What Should You Ask an SEO Company Before Hiring Them?
Ask about verifiable past results in your situation, who specifically will work on your account, their exact process for the first 30 to 90 days, how they measure and report success, whether they track AI search visibility alongside traditional rankings, and what happens to your content and access if you leave. Vague or evasive answers to any of these are the real warning sign, not any single “bad” answer.
Questions About Past Results and Case Studies
“Can you show me results for a client in a situation similar to mine, and what did ‘success’ actually mean for them?”
A good answer names a specific client (even if anonymized by industry and size), a specific starting point, and a specific outcome measured in something tied to the business, like qualified leads or booked appointments, not just a traffic percentage. They’ll usually offer to connect you with a reference if you ask.
A red-flag answer is a screenshot of a traffic graph going up and to the right with no context about the starting number, the industry, or the timeframe. Anyone can show you a chart that looks impressive out of context.
“What’s the realistic timeline before I see meaningful movement, and what does the first 90 days actually involve?”
A good answer sounds like: for a competitive market, expect early technical fixes and quick wins in the first 60 to 90 days, with meaningful ranking and traffic movement in month four to six, and compounding results after that. They can describe the first 90 days as a concrete list: audit, keyword mapping, priority fixes, initial content.
A red-flag answer promises page-one rankings inside 30 days, or gives you the same generic timeline regardless of your industry or current site condition. No agency controls Google’s or an AI engine’s index on that kind of schedule.
Questions About Who Actually Does the Work
“Who is the specific person working on my account day to day, and how many other accounts do they manage?”
A good answer names a real person, describes their role, and is willing to tell you roughly how many accounts they’re juggling. If the number of clients on their plate is high enough that they can’t speak specifically about your account, your goals, or what’s currently live on your site, that’s the warning sign, not the raw headcount itself.
A red-flag answer stays at “our team” and never lands on an individual. It’s common for the senior person on the sales call to disappear the moment you sign, handing you off to someone you’ve never spoken with.
“Is any part of the work subcontracted or outsourced, and if so, which parts?”
A good answer is straightforward about it: “our content editors are in-house, but some link outreach or technical implementation is handled by a vetted contractor, and here’s how we quality-check that work.” Subcontracting itself isn’t the problem; hiding it is.
A red-flag answer gets defensive or flatly denies any outsourcing when the pricing you’re being quoted makes that answer implausible.
Questions About Their Actual Methodology
“Walk me through exactly what you’d do on my site in the first 30 days.”
A good answer is a specific, ordered list: technical audit, Google Search Console and analytics review, keyword and content gap mapping, a prioritized backlog with the two or three highest-impact fixes named upfront. If they can point to something specific on your current site (a missing title tag, a broken redirect chain, a thin category page), that’s a strong signal they actually looked before the call.
A red-flag answer is “we’ll run an audit and go from there,” repeated for every prospect regardless of what your site looks like today.
“How do you build links, and can you show me examples of links you’ve placed for other clients recently?”
A good answer names actual tactics, like digital PR pitches, resource-page outreach, or original data studies that earn citations, and is willing to share a handful of real domains where they’ve placed links (with client names redacted if needed).
A red-flag answer is vague about “our network” and won’t name a single domain. That reluctance usually means the links come from private blog networks or paid placements on irrelevant sites, the kind of link profile that can get a site penalized later.
Questions About Reporting and Measurement
“What will I actually see in my monthly report, and can I look at a real, redacted sample from a current client?”
A good answer is a sample report that ties SEO activity to business outcomes: ranking movement, organic traffic, leads or conversions attributed to organic search, and increasingly, whether the brand is showing up in AI answers alongside traditional search. If they hesitate to show a real sample, that’s already useful information.
A red-flag answer is a report built entirely around vanity metrics like “keywords tracked” or “pages indexed” with no line connecting the work to something your business cares about.
“If my numbers drop one month, what’s your process for figuring out why?”
A good answer names a diagnostic process: checking for algorithm updates, technical regressions, seasonality, or a competitor’s move, and communicating that analysis to you proactively rather than waiting for you to ask.
A red-flag answer is defensiveness, or blaming a drop on something vague with no offer to actually investigate.
Questions About AI Search and GEO Readiness
This is the category most sales calls still skip, and it’s becoming the one that separates agencies actually paying attention from ones running a 2019 playbook with new branding on the pitch deck.
“How are you tracking whether my brand shows up in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews, not just in traditional blue-link rankings?”
A good answer describes something concrete: a set of real prompts your buyers might ask an AI engine, tracked over time, with visibility to see whether your brand gets mentioned and how you compare to competitors inside those answers. That’s a fundamentally different measurement than a rank tracker built for the top ten Google results.
A red-flag answer is “AI search isn’t really measurable yet” or treats generative engine optimization as identical to traditional SEO with no distinct process. It is measurable, and platforms built specifically to track brand visibility across AI engines exist for exactly this reason.
“If an AI engine summarizes my industry without ever citing my site, what would you actually change?”
A good answer names concrete moves: structured, citation-worthy content, clear factual pages an AI model can quote directly, schema markup, and earning mentions on third-party sites the models already trust as sources.
A red-flag answer has no distinct plan at all, just a restated version of “we’ll keep doing SEO and it’ll help eventually.” It might, but that’s not an answer to the question you asked.
Questions About Contracts and Ownership
“If I leave, do I keep ownership of my content, backlinks, and account access?”
A good answer is unambiguous: content lives on your CMS, analytics and Search Console accounts stay under your ownership from day one, and you retain everything built during the engagement.
A red-flag answer is vague, or reveals that logins and access live inside agency-owned accounts you’d have to fight to get back.
“Is there a minimum contract term, and what does cancellation actually involve?”
A good answer is upfront about term length before you ask twice, and describes a reasonable notice period rather than a steep early termination fee sprung on you after the fact.
A red-flag answer buries a 12-month lock-in in the fine print and only discloses it when you push.
Universal Red Flags No Matter What You Ask
A few signals show up regardless of which specific question triggers them, and they’re worth watching for across the whole call, not just in the answers above.
Guaranteed rankings tied to a specific date is about as reliable a red flag as you’ll find in this business. No one, including the agency, controls the algorithm.
An agency that never asks about your business, your customers, or your goals during the call is telling you it sells the same package to everyone. SEO that ignores what actually drives your revenue rarely moves the metrics that matter to you.
Secrecy around tactics, deflecting with “proprietary methods” instead of specifics, usually means there’s nothing distinctive to protect, just something they’d rather you not scrutinize.
How Many Agencies Should You Actually Interview?
Three to four is enough for most buyers. Run the same exact question set with each one, in the same order, and take notes during the call rather than trying to remember afterward which agency said what.
The value of asking identical questions across vendors isn’t finding one perfect answer. It’s noticing which agency’s answers get more specific the deeper you go, and which ones stay vague no matter how directly you ask.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I still ask about AI search visibility if my industry doesn’t feel “techy”?
Yes. Buyers in every industry, from HVAC to law firms to healthcare, are already asking AI engines for recommendations before they search Google directly. An agency with no answer for this question is planning around how search worked three years ago.
Is it a red flag if an agency won’t guarantee rankings?
No, that’s actually the correct answer. The red flag is the opposite: an agency confident enough to promise specific rankings by a specific date.
What happens to my rankings and content if I switch agencies partway through a project?
If your contract actually gives you ownership of your content and access from day one, a switch mostly costs you ramp-up time for the new agency to relearn your site, not lost work. Rankings built on real technical fixes and content tend to hold; rankings propped up by a single agency’s private link network can drop once that agency stops maintaining it, which is one more reason to ask exactly where your links come from before you sign.
How much should I expect to pay, and does price alone tell me anything about quality?
Price alone tells you very little without knowing what’s included. Our pricing breakdown for affordable SEO services walks through what different budget tiers actually buy, which pairs well with the questions above once you’ve narrowed your shortlist.
Where to Go Next for Your Specific Industry
The questions above work whether you’re hiring for a single-location business or a national brand, but the fine print shifts by industry. If you’re a small business sizing up your first agency relationship, our guide to SEO services for small businesses breaks down which type of provider actually fits your size and budget.
Law firms and healthcare practices carry extra compliance and reputation risk on top of everything above, so we wrote dedicated buyer’s guides for SEO agencies for law firms and healthcare SEO companies that go deeper on the industry-specific red flags.
If you’re selling on Shopify, platform-specific quirks like app bloat and duplicate collection pages change what a competent audit should catch, which is why we broke out a separate guide to Shopify SEO services.
Running an agency yourself and looking to resell SEO under your own brand comes with a different set of questions entirely, mostly around reporting transparency and margin, so we covered that in our white label SEO providers guide.
Real estate and manufacturing both carry industry-specific red flags too: local map pack dynamics and MLS-linked content for real estate, long buying cycles and technical spec pages for manufacturing. Those get their own dedicated treatment in our guides to SEO agencies for real estate companies and SEO agencies for manufacturing companies.
Curious how your brand shows up in AI search right now?
Topify tracks and improves brand visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Want to run the analysis yourself, or have a team run GEO and SEO for you end to end?
