The questions worth asking are about ownership, prioritization and honesty rather than tactics. Ask who will own your accounts and data, how work gets prioritized and by whom, what they will tell you when something is not working, and what they would need to see before telling you SEO is the wrong investment. An agency that cannot answer the last one is selling a retainer rather than a result.
About ownership
- Who owns the Google Analytics, Search Console and Business Profile accounts? The answer should be you, with the agency given access. Agencies that create these under their own accounts hold your history hostage at the end of the relationship.
- What happens to the work if we part ways? Content, pages and technical fixes on your site are yours. Ask this explicitly and listen for hedging.
- Who owns the keyword research and the strategy documents? Reasonable answers vary here, but you should know before you sign rather than after.
About how the work gets done
- Who will actually do this work? Meeting a senior strategist in the pitch and being handed to a junior afterwards is the oldest pattern in the industry. Ask to meet whoever will be on it week to week.
- How do you decide what to do first? A good answer involves impact, effort and evidence. A weak answer is a list of deliverables with no reasoning.
- What do you need from us, and how often? SEO stalls in development queues and approval chains more often than it stalls on strategy. An agency that has not thought about your constraints has not thought about delivery.
- What does a typical month look like? Specific enough that you could describe it to a colleague.
About measurement
- What will you report, and from which source? Every number should carry a tool and a date range. "Traffic up 40 percent" is not a number anyone can check.
- What would tell us this is not working? A good agency has thought about this and will say it out loud. The absence of an answer is the answer.
- How do you handle things you cannot measure? Visibility in AI answers, brand search, offline conversions. The honest response is to name the limits rather than produce a number anyway.
About honesty
- What would make you tell us to spend this money somewhere else? The most useful question on this list. It has a real answer, and an agency that cannot give one is not going to give you bad news later either.
- Tell me about a client engagement that did not work. Everyone has them. The willingness to discuss one tells you more than any case study.
Answers worth walking away from
- A guaranteed position, by any date, for any term
- A relationship with Google that accelerates results
- A proprietary method that cannot be described
- A monthly report of rankings gained, with no mention of whether anyone searches those terms
- Reluctance to give you administrator access to your own accounts
- A twelve-month commitment with no break clause and no defined deliverables
One more thing
Ask what they think of your current site before the pitch meeting. An agency that has spent an hour looking at you properly will have something specific to say. One that has not will talk about their process.