Ten Questions to Ask a Marketing Agency Before You Sign

What this covers

• 1. What Will You Do in the First Thirty Days, Specifically?

• 3. Who Will Own the Accounts?

• 4. What Happens to the Work If I Leave?

• 5. What Is the Notice Period, and What Is in the First Invoice?

• 6. Show Me a Report You Send an Existing Client.

• 7. How Do You Measure Local Rankings?

• 8. Can You Guarantee First Place?

• 9. What Are You Doing About AI Search?

• Reading the Answers Rather Than Collecting Them

• What an Itemized Scope Actually Contains

• Scoring It

Most agency sales meetings are structured so the agency asks the questions. That is not sinister, it is just how a discovery call works. The effect, though, is that owners sign contracts having never asked the things that determine whether the arrangement goes well.

Here are ten worth asking, each with the answer that should make you pause. Print them and take them in.

1. What Will You Do in the First Thirty Days, Specifically?

Good answer: a technical crawl, a look at Search Console, an audit of the Business Profile, a review of what currently ranks, and a written list of fixes in priority order. Concrete nouns.

The tell: “We start with strategy.” Strategy is not a deliverable in month one. It is what you produce after you have looked at the data. An agency that cannot describe day one in physical terms has not planned one.

2. Which of My Pages Currently Rank, and for What?

They should be able to answer this before you hire them, from public tools, in the meeting. It takes ten minutes.

The tell: an offer to tell you after you sign. This is basic reconnaissance and doing it is how they qualify you. If they have not looked, you are a name on a list rather than a prospect they understand.

3. Who Will Own the Accounts?

Ask it plainly. The Google Business Profile, the ad account, Search Console, the analytics property, the website itself.

Good answer: you own all of them, the agency is added as a manager, and access is revoked on exit without anything being lost.

The tell: anything involving the agency creating accounts under their own ownership “for simplicity.” This is the single most common way businesses end up hostage. Ad account history and Business Profile ownership are painful to recover and sometimes impossible.

4. What Happens to the Work If I Leave?

Good answer: the pages stay on your site, the listings stay yours, the links point at your domain and remain.

The tell: work that lives on the agency’s infrastructure. Landing pages hosted on their domain, a phone number they own, a review platform that goes dark when you stop paying. If leaving costs you the assets, you were renting visibility rather than building it.

5. What Is the Notice Period, and What Is in the First Invoice?

Good answer: a clear notice period you can live with, and an explanation of any setup cost.

The tell: a twelve-month lock with no break clause. Search work does take months to compound, which is a real argument for commitment, but a long lock protects the agency from being fired for non-performance rather than protecting your results.

6. Show Me a Report You Send an Existing Client.

Redacted is fine. You are looking at the shape, not the numbers.

Good answer: a report that names what was done, what changed, and what happens next, with rankings measured the same way each month.

The tell: a dashboard export full of impressions, sessions and bounce rate with no commentary. Impressions are the easiest number in marketing to grow and the least connected to revenue. If nothing in the report distinguishes a good month from a bad one, it is not a report.

7. How Do You Measure Local Rankings?

This one separates people who understand local search from people who do not.

Good answer: rank varies by where the searcher stands, so it is measured across a grid of points in the service area and tracked over time.

The tell: a single position number, or worse, “we checked and you’re number one.” A rank checked from the agency’s office, or from your own address, is flattering and close to meaningless. Distance is one of the three inputs Google names for local results, so a result measured at one point tells you about one point.

8. Can You Guarantee First Place?

You are not asking because you want the guarantee. You are asking to see whether they will offer one.

Good answer: no, and an explanation that Google itself says no one can promise this, followed by what they will commit to instead.

The tell: yes. Google’s own guidance for business owners warns against anyone claiming to guarantee a top ranking. An agency promising it is either uninformed or counting on you not checking, and both are disqualifying.

9. What Are You Doing About AI Search?

This is the newest question and the most revealing, because the field is young enough that bluffing is obvious.

Good answer: a distinction between being ranked and being named. Something about listings, reviews with specific language, third-party mentions, structured data, and whether the site can be read by crawlers that do not run JavaScript. Ideally an admission that measurement here is manual and that results are volatile month to month.

The tell: either a blank look, or confident talk of “AI impressions” and “AI traffic” pulled from Search Console. That data does not exist in Search Console. Being named inside an AI answer is not reported there, and anyone quoting you a number for it is relabeling something else.

A second tell worth noting: an agency selling AI visibility to a business whose listings are incomplete and whose site has technical problems is selling the roof before the walls. The same weak signals feed both systems.

10. Who Is Actually Doing the Work?

Good answer: a name, and a straight answer about what is in-house and what is subcontracted. Subcontracting is not a problem. Hiding it is.

The tell: “our team.” Ask again. You want to know whether the person in the meeting has any involvement after the contract is signed, because frequently they do not.

Reading the Answers Rather Than Collecting Them

The questions matter less than knowing what a good answer sounds like, because every supplier will have an answer ready.

Question	Good answer	Warning sign
What would you refuse to do?	A specific example, with reasons	Nothing comes to mind
Show me a report you sent last month	A real one, redacted	A template
What did you get wrong recently?	A concrete case and what changed	Nothing
Who does the work?	Named people and their roles	The team
How is the scope itemized?	Counts, deliverables, dates	A monthly figure

The third row is the most revealing and the least asked. Every supplier has had an engagement go badly, and the ones who can describe it plainly are the ones paying attention to their own results.

What an Itemized Scope Actually Contains

Line	What it should state
Pages	How many, what length, on what topics
Links	How many, from where, and what kind
Technical work	Which fixes, on which pages
Reporting	What is measured, how often, in what format
Review cadence	When you and they speak, and about what

Anything not on that list is not being bought, whatever the conversation implied. A scope that lists effort rather than output (“ongoing optimization”) cannot be checked at the end of a month and therefore cannot be judged.### The question to end onon

Ask what happens in the third month if nothing has moved. The useful answer describes what gets reviewed and changed, and acknowledges that some months produce nothing visible.

A supplier who says that will not happen has told you either that they do not do this often or that their reporting is selective. Both are worth knowing before the first invoice rather than after the third.

Scoring It

You are not looking for ten perfect answers. You are looking for candor, and specifically for whether they will tell you something you would rather not hear. An agency willing to say “that keyword is not realistic for your domain this year” is worth more than one that agrees with everything.

Two of these ten, numbers three and four, are contract questions rather than marketing ones, and they are the two owners skip most often because they feel awkward. They are also the two that cost the most when they go wrong.

An example of an engagement itemized this way is published under SEO services for a local business so the questions above can be checked against a real scope. The business profile shows the market it is written from, and there is more on what this normally costs. We have done local search work here for more than ten years, we are veteran-owned and certified as a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business, and we have answered all ten of these in meetings where the honest answer lost us the job.

That is the point of the list. The questions are cheap to ask and expensive to skip.

Keep the answers written down. Six months later, when a review is going badly or unusually well, the record of what was promised at the start is the most useful document in the relationship, and almost nobody keeps one.