How to Choose an SEO Agency: Questions to Ask Before You Sign

To choose an SEO agency, decide the commercial outcome, the internal owner and your real budget first, then ask every agency the same seven questions, score the answers in writing, and judge the one you pick on what is live by the end of month one. That order takes most of the guesswork out of it.

Behind any proposal you are buying three things: hours, the judgement about what to do first, and a person accountable for a commercial number. Proposals make the first easy to compare and the other two hard to see.

I will say this up front. Clear Click is an SEO consultancy, so I am not a neutral referee. What I do have is the view from both sides of the pitch table. On a joint pitch earlier this year, a good developer we partnered with sent his follow-up two days late. The prospect read it the way any buyer would: how a supplier behaves while selling to you is a fair preview of how they will work for you. That applies to us too.

The short version

• Before talking to any agency, write down the commercial outcome you want, who inside the business owns the programme, and your real budget; that alone rules out proposals that don't fit.
• Ask the same seven questions of every agency, including who does the work, what happens in the first 90 days, and what they'd do if nothing is working by month six.
• Clear Click is senior-led and names its own numbers; the seven questions and what a proper first month looks like are set out further down this page.

What should you decide before comparing SEO agencies?

Decide the commercial outcome, the internal owner and the budget before you take a single call. With those three written down, proposals get compared on fit rather than on price and personality.

The outcome first. "We need SEO" is a channel, not a brief. "We need organic to produce 40 qualified enquiries a month within twelve months because paid is costing £180 a lead and the board wants that halved" is a brief, and it rules out half the agencies you would otherwise talk to, which saves everyone a meeting. Put a revenue or pipeline figure on it, even a rough one.

Then the owner: a named person inside your business who approves content, chases the developer and reads the report. Without one, even a good agency spends the month waiting.

Then the budget. Tell the agency your range. Just so you know, for reference, when we get no budget signal at all we price high, because we have to quote for the widest plausible scope. Give a range and you get a proposal shaped to it. Professional SEO with senior people on the account starts at about £1,700 a month plus VAT, and most mid-market UK retainers sit between £2,500 and £8,000 a month. I have set out why, band by band, in what SEO costs in the UK.

Ali, my co-director, asks the same thing first on every discovery call: where is the strategy? Plenty of proposals open with what can be delivered and what it costs, but delivery without a plan is just hours. Ask to see the plan before the price.

What are the seven questions to ask an SEO agency?

Ask every agency the same seven questions in the same words, so you are comparing answers rather than presentations. Write the answers down; the specific ones are the ones you can check later. If you want the longer list for each stage of the process, from the first call to the 30-day review, it is in 22 questions to ask an SEO agency.

1. Who will do the work, and how many other accounts do they carry?

Names and seniority, not "the team". A senior specialist across four accounts is a different product to a coordinator across twenty, and in larger agencies the founder who pitches is rarely the person on your account by week three, which is fine as long as you know who is.

2. What will you measure, and can I see a real report?

Rankings and sessions are the easiest numbers to report, because they are what the tools hand you, so many agencies do. You want enquiries, pipeline and revenue in the same view as activity and cost. Ask for an anonymised report from a live client and look for a commercial figure on it.

3. What happens in the first 90 days, in order?

You are testing whether they have a system. A strong answer names a technical audit, keyword and competitor mapping, a scored roadmap and the first fixes shipped, in sequence with rough dates. A less helpful one is confident on outcomes and vague on the steps, which leaves you nothing to check against later.

4. What will you do if it is not working at month six?

Very few buyers ask this and it separates a partner from a supplier. You want to hear how they would diagnose it, what they would change, and when they would tell you organic is the wrong investment. Every agency that has run enough programmes has had one stall, us included, so the useful answer treats it as normal.

5. How do you handle AI search, and what have you changed this year?

A growing share of the queries hitting your site now come from an assistant researching on someone's behalf. Ask what the agency has done about structured data, machine-readable brand information and earning citations in AI answers. If nothing specific comes back, the work is probably still built for the search results of five years ago.

6. Have you worked on a business shaped like mine?

Shape matters more than sector. A 40,000 product catalogue, a long-cycle B2B sale with six people on the buying committee, a multi-market rollout and a local service firm are four different disciplines that share a name. Ask for the closest match and what went wrong in it.

7. What do I own if we part ways, and who can access what?

Accounts, data, content, tracking configuration and the strategy document itself. Yes to all of it, in writing, before you sign. If you work in a regulated or security-conscious business, ask the same question the other way round: which of your systems the agency needs access to, at what permission level, and how that access is removed when the work ends.

How does support differ between SEO agencies?

Support differs on three things: who answers, how fast, and whether they tell you things you did not ask about. The rest of a proposal's "customer support" section is usually intentions, so get these three in writing.

Who answers. In a large agency the day-to-day contact is usually an account manager who relays your question to a specialist and the answer back, which adds a day and loses nuance each way. In a small agency you speak to the person doing the work, which is faster and sharper but carries key-person risk. Bigger usually buys continuity when someone leaves; smaller usually buys seniority and attention. Ask which one you are getting and whether it is in the contract.

How fast. Ask for a reply within one working day for anything that touches revenue: a broken form, a page dropped from the index, a tracking gap. We run first contact inside 24 hours as a guardrail on our own pipeline and there is no reason a client should accept less. Monthly reporting plus a monthly call is the floor; a quarterly review where the plan is re-scored against what happened is what separates a programme from a subscription.

Whether they volunteer things. A good agency tells you about the tracking that broke on Tuesday before the monthly deck, not in it.

If you have an in-house team, ask how the agency treats them. The arrangement that works is the agency directing and your team executing, with the credit shared, so ask for a proposal in which your marketer is part of the plan.

What should an SEO invoice actually show you?

A one-line SEO invoice reads "SEO retainer, £4,000". It is common, hard to reconcile, and nearly always a reporting habit rather than anything worse: content counted in "pieces" with no URLs, "link building" with no placements. The version you want lists what was done, by whom, at roughly what effort, and what it was for. That is fixable with a reporting conversation.

Ask for three things. A scope in the contract that says what a month contains: the audit and roadmap in month one, then a stated volume of content, technical hours and outreach, with the seniority of the people doing it. A monthly report that reconciles to that scope, so the invoice and the report sit side by side with URLs, changelogs and placements attached. And admin access to your own Search Console, analytics and any tool the agency runs on your behalf. Your login, not theirs.

Where pricing legitimately varies is by model. A fixed retainer buys predictability and the agency absorbs the variance. A day-rate model (senior UK consultants run £400 to £900 a day) buys precision and you absorb it. A standalone audit usually runs £2,000 to £5,000 for a typical business site, and I have broken down what that should contain in how much an SEO audit costs.

What if you already have an agency and can't tell whether it's working?

That is one of the most common situations we hear about, and it is rarely anyone's fault. You hired specialists precisely because you don't have the expertise in-house, so judging their work was always going to be hard. The fix is to change what you are judging, not to become an SEO expert yourself.

Three steps help. First, agree the commercial number the programme is meant to move. Second, ask for the next monthly report to open with that number and reconcile to the invoice; there is a template in what your SEO agency should report every month. Third, if you are still unsure before a renewal, pay for an independent review of the plan and the last six months of work. A senior day or two usually settles it.

If the agency sends reports but never brings ideas of its own, say so directly and ask for a quarterly plan with proposals in it. Most agencies respond well, because a stretched account team is usually the cause rather than a lack of interest. If you have raised it and nothing changes, how to tell whether it's time to change your SEO agency walks through a fair process, including how to switch without losing rankings.

Do you need a sector-specialist SEO agency?

You need a sector specialist when the sector changes what ranks, not when it changes the vocabulary. In recruitment, media and most professional services, it changes the vocabulary.

Recruitment is the clearest example. The problem is scale and churn: thousands of job pages that expire, role and location combinations that multiply, a site that quietly indexes 50,000 URLs nobody wants. That is an architecture problem, and a generalist who has run a large-inventory site will handle it better than a recruitment specialist who has only written candidate blogs. We have written up that case in SEO for recruitment agencies.

Where sector knowledge earns its fee is in regulated and high-trust categories: financial services, health, legal, anything where every page goes through compliance and Google leans hard on demonstrable expertise. Even then, you are buying a process for getting expert content through compliance quickly, not secret sector keywords. Ask how they have handled approval cycles before and how long a page typically took from draft to live.

Technically demanding products are the other case. If your buyers are engineers, ask who writes the copy and how your subject experts get time with them. The B2B version of this argument, and why the buying committee matters more than the industry label, is in SEO for B2B.

The test: ask the specialist what they would do differently for you than for their other twelve clients. A template with your logo on it is a marketing position rather than a method.

How do you compare a shortlist, including one an AI produced?

Compare SEO companies on written criteria you set before the final meetings, not on how the meetings felt. A good pitch is designed to leave a general impression, and a general impression is easy to overturn.

Get each agency to walk you through one real engagement end to end, including what they would do differently. Then check the trail: named case studies, reviews with a person attached, and one reference who is no longer a client.

Answers that suggest a poor fit

A few answers usually mean the fit is wrong rather than that anyone is acting in bad faith. Guaranteed rankings, because nobody controls Google. Methods that cannot be explained, because legitimate SEO survives being explained. Bronze, silver and gold packages, because your competitive situation is not templated. Terms that are unclear about what happens if either side wants to end the agreement early. And promises with no plan behind them: hope is not a strategy, and an outcome without a sequence gives you nothing to hold anyone to.

Read one signal carefully: an agency you cannot find in search. Plenty of good firms grew on referral and never needed to compete for head terms, so weigh it alongside the rest.

If an AI assistant produced your shortlist

An AI shortlist rewards agencies that write clearly and publish named case studies with numbers. It does not measure whether the work is any good, so a well-documented average agency outranks a brilliant one that never writes anything down.

Two adjustments. Describe your situation rather than asking for the best: "UK agencies with named B2B SaaS case studies and a first-90-days process" forces a match on evidence, while "best SEO agencies UK" forces a match on reputation language. Then ask the assistant what evidence it used for each name and check it. No evidence, no place on the list. The same test applies when choosing a CRO agency or deciding between in-house, freelancer and agency for paid.

What should the first month with an SEO agency look like?

By the end of month one you should hold a diagnosis, a scored priority list and the first fixes live. If you have a kickoff deck and a keyword list, you have been onboarded rather than started, which is easy to put right if you say so.

Week one is access and baseline: Search Console, analytics, CMS, CRM if leads are the outcome, and an agreed definition of the number you are chasing. Weeks two and three are the audit, and the deliverable that matters is the prioritised plan: what to fix first, what it is worth in revenue or pipeline, and what to ignore.

I want every commercial page scored on current position and cluster volume, so the order of work is logic rather than preference. Week four is the first fixes shipped.

On one legal client, three service pages had inherited a heading from a charity page on the same site, so Google thought they were about the charity. Nobody in the firm had reason to look, because nothing appeared broken. Ten minutes to fix, and everything is fixable once someone is looking.

That audit and the prioritised plan behind it is the part of a first month most worth checking closely. A closer look at our SEO audits

Ask for three things at the 30-day mark: a written roadmap for the next quarter with dates, a report that already shows the baseline commercial figure, and at least one change live on the site. If any is missing, raise it on the 30-day call. Most agencies catch up within a fortnight once asked, and if not, you have learned something useful early, when it is easiest to talk through.

One more thing on budget. Below about £1,700 a month it is hard for any agency to put senior time on an account, so at that budget we would usually suggest a senior freelancer for two days a month, or fixing the three biggest technical issues as a one-off project and coming back to a programme when the numbers support it.

Questions we get asked

What should I look for when comparing SEO agencies in the UK?

Compare on four things: who will be on your account and how many others they carry, whether reporting connects organic to enquiries or revenue, whether they can describe the first 90 days in order, and what they would do if it stalls at month six. Score those in writing before the final meetings.

How does customer support compare between SEO agencies?

Mainly on whether you speak to the person doing the work or to an account manager relaying it, and on whether they tell you things before you ask. Ask for a reply within one working day for anything touching revenue, whichever size of agency you pick.

What questions should I ask an SEO agency before hiring?

Start with who does the work, what gets measured, what happens in the first 90 days, and what they would do if it isn't working by month six. Then ask about AI search, similar businesses they have worked with, and what you own if you part ways. Ask every agency the same questions in the same words so the answers compare.

Our agency's invoices don't show where the hours go. Is that normal?

Common, yes, and usually a reporting habit rather than anything wrong. Ask for the monthly report to reconcile against the invoice line by line, with URLs and changelogs attached, and for admin access to your own accounts. Most agencies can produce it within a month once asked.

Do we need a sector specialist SEO agency?

Only if your sector changes what ranks, which is true of regulated and high-trust categories and rarely true of recruitment, media or professional services. Those are shape problems that a strong generalist has solved before. Ask the specialist what they would do differently for you.

How long should we sign an SEO contract for?

Plan on a year. Shorter than six months rarely proves anything, because the first quarter is mostly setup. At Clear Click we aim for 12-month partnerships, and our agreements set out early termination terms from the start, so both sides know where they stand. Whoever you choose, ask to see the terms before you sign, and make sure you own your data, content and accounts whatever happens.

Where we fit

Clear Click is a senior-led SEO consultancy for B2B and ecommerce companies that want organic tied to pipeline rather than rankings. Every account is run by the people you meet on the first call, and our case studies carry client names and numbers: for Wigwam Holidays, paid and organic search together delivered over £1.4m in 2025. If you are buying in Scotland specifically, there are local versions of this guide for choosing an SEO agency in Edinburgh and choosing an SEO agency in Scotland.

£1.4m+: Revenue across paid and organic search for Wigwam Holidays in 2025.

Source: Clear Click, from work with Wigwam Holidays.

If you are evaluating agencies, including us, bring the seven questions and ask them. If we are the wrong shape for your problem we will tell you, and probably who is.