Hiring an SEO agency: five questions that filter out the bad ones.

The fastest way to filter out a bad SEO agency is to ask five questions and listen for vague answers. Bad agencies talk in volume — more keywords, more content, more backlinks. Good agencies talk in tradeoffs and revenue. The difference shows up in the first call, before you sign anything.

I have hired agencies, fired agencies, and cleaned up after agencies. Most of the bad ones were not scams. They were just selling activity instead of outcomes, and the owner who hired them did not have the questions to catch it. Here are the five I use. Each one has a good answer and a tell.

What revenue did your last client make from your work?

A good agency can name a client, a number, and a timeframe in one sentence. A bad one redirects to traffic, rankings, or impressions. That redirect is the whole tell.

Rankings are not revenue. A San Diego dental practice can rank first for a search no patient ever types, and the agency will still send a green dashboard. What you want to hear is something like "a family law firm went from six qualified inquiries a month to nineteen in five months, and we can show you which keywords drove the calls." If they cannot connect their work to money — new clients, booked calls, signed matters — they are selling you motion, not results.

Push on the number. Ask how they measured it. A real agency tracks calls, forms, and bookings back to the page and the search that produced them. A weak one points at a traffic graph and hopes you stop asking. If we cannot tie a result to revenue, we do not celebrate it, and neither should the agency you hire.

The follow-up that catches people: ask for the client's name and whether you can talk to them. Confident agencies hand you a reference. Nervous ones suddenly need to "check on confidentiality."

What will you refuse to do?

The best agencies have a list of things they will not do, and they say it out loud. The worst ones say yes to everything because every yes is a line on the invoice. Our differentiator is what we refuse to do, and a good agency should be able to name theirs.

Listen for refusals around link buying, private blog networks, and "guaranteed rankings." Google does not sell rankings, so anyone who guarantees them is either buying links that will get you penalized or lying about what they control. An agency that says "we don't buy links, and here's why" is protecting you from a problem you would not see until traffic collapsed.

A second refusal worth hearing: vanity metrics. Ask if they report on impressions and keyword counts. If those are the headline numbers, the report is theater. The agency is showing you what looks good rather than what made you money.

The third refusal is scope honesty. A good agency tells you what SEO will not fix. If your website takes eight seconds to load and your intake team ignores phone calls, no amount of ranking will save you. An honest partner names that before you sign. We wrote about this split in Fractional CMO vs agency: the difference that matters — the agency that tells you the uncomfortable truth is usually the one worth keeping.

How will I know it's working in 90 days?

A good agency gives you a specific 90-day milestone before you pay them. A bad agency tells you SEO takes six to twelve months and leaves it there. Both statements are true — SEO is slow — but the good one still commits to early signals you can check.

Early signals are not rankings for your money keyword. They are foundation fixes, indexed pages, and the first movement on low-competition searches. By day 90 you should be able to see a technical audit completed, priority pages rebuilt, and a handful of new searches starting to bring qualified visits. If the only answer is "trust the process," you have no way to tell a slow-but-working engagement from a slow-and-failing one.

This matters because the cost of being wrong is months of fees with nothing to show. I have seen owners pay $3,000 a month for a year before realizing the agency had not touched the broken pages that were costing them clients. A 90-day checkpoint is your circuit breaker. Ask for it in writing.

Foundations first. A serious agency spends the first stretch fixing what is broken before chasing new traffic, and they can tell you exactly what "fixed" looks like by the end of the quarter.

Who actually does the work, and where do they sit?

The person who answers your questions on the sales call should be close to the person doing the work. When the agency sells with a senior strategist and delivers with an offshore content mill nobody named, quality drops and you find out three months in.

Ask directly. Who writes the content. Who does the technical work. Are they employees or subcontractors. Do they understand your field. A roofing company and an immigration law firm need different things, and an agency that treats both the same will write thin content that ranks for nothing and converts no one.

This is also where you find out if you will get a strategist or a ticket queue. Small businesses get hurt most by agencies built for volume — you become account number 340, your work gets templated, and your calls go to whoever is free. You do not need a marketing department on retainer. You need a small number of people who know your business and stay in the room.

When the answer is "we'll assign you a dedicated account manager," ask what that manager can actually decide. Often they are a relay between you and the people doing the work, which adds a week to every change. Fewer hops is better. Ask how a request gets from your email to the person who fixes it.

What happens to my work if I leave?

A good agency builds on assets you own and hands them over without a fight when you go. A bad one locks your website, your content, and your data inside accounts you cannot access, so leaving means starting over. Ask the exit question before you sign, because the answer reveals whether they are building for you or for their own retention numbers.

The specifics matter. Do you own your domain and hosting. Is the content written into your site or trapped in their platform. Can you get admin access to your own Google Business Profile, Search Console, and analytics. An agency that owns those logins owns your leverage. When the relationship sours, they can hold your own data hostage.

Deliver-and-disappear is the common failure, but lock-in is the quieter one. The work looks fine until you try to leave and discover you cannot. A good partner sets up everything in your name from day one and would rather you stay because the work is good than because the exit is painful.

This is the question that separates a vendor from a partner. McShanes wanted a firm that built durable foundations they would keep regardless of who managed them — you can read how that played out with McShanes Solicitors. The test is simple. If leaving is easy and you stay anyway, the work earned it.

Where this breaks down

These five questions filter out bad agencies. They do not guarantee a good one. A polished agency can give clean answers to all five and still under-deliver once the contract is signed. The questions get you a shortlist and a baseline; the 90-day checkpoint is what proves the answers were true. Treat the call as the start of the test, not the end of it.

There is also a harder question underneath all five: should you hire an agency at all. If you do not know what good SEO output looks like, you cannot judge whether you are getting it — and that is a setup for being managed by your vendor instead of managing them. Some owners need someone to set the strategy and hold the agency accountable before they hire one. That is the gap a Fractional CMO fills — a senior operator who runs vendor oversight so you are not grading work you cannot read. We cover the decision in When you actually need a Fractional CMO (and when you don't). For many small businesses, the answer is to fix the foundation first and add ongoing help once you know what you are buying.

The pattern across all five questions is the same. Good agencies talk about revenue, refusals, milestones, people, and your ownership. Bad agencies talk about volume and ask you to trust the process. You do not need to be an SEO expert to hear the difference. You need to ask the question and notice whether the answer is specific or smoke.