is that you’re buying work that may take months to properly judge, so there isn’t much opportunity to kick the tyres beforehand.

Two agencies can also quote roughly the same monthly fee while offering very different things for it. One might have experienced specialists going through your site each month, fixing issues and planning the next round of work. Another may have the same person bouncing between 20 or even 30 accounts, meaning that realistically you get less than a day’s work in a whole month!

The same goes for strategy. How do you know the team is well-experienced in your field of business to actually prepare the strongest strategy?

That’s where good questions earn their keep. You’re giving the agency a chance to open the bonnet and show you how the thing actually runs. The more specific the answers become, the easier it is to tell whether you’re buying serious SEO work or a very expensive monthly report.

10 Questions to Ask an SEO Agency Before Hiring Them

You don’t need to know a huge amount about SEO to catch an agency out on technical details. These questions are much more useful for getting them talking about how they would actually handle your website, where your money goes and what happens when things don’t go perfectly to plan.

1. What Would You Do in the First 90 Days, and Why?

Ask an agency what its first three months would look like and you should start getting past the brochure language pretty quickly.

There will usually be some audit in the beginning, so listen specifically for what happens after. An agency might check whether important pages can be crawled and indexed, review canonicalisation and internal links, set up Search Console, Analytics, etc.

The order should depend on what they find. A misplaced noindex, broken canonical or migration problem may deserve attention before another ten blog posts; on a technically healthy site, the bigger opportunity might be improving commercial pages or filling genuine content gaps.

2. How Will You Measure Whether the SEO Is Working?

Rankings are useful to watch, and more search traffic is usually welcome, but you’ll want to know what happens after people arrive on the site. If SEO is bringing in plenty of visitors who never enquire or buy anything, the graph may look lovely while the business gets very little from it.

Ask what the agency plans to measure for your particular goals and how often you’ll see those numbers. Search Console data such as clicks and impressions can show whether visibility is improving, while GA4 should tell you whether that traffic is producing enquiries, purchases or other meaningful conversions.

For lead-generation businesses, ask whether they can distinguish more leads from better leads, and how they handle attribution when several channels contribute to a conversion. A good agency should be able to explain not just what it reports, but what the numbers actually mean for the business.

This question will tell you if the agency is more focused on just traffic or if they truly understand that you’re doing this partnership to increase revenue.

3. Who Will Actually Be Working on My Account?

The people you meet during the pitch won’t necessarily be the people spending Tuesday afternoon inside your website.

Find out who will actually handle the account and what experience they bring to it. Some agencies divide work between different specialists, which can work very well, but you should still know who is responsible for your campaign and who you’ll be speaking to when you have a question.

It’s also worth asking whether any of the work is outsourced. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, provided the agency is open about it and still has proper oversight.

You’re paying for the work behind the agency name, so it’s perfectly reasonable to know whose hands it will be in.

4. Can You Show Me Results From a Business With a Similar Challenge?

Industry experience can be useful, but don’t get too hung up on finding an agency with a case study that looks exactly like your business.

A better comparison may be a company that started with the same problem. Perhaps its important pages weren’t ranking, or it was getting traffic without enough enquiries. Ask what the agency found, what it changed and what happened afterwards. That tells you far more than a row of familiar client logos.

And if they show you a case study, ask for the baseline, timeframe and what actually changed. A “200% increase in organic traffic” looks rather different if the site went from 100 visits to 300, launched a new product range halfway through the period or naturally peaks every December.

Ask whether the gains came from branded searches or new non-brand visibility, which pages improved and whether conversions rose alongside the traffic. That makes a case study much harder to dress up with one flattering percentage.

5. What Exactly Is Included in the Monthly Fee?

A £2,000 monthly retainer doesn’t tell you much until you know what happens to the £2,000.

Ask the agency to spell out what’s included. If they recommend new content, for example, does the fee cover writing it, because if not, then that’s another $2k for that. If a technical issue needs fixing, will their team make the change or hand you a report for your developer?

This is also where extra costs tend to crawl out from under the furniture. Some perfectly reasonable services may sit outside the retainer, but if half the work they recommend comes with a separate quote, that £2,000 figure stops being very useful.

£2,000 for hands-on SEO work is a very different proposition from £2,000 for advice and a monthly report. Two proposals can both say £2,000 a month while one includes the work itself and the other leaves you paying someone else to carry it out.

6. How Do You Build Links?

Link building is one of those SEO services that can sound reassuringly impressive right up until you ask where the links actually come from.

Get the agency to walk you through its process. You want to know how it finds relevant websites, why those sites would want to link to you and what sort of work goes into earning the link. If the explanation begins and ends with promises of dozens of “high-authority backlinks” every month, keep digging.

Don’t let the explanation stop at metrics such as Domain Rating or Domain Authority. These are third-party scores, not Google ranking metrics, and a high-scoring site can still be irrelevant or exist largely to sell links.

Ask how the links are actually earned: through digital PR, original research, expert commentary or useful resources, for example. Google treats buying links for ranking purposes, excessive link exchanges and other manipulative link schemes as spam, so an agency should be able to explain why a publisher would genuinely want to link to you.

7. How Are You Adapting SEO for AI Search?

Search is changing, so it’s worth finding out whether the agency has changed with it.

Ask how AI-generated search results affect the way they approach your campaign and what, if anything, they now do differently. You’re looking for an explanation that connects back to your website rather than a fresh pile of acronyms wearing a party hat.

Be wary if “AI SEO” or “GEO” is presented as a completely separate magic trick. Google says its AI search features still depend heavily on the same foundations as traditional search, including crawlability, indexation, useful content and its existing ranking systems.

Ask what the agency is actually changing and measuring. They should be able to talk about the types of queries where AI results appear, which pages are being surfaced and how they are improving content to make it clearer, better evidenced and more useful, not simply adding an “AI optimisation” line to the retainer.

8. What Will You Need From Us?

SEO may be something you’re hiring an agency to handle, but they probably won’t be able to disappear into a cupboard for six months and do everything alone.

Ask what they’ll need from your team and how often. They may require access to the website, help from a developer or approval before new content goes live. None of that is unusual, but it can become a headache if nobody has planned for it.

This question also shows you how the relationship is likely to work day to day. If the agency expects regular input, you can make sure the right people have time for it before the campaign gets moving.

9. What Happens If the Results Aren’t Coming?

SEO campaigns don’t always march neatly upwards, so it’s worth asking what the agency does when the numbers refuse to cooperate.

A useful answer should show you how they diagnose the problem rather than simply promising to “optimise harder.” If impressions have fallen, they might check whether the loss affects the whole site or a particular group of pages, then investigate indexing problems, recent site changes, algorithm updates or seasonality.

If impressions are stable but clicks have fallen, the issue may instead be CTR or a changing search results page. What matters is whether the agency can isolate where the decline is happening before deciding what to fix.

You can also ask what would make them recommend reducing or stopping the work. That’s a revealing one. It’s much easier to trust an agency that can explain when spending more money wouldn’t be a particularly clever idea.

10. What Happens to Our Work and Accounts If We Leave?

Nobody hires an SEO agency while enthusiastically planning the breakup, but it’s much nicer to sort this out before you need to.

Ask who owns the content produced during the campaign and make sure important accounts, including Google Search Console and analytics, remain accessible to your business. If the agency uses its own systems for anything you may later need, find out what happens to that information when the contract ends.

Check the exit terms too. A reasonable notice period may be fine, while discovering you’re tied in for another six months is considerably less fun.

Ideally, you should be able to leave with your website, your data and the work you’ve already paid for firmly in your hands.

To Sum Up

You don’t need to walk into an agency meeting speaking fluent SEO. Ask these questions and pay attention to whether the answers make the partnership clearer.

By the end of the conversation, you should understand what the agency plans to do and why that approach makes sense for your website. If everything still feels wrapped in jargon and impressive promises, then it may perhaps be better to clear things up more.

© qolumnist