Hiring an SEO agency usually comes down to one sales call. The agency brings a deck, a few case studies and a confident plan. You bring a list of questions, and you nod along to the answers.
Here is the problem with that call. A slide says “we took a dental clinic from 400 to 4,000 visits a month”. You have no way to check it in the room, so you take it on trust. Most buyers ask good questions. Very few check the answers.
This guide gives you the questions that matter and what a good answer sounds like. For each one, it shows how to check the answer against real data, often before the second call. Some of these checks take two minutes in your own Google Search Console, the free tool where Google reports how your site performs in search.
- Ask about results, the plan, the work, access and the contract. Client domains you can look up, the first keywords and why, who makes the fixes, whether links are included, and who owns the work when you leave.
- Then check the answers. Look up what their case-study clients rank for today, test their target keywords for volume and difficulty, and compare their audit with your own Search Console.
- ContextBolt SEO is the tool for that checking, and often the alternative to the agency. It gives Claude, Cursor or Codex live keyword, competitor, audit and Search Console data, so you can vet a pitch, or run the work yourself. $35 a month, month to month, with a 7-day free trial. See the in-house setup.
- Walk away from guarantees. Google says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, and it warns against a claimed “special relationship” with Google.
- An agency earns its fee when nobody on your team has an hour a week, or for a big one-off job like a migration.
Start with Google’s own list
Google has a page on whether you need an SEO, and it includes eight questions to ask one. Ask for examples of previous work. Ask whether they follow Google Search Essentials. Ask what results they expect, in what timeframe, and how they measure success. Ask about your industry, your country and how long they have been in business.
The same page also says something most agencies leave out of the pitch. “If you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself.”
Google’s list is a good start. It is written to filter out bad actors, though, and most agencies you talk to will pass it. The questions below go further. They are the ones that decide whether a decent agency is right for you, and each one comes with a way to check the answer.
Questions about their results
Can you show me three clients like us, with their domains?
What a good answer sounds like: Real domains, in your industry or close to it, with permission to look. A logo wall is not an answer. Neither is “our clients are confidential” for every single one.
How to check it: Look each domain up. You want what it ranks for today and its estimated organic traffic, held against the number on the slide. You are checking two things. Is the result still standing? And do the keywords it ranks for look like ones that bring in buyers, or just traffic?
What results do you expect, by when, and how will you measure them?
What a good answer sounds like: A range, a timeframe in months, and a measure tied to your business. Clicks from search, read off your own Search Console, and the leads they turn into. Until mid-2026, Google’s guidance said to expect four months to a year before changes pay off. An agency promising page one in six weeks is selling, not planning.
How to check it: Ask which keywords the measure covers, then look up their monthly volume. Ranking first for a phrase ten people a month search is a nice screenshot and almost no customers.
Questions about the plan
Which keywords would you go after first, and why those?
What a good answer sounds like: A short list, with a reason for each. Search volume, how hard the page one results are to beat, and why a buyer types that phrase. “We will do the research once you sign” is fair for the full plan. It is not fair for the first five.
How to check it: Look up each keyword’s volume and difficulty, then look at the live top ten. If page one is all household-name publishers and your site is two years old, ask how they plan to beat them. A good agency will have an answer, or will pick different keywords.
What will you do in the first 90 days?
What a good answer sounds like: An audit, the fixes that come out of it in priority order, and the first pages they would write or rewrite. Specific beats busy. “Technical optimization” is not a plan. “Fix the 40 pages Google crawled but did not index” is.
How to check it: Run your own audit before the call. A crawl of your top pages and a look at Search Console’s page indexing report will show you most of what they will find. If their first 90 days skip the problems you already found, ask why.
How will you handle AI search?
What a good answer sounds like: It starts from the basics. Google’s page on AI features in Search says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations necessary. Google’s hiring page also asks whether an agency’s AI advice lines up with that guidance.
How to check it: Ask what they would measure. Whether ChatGPT names your brand when someone asks for a tool like yours is something you can check today, before and after.
Questions about who does the work
Who makes the technical fixes, you or our developer?
I have worked alongside SEO agencies from inside company marketing teams, on the client side. The retainers I saw started at $3,000 a month. A lot of the time, the technical fixes came back to our own team as a list.
That is not always wrong. Agencies often cannot touch your code. But it changes what you are paying for, so get it in writing. Who changes the site, and who checks it worked?
Who writes the content, and how many rounds of edits do we get?
What a good answer sounds like: A named writer or a clear process, a set number of pieces a month, and edits included. Ask how they will learn your voice. An agency writer works from a brief. You already know the business.
Is link building included, and how do you build links?
In Credo’s survey of SEO agencies, 62.66% said they do not offer link building at all. In my experience it was often an extra charge on top. Ask which it is before you compare prices.
How to check it: Ask for examples of links they built for a current client, then look at the sites. Real publications in the client’s industry are a good sign. Google’s hiring page tells you to avoid “link popularity schemes”, and its spam policies cover buying links that pass ranking credit. For the full method, the backlink audit with Claude guide walks through reading a link profile.
Questions about access, ownership and the contract
What access do you need, and when?
What a good answer sounds like: Read-only to start. Google’s advice is to grant only read access to Search Console during an audit and not write access yet. In Search Console terms, that is a Restricted user, added under Settings, then Users and permissions. You stay the owner.
Who owns the accounts, the content and the research if we leave?
What a good answer sounds like: You do. Your domain, your Search Console, your analytics, every page they write and the keyword research behind it. Google’s page says “you should never have to link to an SEO”, and the same goes for handing them your domain.
This is the question buyers forget. When a contract ends, the research often leaves with the agency, and the next agency starts from zero.
What is the minimum term, and what happens if it is not working?
In the Credo survey, about 30% of agencies asked for a minimum of 6 to 12 months, and about 40% asked for up to six months. Only about 30% had no minimum at all. A minimum is not a red flag on its own, since SEO is slow. What matters is how you will both know, at month three, whether it is on track. The SEO retainer guide covers what these contracts cost and what they usually include.
What goes in the monthly report?
What a good answer sounds like: Clicks and impressions from your Search Console, what they changed, what moved, and what comes next. Rankings for a list of phrases they picked themselves is the weakest version.
How to check it: Connect your own Search Console to the tool you check with, and read the same numbers yourself. If the report and your data disagree, ask why.
Red flags that should end the call
Google names most of these outright, and any one of them is enough.
- A guaranteed ranking: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”
- A special relationship: Google warns against anyone who claims one, or who sells a “priority submit”.
- Secrecy: an agency that will not explain what it plans to change on your site.
- Link schemes: talk of link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines.
- A link back to them: Google says you should never have to link to an SEO. Your domain stays in your own name too.
- A cold email: Google says to be wary of SEO firms that email you out of the blue.
One more from Google that is worth knowing. Third-party SEO tools do not have access to Google’s internal ranking data. That goes for the tool you check with, ours included. The numbers are estimates, good for decisions and comparisons. Your own Search Console is Google’s record of your site, which is why the check below reads both.
Check the pitch yourself in one session
The checks above take a few minutes each if you have the data in front of you, and that is the part most buyers do not have. ContextBolt SEO is ours, so weigh the bias. It connects Claude, Cursor or Codex to live keyword volume and difficulty, the live top ten for any search, what any domain ranks for, backlinks, page and site audits, and your own Search Console. You ask in plain English, and every successful lookup saves to your SEO Dashboard.
Paste the agency’s pitch into the chat and run this.
Copy this prompt
I'm vetting an SEO agency. Their pitch is pasted below.
Use ContextBolt SEO and my connected Search Console.
1. For each client domain they name, show what it ranks for
today and its estimated organic traffic.
2. For each keyword they plan to target, give me the volume,
the difficulty and the current top ten.
3. Tell me which targets a site like mine could realistically
reach, and which look out of reach.
4. From my Search Console, list pages that lost clicks in the last
28 days and queries where I rank 5 to 20, so I can compare.
5. Finish with five follow-up questions for the next call.Two notes on cost. Each research call costs one credit, and reading your Search Console spends none. A pitch with three client domains and five target keywords comes to about 16 credits, well inside the 100 in the free trial, so you can vet an agency before you pay us anything. Your AI app bills you separately for its own usage.
Something usually happens when you run this. You see the plan, the evidence behind it and your own data in one place, and the next question is not “is this agency good?” It is “do I need one?” For a small team with an hour or two a week, often not, and is an SEO agency worth it has a five-question test that settles it. The SEO agency alternative page shows that in-house setup on one screen, and the Claude SEO experiment is what a full week of it looked like on a real site.
When an agency is worth it
Hire an SEO agency when nobody on the team has the hour a week. A good agency writes, fixes and reports without you, and for a business with no one to do it, that is worth real money.
It also makes sense for big one-off jobs, like a site migration or a redesign. Google’s own page says the earlier you bring an SEO into a redesign, the better. And if links are your main channel, outreach is people work, and a specialist earns their fee.
If you do hire, keep your own data running alongside. Run a site audit with Claude before they start, so you have a baseline. Then you can check the work every month and keep the record when the contract ends.
The bottom line
The questions are the easy part. Any buyer can ask an agency for case studies and a timeframe. What changes the decision is checking the answers, and with live data in your AI, that takes one session instead of a leap of faith.
You may come out of that session with an agency you trust. You may also come out of it doing the work yourself. Try ContextBolt SEO free for 7 days with 100 credits. A card is required, and it becomes $35 a month unless you cancel before the trial ends. If you are still weighing it up, the ContextBolt SEO vs an SEO agency comparison sets the two side by side.
