Hiring an SEO agency is unusually hard, and not because owners are careless. It is hard because SEO is one of the few things you can pay for every month without ever being able to see what you bought.
You can look at a new website. You can watch an ad run. But most SEO work happens out of sight (in your page structure, your content, your profile, your links) and the results arrive slowly enough that a poor agency can take money for a long time before anyone can prove much either way. That gap is exactly where the industry’s worst operators live.
The good news is that a handful of specific questions will separate a genuine agency from a poor one in about twenty minutes. Not questions about strategy, which anyone can answer smoothly, but questions about ownership, method, reporting and exit, where evasive answers are very hard to hide.
Before you talk to anyone, know your own numbers
Walk into the conversation knowing what an enquiry is worth to you, what you currently get, and what you can afford to pay for a customer. If you do not know those, any proposal will sound reasonable, because you have nothing to measure it against.
Our guide to the marketing metrics that actually matter covers how to work them out in an afternoon. Owners who arrive with their own numbers get noticeably better proposals, because it is immediately obvious they will be checking.
It also helps to know roughly what the market charges, so you can spot a quote that is implausibly cheap. Our breakdown of what SEO costs for an Australian small business sets out realistic bands.
First decide what kind of help you are hiring
“SEO agency” covers several very different arrangements, and picking the wrong shape costs more than picking the wrong provider.
A freelancer or solo consultant. Usually the cheapest, often genuinely expert, and you deal directly with the person doing the work. The risks are capacity and continuity. One person gets sick, takes holidays, or takes on a bigger client. Best suited to a business with a specific, contained need and someone internally who can pick things up.
A small agency. More expensive, but you get a team, cover when someone is away, and usually a mix of skills (technical, content, local search) that one person rarely has all of. The risk is becoming a small account among larger ones, so ask directly who will actually work on your business and how often you will hear from them.
A large agency. Rarely the right fit for a small local business. Minimum spends are high, and small accounts tend to be handled by the most junior staff while the people you met at the pitch move on to bigger clients.
Doing it yourself with occasional help. Genuinely viable for some businesses, particularly if your market is not fiercely competitive and someone in the business enjoys it. Paying for a one-off audit and a plan, then executing it yourself, is often the best value of all, and our ten local SEO fixes you can make this week is a reasonable place to start.
There is no universally right answer, but knowing which you are shopping for stops you comparing a $600-a-month freelancer against a $3,000-a-month agency as though they are the same purchase.
The ten questions
1. What will you actually do in the first ninety days?
You want specifics: a technical audit, fixing these issues, rewriting these pages, building these new pages, sorting the Google Business Profile, this many pieces of content. If the answer is “optimise your site and build authority”, press harder. Vagueness at the proposal stage becomes vagueness in the invoices.
2. Who will own my accounts and my work?
The most important question on this list, and the one owners forget.
Your domain, hosting, website, Google Analytics, Search Console and Google Business Profile should all be registered to your business, with you as the owner, and the agency added as a user. The content they write and the pages they build should be yours.
Some agencies register these in their own name. When you leave, you lose your analytics history, sometimes your Google Business Profile, occasionally your website. Ask directly, and get the answer in writing.
3. What will you report, and how often?
A good report says what was done, what happened, and what is next. It leads with enquiries, not impressions.
If the sample report is a wall of rankings and traffic charts with no mention of leads, you are being shown effort rather than outcomes. Ask to see a real, recent, anonymised report for a client like you, not a template.
4. How do you approach links?
This one quietly separates safe agencies from risky ones. Ask how they earn links, and listen for whether they buy them or use private networks.
Google’s spam policies treat link schemes as a violation, and sites can and do lose visibility over it. The risk lands on your business, not the agency’s. A good answer sounds like digital PR, genuine local citations, partnerships, useful content people reference. A bad answer is a monthly quota of links from unnamed sources.
5. Who actually does the work?
Is it the person in front of you, an in-house team, or subcontracted offshore? There is nothing wrong with a team or with outsourcing per se, but you should know, because it affects quality, communication and accountability.
Ask specifically who writes the content, and whether it is generated automatically. Content written by someone who understands your trade reads completely differently to content assembled by someone who has never seen a job like yours.
6. What do you need from me?
A revealing question. Good SEO needs input from the business: photos of real work, answers to technical questions, knowledge of your best jobs and margins, prompt review of drafts.
An agency that says “nothing, we handle everything” is either being polite or is planning to produce generic work that could belong to any business in your industry.
7. Can I speak to a client in a similar business?
Not a testimonial on a page, an actual conversation. Ask about a client of a similar size in a comparable industry, ideally one who has been with them a year or more.
Ask that client the useful questions: did enquiries genuinely increase, were reports clear, did anyone answer the phone when something went wrong, and would they sign again.
8. What is the contract, and how do I get out?
SEO needs time, so expect some commitment. But there is a difference between a reasonable initial term and a twelve-month lock-in with no exit and automatic renewal.
Ask: what is the minimum term, what notice do I give, what happens to the work and accounts if I leave, and are there exit fees. Read the renewal clause specifically, automatic rollovers with a short cancellation window catch a lot of small businesses.
9. What won’t you promise?
A genuinely good answer to this is one of the strongest signals you will get. An experienced agency will say plainly that they cannot promise a ranking position, cannot control Google, and cannot guarantee a timeframe.
Google itself is explicit on this in its own guide to hiring an SEO. Nobody can guarantee a number one ranking. An agency that promises one is either inexperienced or hoping you will not check. In Australia, claims like that may also raise questions under the consumer protections the ACCC enforces.
10. What happens if it is not working?
Ask what they would do at month six if enquiries had not moved. You want to hear a diagnostic process (review the data, check what changed, look at whether the problem is traffic, conversion or follow-up) and a willingness to have an honest conversation.
“That won’t happen” is not an answer.
The red flags
Any one of these is worth pausing on. Two or more and you should keep looking:
- Guaranteed rankings, or “we have a relationship with Google”. There is no such relationship.
- Cold-call or spam email approaches claiming problems with your site they have not looked at.
- Secret methods they cannot explain. If they will not tell you what they do, assume you would not like it.
- Reporting only rankings, particularly for terms you have never heard anyone use.
- Accounts in their name, or reluctance to give you admin access to your own property.
- Suspiciously cheap monthly packages. Real SEO takes hours; a very low fee usually buys automated output.
- No questions about your business. If they have not asked what a customer is worth or which services you want more of, they are selling a package, not a strategy.
- Pressure to sign today, or a discount that expires this afternoon.
The green flags
Equally, here is what a good agency tends to do:
- Asks about your business before talking about SEO: your margins, your best jobs, the work you actually want more of.
- Sets realistic expectations, including that early months may show little.
- Explains things in plain English without either dumbing down or hiding behind jargon.
- Shows their working: what was done, not just what happened.
- Tells you when something is not worth doing, including when you do not need them.
- Is comfortable with you owning everything.
This is the approach behind our longer-running client relationships, like Metro Tree Works and Anchor Claims, where local SEO runs alongside the website and the client can see exactly where their investment is going. You can browse our client projects for the range.
The questions a good agency will ask you
Worth knowing what a strong pitch looks like from the other side. Expect to be asked:
- What is a customer worth to you, and what is your average job?
- Which services are most profitable, and which do you want more of?
- Where do your customers come from geographically?
- What have you tried before, and what happened?
- Who will be our contact, and how quickly can you review things?
- What does success look like in twelve months?
If nobody asks you anything like this, they are not designing anything for your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should I ask before hiring an SEO agency?
Ask what they will actually do in the first ninety days, who will own your website and analytics accounts, how they build links, who does the work, what they will report on, and how you exit if it is not working. The answers to those six tell you more than any pitch deck. A good agency will answer all of them plainly; a poor one will talk around them.
Can an SEO agency guarantee first place on Google?
No, and anyone who does is telling you something untrue. Nobody controls Google’s rankings, results vary by searcher and location, and the algorithm changes constantly. Google states plainly that no one can guarantee a number one ranking. A guarantee is the single clearest signal to walk away, and in Australia it may also raise questions under consumer law.
Who should own my Google Analytics and Google Business Profile?
You should, always. Your website, domain, hosting, analytics, Search Console and Google Business Profile should be registered to your business with you as owner, and the agency added as a user. Agencies that keep ownership of these can hold your data and visibility hostage when you try to leave. Ask this before you sign anything.
How long should I sign an SEO contract for?
SEO needs time to work, so a very short commitment is unrealistic, but a long lock-in with no exit is a risk. A reasonable arrangement is an initial period of three to six months, then month to month, or a longer term with a clear exit clause and notice period. What matters most is that you can leave if the work is not being done.
How do I know if my SEO agency is doing anything?
Look for evidence of work and evidence of results. Ask what was actually done each month (pages published, technical fixes, profile updates) and check it against your site. Then judge results on enquiries and cost per lead rather than rankings alone. If reports show only rankings and traffic and you cannot see any change on your website, that is a fair reason to ask harder questions.
The bottom line
You are not being asked to judge someone’s SEO expertise. You could not, and you should not have to. You are being asked to judge whether they are straight with you.
So ask the questions that are hard to dodge. What exactly will you do first. Who owns my accounts. How do you get links. Who does the work. What will you report. How do I leave. Anyone doing this properly will answer all six without hesitation, because the answers are the ordinary facts of running a decent agency. Anyone who bristles, deflects or promises a number one ranking has told you what you needed to know.
And keep your own numbers close. The moment you know what an enquiry costs and what a customer is worth, an SEO relationship stops being an act of faith and becomes a business decision you can check every month.
Wondering why your website isn’t ranking? Contact 7 Marketing for a complimentary website and SEO review. We’ll tell you what we would actually do, what it would cost, and whether it is worth doing at all. Request a chat or get in touch through our contact page, and ask us every question on this list.