12 Questions to Ask Before Choosing an SEO Agency

Most SEO proposals look the same. They open with a custom audit describing your site’s weaknesses, promise meaningful traffic growth within three to six months, and close with a monthly retainer and a service breakdown. Unless you know what to look for, it is very difficult to tell the credible ones from the ones that will cost you twelve months of budget and produce nothing you can point to.

Choosing an SEO agency is one of the more consequential decisions a business owner makes, and most people make it with very little information beyond what the agency chooses to share at pitch. This guide gives you 12 questions to ask before you commit.

How to use this guide

Take these questions into your next proposal meeting or send them to shortlisted agencies in advance. Score each agency’s response on a 1-3 scale per question and use the score bands below to compare. Pay as much attention to how an agency answers as to what they say. Specific, data-backed answers signal genuine capability. Vague or defensive responses are a signal worth taking seriously.

Score	What it means
3 – Strong	Specific, data-backed, accountable answer
2 – Adequate	Some specificity, but follow-up questions needed
1 – Weak	Vague, defensive, or missing entirely

Score each question 1, 2 or 3 and add up across all 12. Total out of 36.

Score band	Interpretation
29-36	Strong candidate. Proceed with confidence, confirm named strategist in writing.
20-28	Proceed with caution. Go back with follow-up questions on the weakest areas.
Below 20	Look elsewhere. The proposal is built around activity rather than outcomes.

1. What does success look like in month three, and how will you measure it?

A credible agency should name specific, measurable milestones at the 90-day mark: a baseline established in Google Search Console, technical issues resolved, target pages indexed and performing, early signals on organic click growth. Twelve-month projections are educated guesses. A 90-day plan is testable.

Strong answer: Specific KPIs tied to crawl health, keyword visibility, and early conversion signals. A clear account of what the first 30 days will focus on and why.

Weak answer: “SEO takes time” offered as an explanation rather than a plan. No benchmarks. No accountability mechanism at any specific milestone.

2. Which keywords are you targeting first, and why those?

The answer should be built on data, not instinct. A good agency will have already researched your keyword landscape, matched search volume to commercial intent, assessed the competitive difficulty, and made a prioritisation decision based on how quickly rankings in that cluster could convert to leads or sales.

Strong answer: Specific terms with volume data, intent classification, and a clear rationale for why those keywords are the right starting point given your business model and current domain authority.

Weak answer: A list of broad terms pulled from a tool without explaining the selection logic or the connection to your actual revenue streams.

3. How do you connect ranking improvements to revenue?

Rankings are a means to an end. If an agency cannot explain how they will track the path from organic keyword to business outcome, you will spend months reviewing ranking tables without knowing whether your investment is working.

Strong answer: A clear description of the tracking infrastructure they will set up in the first 30 days, including how organic sessions will be attributed to specific conversion events in GA4 or your CRM.

Weak answer: “We focus on rankings and traffic. Revenue attribution is on your side.” That division leaves the most important question unanswered.

4. What does your monthly report include, and can we see an example?

A reporting sample tells you more than a pitch deck. Look at whether the report shows organic conversions alongside traffic data, whether it attributes performance to specific changes, and whether it includes a forward-looking section explaining what next month’s work is and why.

Strong answer: A redacted real report showing organic traffic by landing page, conversion events from organic sessions, keyword position changes with click data, and a clear next-steps section tied to the data.

Weak answer: Reluctance to share a real report, or a sample that shows rankings and total sessions without any conversion or revenue data.

5. What technical SEO work will be done in the first 90 days?

Content and links are visible and easy to pitch. Technical SEO is the work most agencies deprioritise because it is harder to explain. But for most sites, technical health is the ceiling that determines whether everything else works.

Strong answer: A specific technical audit process with named checks: crawl errors, index coverage, page speed, structured data, internal link architecture, duplicate content, and mobile usability. This work starts in month one.

Weak answer: A plan that begins with content production and treats technical work as something to “address over time” rather than as a foundational first step.

6. Who will be working on our account, and how do we reach them?

Many agencies win business at senior level and then hand it to a junior account manager. Ask for the name of the person who will be executing the strategy, their experience level, and how you reach them directly.

Strong answer: A named senior strategist with direct contact details. The person presenting the proposal is, or can introduce, the person doing the work.

Weak answer: References to “your dedicated account manager” who serves as an intermediary between you and an unnamed execution team.

7. What is your approach to link building, and how do you assess link quality?

Link building has a long history of shortcuts that produce short-term rankings and long-term penalties. A credible agency should explain their qualification criteria for a link: domain authority, topical relevance, editorial context, and traffic to the linking page.

Strong answer: A clear quality framework covering domain relevance, editorial standards, and how they approach outreach or content-led acquisition. Honest acknowledgement that high-quality links are slower to build than templated packages.

Weak answer: Monthly link quotas without a quality filter, or vague references to “white-hat” practices without being able to explain what those are in concrete terms.

8. What happens if traffic drops, and how will you communicate it?

Traffic drops happen. The question is not whether they happen but how your agency responds. An agency that goes quiet or deflects blame onto external factors without a diagnosis is not a partner.

Strong answer: A clear communication protocol: they notify you before you notice, they provide a root-cause analysis within a defined timeframe, and they return with a prioritised response plan rather than reassurance.

Weak answer: “Algorithm updates are unpredictable” as a first response, without a defined process for diagnosing or responding to drops.

9. Can you share a case study where SEO took longer than expected, and what caused it?

A more revealing signal than their best-case examples is whether they can talk honestly about a campaign that was harder than anticipated. The answer will tell you how they handle complexity and whether they take responsibility when things do not go to plan.

Strong answer: A specific example describing the complicating factor, what they did about it, and what the final outcome was.

Weak answer: Only positive examples offered. Resistance to the premise of the question. Generic references to “SEO being a long-term game” without a concrete example.

10. What are the risks specific to our site, and what could slow results?

A good agency does a real diagnostic before they pitch a plan. If they have done that work, they will be able to name the specific factors on your site that could complicate results: penalty history, a thin backlink profile, significant duplicate content, or a platform with known crawl limitations.

Strong answer: At least two or three specific risks identified from a pre-proposal audit, with an explanation of how the strategy accounts for each one.

Weak answer: A risk-free framing that presents a clean path to results. Generic “SEO takes 3-6 months” without site-specific context.

11. Are we locked in, and what happens to our assets if we leave?

Contract structure tells you how an agency thinks about accountability. A month-to-month model means the agency needs to earn the relationship every month. Ask specifically who owns your Google Ads accounts, Analytics property, Search Console access, and any content produced.

Strong answer: No lock-in contracts. The client retains ownership of all accounts, tracking assets, and content from day one. A clear offboarding process described upfront.

Weak answer: 12-month minimum terms, or vague answers about account ownership. Any suggestion that the agency “manages” accounts on your behalf without giving you admin access.

12. What does a good SEO strategy look like for a business at our stage?

The right answer is specific to your business: your domain authority, your competitive landscape, your current traffic mix, your revenue model. A templated answer covering “content, technical SEO, and link building” tells you nothing.

Strong answer: A response that varies by business type, site maturity, and keyword opportunity. References data from a pre-proposal audit. Acknowledges trade-offs between different strategic starting points.

Weak answer: The same answer regardless of what you told them about your business. A service breakdown rather than a strategic rationale.

What to do with the answers

These twelve questions will not give you a definitive verdict on their own. An agency can answer all twelve well and still be a poor fit for your business. What the questions will do is give you a much clearer picture of how an agency thinks, what they prioritise, and whether their model of success is built around your business outcomes or their own deliverable targets.

If you are working through a shortlist, run the same questions past each agency and compare the scores side by side. The differences will often make the decision for you.

A note from CCM

We have been providing specialist SEO agency support in Sydney since 2008. In that time we have audited a significant number of accounts transferred from other agencies. The most common finding is a reporting framework that was never built around business outcomes, and a client who did not know what to ask before they signed. We operate on month-to-month retainers with no lock-in. Every account is run by a named senior strategist with direct access. You can see how that works in practice in the Woofers World relationship.

Got a proposal on your desk right now? Send it to our SEO team and we’ll tell you what we’d ask.