SEO Noble Marketing Guide
12 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company
The exact questions that separate real agencies from smooth talkers, and the answers you should hear back.
Technical Lead at SEO Noble
Author of 4 SEO books on Amazon, 15 years in search marketing, contributor to Search Engine Journal
The Short Answer
Ask twelve questions before you sign with any SEO company: what exactly will you do each month, who does the work, how do you report, what does it cost and what is excluded, what are the contract terms, do I own my accounts and content, can I talk to a current client, have you won in a market like mine, how long until results, what happens if nothing moves, and how do we part ways. A real agency answers all twelve in plain language. A weak one survives about four.
Hiring an SEO company is a strange purchase. You cannot see the product before you buy it, results arrive months after the invoices start, and the industry has no license requirement, so anyone with a website can claim the title. The average client relationship lasts about 11 months according to First Page Sage research, which tells you how often these purchases go wrong.
The fix is a better interview. Every question below comes from a mistake business owners have made and paid for. Ask them all, ask for the answers in writing, and watch not just what comes back but how fast and how plainly it arrives. That response is your preview of every future monthly report.
Questions About the Work
Question 1
What exactly will you do for me each month?
The single most important question on this list. A real answer is countable: this many pages, these technical fixes, this reporting, this review work. A warning answer is a cloud of adjectives: optimization, synergy, ongoing efforts. If the work cannot be listed, it cannot be checked, and work that cannot be checked tends not to happen.
Question 2
Who actually does the work on my account?
The person pitching you is rarely the person doing the work. Ask whether the campaign is handled in house, outsourced, or generated by software with light review. Recent churn research found generic machine written content is now the top driver of client dissatisfaction, cited by 48% of businesses that left an agency. Ask to see a real piece of content they produced for a client in a similar field.
Question 3
What will my monthly report look like?
Ask for a sample. A good report fits in five minutes of reading: what was done, what moved, what is next, and how many calls or leads the campaign produced. A bad one is thirty pages of charts exported from a tool, designed to look like effort. The sample report tells you more about the agency than any case study.
Questions About the Money
Question 4
What does it cost, and what is not included?
The second half of the question is where the surprises live. Content, link building, website changes, and ad spend are excluded from some quotes and included in others. Industry surveys put real local campaigns between $1,500 and $5,000 per month, so a very cheap quote usually means a very short deliverables list. Get the exclusions in writing.
Question 5
What are the contract terms, exactly?
Initial term, notice period, auto renewal, early termination fee, and who owns the work. Fair looks like a short commitment with a 30 day exit. Unfair looks like a 12 month lock with renewal traps. If the terms are only explained verbally, assume they are worse than they sound and ask for the document before you decide anything.
Question 6
Do you guarantee rankings?
This is a trap question, and Google built it. Google’s official guidance says no one can guarantee a number one ranking, so the only honest answer is no. An agency that guarantees a position is either lying or planning to rank you for phrases nobody searches. Ask it even if you already know. The answer ends interviews quickly.
Questions About Proof
Question 7
Can I talk to a current client?
Not a testimonial on a website. A phone call with someone paying the agency right now. Happy clients say yes to this constantly, so an agency with happy clients can always produce one. Ten days of stalling, or an offer of written testimonials instead, answers the question for you.
Question 8
Have you won in a market like mine?
SEO is not one skill. Winning local search for a Los Angeles service business is a different job than national eCommerce or software marketing. Ask for a result in your industry or your kind of market: the searches targeted, the timeline, and the outcome in calls or customers, not just traffic.
Question 9
How long until I see results, and what will I see first?
The honest answer: 4 months to a year for meaningful movement, with impressions and rankings moving before calls do. An agency that promises page one in 30 days has told you everything. An agency that explains the sequence and points you to Google’s own documentation has also told you everything.
Questions About Ownership and the Exit
Question 10
Are my accounts opened in my name?
Your website, domain, hosting, Google Business Profile, analytics, and Search Console should all belong to you, with the agency added as a user. If the agency opens accounts under its own name, leaving them later means losing your history, your content, and sometimes your website. This clause matters more than the price.
Question 11
What happens if nothing moves in six months?
Every honest campaign has a plan for a stall: what gets diagnosed, what changes, and how you will know. The answer you want names a process. The answer you do not want is reassurance. An agency that has never had a flat campaign to fix has not been doing this long, or has not been watching.
Question 12
If we part ways, what do I keep?
Ask it before you sign, while everyone is still friendly. The right answer: everything. The content, the research, the reports, the accounts, the rankings your site has earned. An agency confident in its monthly value has no reason to hold your assets, and its answer to this question predicts the entire relationship.
“You are not interviewing an agency. You are previewing the next twelve months of monthly reports. If the answers are vague now, the reports will be vague later.”
Kent Mauresmo, SEO Noble
Red Flag Answers, Translated
Some answers sound fine in the room and mean something else entirely. Here are five classics and their translations.
“We use proprietary techniques we cannot disclose.” Translation: there is either nothing to disclose or something you would not approve of. Real SEO is not secret. The methods are public, the skill is in the execution, and any agency doing honest work can describe it plainly.
“We are a Google partner, so we have a direct line.” The Google Partners badge covers paid advertising, not organic rankings. Nobody has a direct line into the algorithm. This answer is designed to borrow authority the speaker has not earned.
“Results depend on too many factors to give a timeline.” Google publishes the timeline: 4 months to a year. An agency unwilling to discuss it either does not know it or does not want to be measured against it.
“We will get you thousands of backlinks fast.” Links bought in bulk from farms and networks are the fastest way to earn a Google penalty, and the cleanup costs more than the campaign. Quality links are earned slowly, through content worth citing and real outreach.
“You do not need to worry about the technical details.” You are not asking because you want to do the work. You are asking because you are paying for it. An agency annoyed by questions in the interview will be unreachable with your money in its pocket.
How a Good Interview Usually Goes
A serious agency interview has a recognizable shape. You send the questions by email. Within a few days, written answers come back, and they are specific enough to hold the agency to later. Then a call happens, and the agency spends at least half of it asking about your business: your customers, your margins, your busiest seasons, your service area.
Pay attention to that ratio. An agency that talks about itself for the whole call plans to sell you a package. An agency that spends the call learning your business plans to build you a campaign. The proposal that follows a real discovery call references your competitors and your cities by name. The proposal that follows a sales call could have been sent to anyone, and probably was.
How to Use the Answers
Interview at least two or three agencies with the same list, and send the questions by email so the answers come back in writing. Written answers can be compared side by side, and they become part of your records if the relationship later goes sideways.
Score each agency on three things: specificity, speed, and proof. Specificity means countable deliverables rather than adjectives. Speed matters because an agency that takes a week to answer a prospect will not be faster with a paying client. Proof means a reference who picks up the phone and a result in a market like yours. Two out of three is not enough, because the missing one is always the one that hurts you later.
And ask every candidate all twelve questions, including us. At SEO Noble, a Los Angeles agency based in Century City and working with local businesses since 2008, we would rather earn a client who checked than inherit one who did not.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many SEO agencies should I interview?
Two or three is the sweet spot. One gives you nothing to compare against, and five turns the search into a part time job. With the same twelve questions asked of each, the differences between candidates become obvious within a day of receiving the answers.
Is it rude to ask for a client reference?
No. It is standard practice in every professional service, and agencies expect it. You are considering spending tens of thousands of dollars over a year. Any agency that treats a reference request as an insult is protecting something, and it is not your interests.
What if an agency will not put answers in writing?
Then you have your answer. Verbal promises evaporate the moment a dispute starts, and the contract will govern everything. An agency that answers warmly on the phone but vaguely by email is telling you which version to believe. Believe the email.
Should the cheapest quote win?
Almost never. SEO pricing surveys show most real campaigns cost between $1,500 and $5,000 per month, and the cheapest quotes almost always hide the shortest deliverables lists. Compare what each quote buys, not what each one charges. The expensive mistake is the cheap campaign that produces a year of nothing.
Can I ask these questions of my current agency?
Yes, and you should. The list works just as well as an audit of a relationship you already have. If your current agency cannot answer question one with a dated list of last month’s work, or question ten with proof that you own your accounts, the interview is telling you something about the marriage.
What should a good agency ask me in return?
Plenty. Expect questions about your best customers, your profit margins, your service area, your busiest months, and what a new customer is worth to you. Those questions are how an agency calculates whether SEO can pay off for you at all. An agency that asks nothing about your business cannot build a campaign for it, only a package around it.
Ask Us All Twelve
Send this list to every agency you are considering, including SEO Noble. We will answer every question in writing, with client references you can actually call. Free consultation, no pressure.
Conclusion
The difference between a good SEO hire and an expensive regret is rarely luck. It is twelve questions, asked in writing, before a signature. Agencies reveal themselves in how they answer: the specific ones with named deliverables, real references, and clean ownership terms are the ones still earning their fee in month 12.
Keep the list. Use it on every candidate, including your current provider, and including us. The agencies worth hiring will thank you for it, because good agencies win exactly these interviews.
