Questions to ask an SEO agency, by stage: before the call, on it, on the proposal, before signing and at day 30, each with the answer that should worry you.
Ask an SEO agency 22 questions across the whole buying process, six of them on the first call, and judge every answer on one thing: is it specific about the sequence of work or only confident about the outcome? How a supplier answers you while they are selling is how they will work once they are paid.
This is the companion to our guide on how to choose an SEO agency, which covers the seven questions for the pitch itself. Here I’ve gone wider: 22 questions grouped by stage, from the first email to the 30-day review, and for each one the answer that should worry you and the answer that should settle you.
What should you ask an SEO agency before the first call?
Three questions, by email, before anyone books an hour. They cost the agency ten minutes to answer and tell you whether the hour is worth having.
1. Who would run our account day to day, and how many other accounts do they carry?
Worry if the answer is “our team”, or the founder you are emailing turns out not to be on the account by week three. Settle if you get a name, their seniority, and a number: a senior specialist carrying four to six accounts is a different product from a coordinator carrying twenty.
2. Can you send an anonymised monthly report from a live client?
Worry if you get a sample deck built for sales, or a real one that is all rankings and sessions with nothing in pounds. Settle if the report puts enquiries or pipeline next to activity and cost, carries a changelog of what shipped, and has a couple of clumsy redactions in it, because that means it is real.
3. Here is our budget range. Is it enough for what you would want to do?
Worry if the answer is “we can make anything work”. Settle if you get a plain yes, a plain no, or “yes at reduced scope” with the dropped piece named.
Just so you know, for reference, this is why you should give the range. When we get no budget signal at all we price high, because we have to quote for the widest plausible scope, and we can always go down, never up again. Withholding your budget does not get you a better price. It gets you the high one. Mid-market UK retainers sit between £2,500 and £8,000 a month, and the reasons are in what SEO costs in the UK.
One thing you may not want to hear at this stage: you are being interviewed too. An agency with a full book will pass on a buyer who won’t share a budget, sends 40 templated questions, and has no internal owner for the work. Ask about price and nothing about your own commercial number and the good agencies quietly price you out, while the weak ones say yes to everything.
What should you ask an SEO agency on the first call?
Six questions, in the same words to every agency, and write the answers down while they talk. An hour later you will remember the personalities and not the content.
4. What have you understood about our commercial problem so far?
Worry if they open with what they can deliver and how much it costs. Ali’s reflex on every one of these calls is the right one: slow down, where’s the strategy? Settle if they play your problem back with a number in it, then tell you what they would need to check before they commit to a plan.
5. What happens in the first 90 days, in order?
Worry if the answer is vague on steps and confident on results. Settle if you hear a technical audit, a keyword and competitor map, a scored roadmap and the first fixes live, in that order, with rough weeks against each.
6. Why is discovery paid, and what do I walk away with?
Worry if they offer a free audit inside 48 hours. That is an automated crawl attached to a salesperson, and somebody pays for the salesperson’s time later, which is you. Settle if discovery has a fee, a four to six week timeline, and outputs you own whether or not you hire them: a diagnosis of where you sit, one search strategy across organic and paid, and a twelve-month roadmap. A standalone audit of a typical business site runs £3,000 to £8,000 and I’ve set out what it should contain in how much an SEO audit costs. We charge for it because we want to protect the work we do for paying clients, and because free strategy is worth what it costs.
7. What would you do if it isn’t working at month six?
Worry if they cannot imagine it. An agency that has never underperformed has not run enough programmes. Settle if they describe how they would diagnose it, what they would change, and the point at which they would tell you organic is the wrong channel for you.
8. What did you change in the last twelve months because of AI search?
Worry if the answer is nothing specific, or a new “GEO package” at a new price. Settle if they name changes to structured data and machine-readable brand information, describe how they track citations in AI answers, and have a view on which of your queries now get answered without a click.
9. Which of your clients is shaped most like us, and what went wrong on it?
Worry if you get a logo wall and no setbacks. Settle if they walk one engagement through end to end and name the mistake unprompted. Shape matters more than sector: a six-person buying committee and a long sales cycle is a discipline in itself, which is the argument in SEO for B2B.
What should you ask about the proposal?
Five questions, in writing, once the document lands. The proposal is the first deliverable the agency will ever hand you. Read it as one.
10. Where is the diagnosis?
Worry if the document opens with the agency’s process and a price. Settle if it opens with your position in the market, a figure for what closing the gap is worth in revenue or pipeline, and a plan that visibly follows from those two things.
11. What exactly does a month contain?
Worry if the line reads “SEO retainer” and the scope is a list of nouns. Settle if you can see volumes with seniority attached: content pieces with intended URLs, technical hours, outreach placements, and the name of the person doing each.
12. If the price is too high, what comes out?
Worry if they knock 20% off and change nothing, which means the first number was padded or the work will shrink quietly. Settle if the scope shrinks and they tell you which piece goes and what that costs you in outcome. I will say this is how we run it: reduce scope, never value. A client can strip a service out of the monthly if they need to. The price of what remains does not move.
13. What will the monthly report show, and can I see the template with our numbers in it?
Worry if the template is a rankings dashboard with a sessions graph. Settle if it leads with qualified enquiries or pipeline from organic, cost per lead against paid, a changelog, and next month’s plan, with rankings and sessions in the appendix where they belong.
14. How does this change if we have an in-house marketer?
Worry if the proposal does not change at all. Settle if they would rather direct and oversee than duplicate, the scope drops to match, and they say without prompting that undermining your own people is not part of the job.
What should you ask before signing?
Four questions for the contract. The agency will find them slightly annoying, which is fine. A good one has been asked them before.
15. What do we own if we part ways?
Worry if the answer is “we’d discuss that at the time”. Settle if it is yes, in writing, to all of it: accounts, data, content, tracking configuration and the strategy document itself.
16. What is the term, the break clause and the notice period?
Worry if it is twelve months with no break and a fee for leaving. Settle if it is six to twelve months with a break clause at three and 30 to 60 days’ notice after that. Shorter than six proves nothing because the first quarter is setup. Longer with penalties is the agency insuring itself against its own performance.
17. Who do we call when something touching revenue breaks, and how fast do they answer?
Worry if the route is an account manager relaying to a specialist and back, with no response time in the contract. Settle if it is one working day, in writing, for anything that touches revenue: a broken form, a page dropped from the index, a tracking gap. We hold ourselves to first contact inside 24 hours on our own pipeline and there is no reason a client should accept less.
18. Can I speak to one current client and one former one?
Worry if you are offered current clients only, hand-picked, or a polite refusal. Settle if you get both and they tell you why the former client left before you ask. Nobody keeps every account, and the reason they lost one tells you more than the reason they kept ten.
What should you ask at the 30-day review?
You are not done asking questions when you sign. At day 30 the break clause is still close, and four questions tell you whether you will need it.
19. Can I see the scored roadmap for the next quarter, with dates?
Worry if you have a kickoff deck and a keyword list. Settle if there is a written plan where each item is scored on current position and cluster volume, with a revenue estimate against the top items, so the order of work is logic rather than preference.
20. What is live on the site already?
Worry if the answer is “we’re still in research”. Settle if at least one fix has shipped. On a 30-page site the first technical corrections are rarely the hard part, and an agency that has not shipped one in a month is telling you about the next eleven.
21. What is our baseline commercial number, and where does it sit in the report?
Worry if the baseline is sessions. Settle if it is organic enquiries, qualified leads or pipeline for month zero, recorded in the same report format you will see every month from here.
22. What did you find that you didn’t expect, and what did you tell us before we asked?
Worry if nothing was volunteered. Settle if they raised the broken form, the tracking gap or the page that lost 30% of its clicks on the day they found it rather than in the monthly deck. That habit at day 30 is the habit you get at month ten.
Questions we get asked
How many questions should I ask before hiring an agency?
Twenty-two across the whole process, spread over the first email, the first call, the proposal and the contract, with six on the call itself. Forty questions in one meeting gets you forty rehearsed answers, and it marks you as a buyer nobody senior wants to work with.
What is a red flag answer from an SEO agency?
Any answer that is confident about the outcome and vague about the sequence that produces it. Guaranteed rankings, a secret method, and a free audit that arrives in two days are the three most common forms of it.
Should I ask an SEO agency for references?
Yes, and ask for one current client and one former client. The current one tells you what the work is like; the former one tells you how the agency behaves when it is losing, which is the thing you are actually buying insurance against.
Is it rude to ask an agency about their own rankings?
No, and a good agency expects it. Search the commercial terms they would want and see where they land, then treat the result as one data point among several, because plenty of good firms grew on referral and never had to compete for a head term.
What should I ask about reporting?
Ask to see a real anonymised report before the first call, then the template with your own numbers in it before you sign. You are looking for a commercial figure on page one, a changelog of what shipped, and next month’s plan. If the report cannot show what the invoice bought, the invoice is a black box.
Where we fit
Clear Click is a senior-led SEO agency for B2B and ecommerce companies that want organic reported as pipeline. Discovery is paid, the people on the first call are the people on the account, and our case studies carry names and numbers: for Myagi that meant 38% more qualified organic leads and 115% pipeline growth.
If you are running this list on a shortlist, run it on us. Get in touch with your budget range and your commercial problem and we will answer all 22 in writing.
