Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company (and the Answers That Should Worry You)

Start with what Google itself recommends

Google's Search Central documentation includes a page on whether you need an SEO and how to choose one. It suggests asking for examples of previous work, whether the SEO follows Google Search Essentials, what results to expect and over what timeframe, what experience they have in your industry and location, how long they have been in business, and how they will communicate and share the changes they make.

It also warns plainly: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." In Google's own video on hiring an SEO, the advice is that SEOs typically need four months to a year to implement improvements and then see potential benefit. Any pitch that contradicts either point is telling you something important about the agency.

Questions about results and measurement

The most revealing question is what the agency will measure. Rankings and traffic are easy to inflate and easy to report. Enquiries, sales and pipeline are harder, and they are the only numbers that tell you whether the money is working.

A good answer names the commercial goal first and works back to the metrics. A weak answer leads with ranking positions, domain authority scores or traffic totals that are not connected to anything you sell.

• What will you measure, and how does it connect to enquiries or revenue?
• What should we realistically expect in the first three months, and in the first year?
• Can you show results for a past client, with access to real Search Console or Analytics data rather than a screenshot?
• Which keywords will you target, and why those ones for our business?

Questions about method

You do not need to understand SEO to judge the answers here. You only need to notice whether the agency can explain what it will do in plain English, and whether the explanation is specific to your site rather than a generic package.

Pay particular attention to links. Earning links takes real effort, so any agency offering a fixed number of backlinks a month is almost certainly buying them or placing them on networks of low quality sites, which is exactly what Google's spam policies target.

• What will you do in the first month, specifically, on our site?
• Do you start with a technical audit, and will we see the findings?
• How do you earn links, and can you show examples?
• Who writes the content, and how do you make sure it is accurate for our industry?
• Will you tell us about every change you make to the site?

Questions about people, access and ownership

Ownership is where SEO relationships go wrong most expensively. If the agency creates your Search Console property, your Analytics account or your Google Business Profile in its own name, leaving becomes painful and occasionally means starting over.

The right arrangement is simple: you own every account, and the agency is added as a user. You also own all content and on-site changes outright once they are paid for.

• Who will actually do the work: the person pitching, a junior team, or a subcontractor?
• Will every account be created in our name, with you added as a user?
• Do we own all content and changes, including if we end the contract?
• What happens to the work, and our access, if we leave?

Questions about cost and commitment

SEO pricing varies enormously, which makes context useful. Ahrefs surveyed 439 SEO providers and found that 78.2% charge a monthly retainer, with $501 to $1,000 a month the single most common band at 20.4% of respondents. Agencies averaged noticeably higher retainers than freelancers.

Price alone tells you little. What matters is what the retainer buys each month and how long you are committed. A long minimum term is not automatically a bad sign, because SEO takes time, but you should know exactly what you are committing to and how to leave.

• What exactly is delivered each month for the fee?
• Is there a minimum term, and what is the notice period?
• Are content, links or technical fixes extra, or included?
• How will we know, after six months, whether this is worth continuing?

Answers that should worry you

Some answers are disqualifying on their own. Google's guidance flags several of them directly, and the rest are patterns that reliably end badly.

• Guaranteed rankings, especially guaranteed first page or number one positions
• Claims of a special relationship with Google or priority submission
• Secret or proprietary methods they will not explain
• A fixed number of backlinks per month, or talk of a network of sites
• Reports built on rankings for long phrases nobody actually searches
• Accounts set up in the agency's name rather than yours
• An unsolicited email promising page one, which Google specifically warns about

Do you actually need an SEO company?

Not always. If your website is technically sound, your market is local and small, and your main channel is your Google Business Profile and reviews, focused effort in-house may get you most of the way. If your site gets traffic but no enquiries, the problem is conversion, not search, and SEO will just bring more people to a page that does not persuade them.

An SEO company earns its fee when the site has technical problems you cannot fix, when competitors are actively investing in search, or when nobody on your team has the time to produce the content consistently. In those cases, the questions above are how you find one worth paying.