How to Choose an SEO Agency: A Buyer's Vetting Playbook

Every agency pitch is engineered to survive your questions. The deck is rehearsed. The case studies are the best three out of forty. The person charming you on the call is a closer who will never touch your account again.

So stop grading your questions. Grade their answers. A vetting process only works if you decide before the call which answers disqualify — and then hold the line when a likable person gives you one.

Google's own hiring documentation, last updated June 2026, is blunt about the baseline: no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, and 'if they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else.' That is the posture. Here is the sequence.

How do you actually vet an SEO agency?

Four passes over about a week, roughly two hours of your time total: a 15-minute pre-call filter, one 45-minute discovery call built around five disqualifying questions, a 30-minute paper check of their claims, and one 20-minute reference call with a client who left them.

Most buyers run only the second pass — the pitch — and then sign. The pitch is the least informative of the four, because it is the only one the agency controls.

Two hours. A bad twelve-month contract at $2,500/mo costs you $30,000 and a year of compounding you will never get back. The math on doing the work is not close.

Which questions get you a rehearsed answer and tell you nothing?

Three questions dominate every buyer checklist online and not one of them separates a good agency from a bad one: 'What's your process?', 'Do you follow Google's guidelines?', and 'Can you show me case studies?' Each already has a slide built for it.

'What's your process?' returns a five-phase diagram. Every agency has the same one — audit, keywords, on-page, content, links. It tells you nothing about what will actually happen on your account in week six.

'Do you follow Google's guidelines?' has exactly one possible answer, and it is yes. Google does list it on its hiring checklist, and it is worth asking — but only in a form they can fail. Ask instead: name a tactic one of my competitors is running that you would refuse to run for me, and tell me why.

'Can you show me case studies?' produces a marketing asset, not evidence. The FTC's endorsement guidance is direct about what a showcased result implies: 'Endorsements claiming specific results usually will be interpreted to mean that the endorser's experience reflects what others can also expect,' and disclaimers like 'Results not typical' do not change that (FTC Endorsement Guides). So ask the version nobody rehearses: what is the median result across every client you signed in the last 18 months, including the ones who left?

The pattern: a good question is one where a mediocre agency has to either lie or admit something. If any competent firm could answer it well, it is not a filter.

What answer should end the call immediately?

A guarantee. Google's documentation states 'No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google' and warns against SEOs that 'claim to guarantee rankings, allege a special relationship with Google, or advertise a priority submit to Google.' A guarantee is not confidence. It is either a lie, or a plan to rank you for a keyword nobody searches.

Six more answers should end the call on the spot. Not 'note it as a concern' — end it. You are one call into a relationship where you hand over your website, your ad accounts and $30k a year.

• 'We guarantee page one in 90 days.' Google's own advice is to find someone else. There is no counter-argument to make here.
• 'Our team will handle it.' No named human means no accountability. This is the one buyers rationalize away. Don't.
• 'We'll start with a full audit and take it from there.' You are buying a PDF at retainer prices.
• 'Pricing depends — let's build you a custom quote.' After 45 minutes about your city, your services and your competitors, they can name a number.
• 'We'll need write access to Search Console and your site to start.' For an audit, Google says grant read access only at that stage — not write.
• 'We retain ownership of the content and links during the engagement.' You paid for it. It is yours the day it publishes.
• 'That's proprietary.' Said about anything you are paying for, this means there is nothing behind it.

Who specifically will do the work, and how do you find out?

You get a first name, a title and a monthly hour count for every person touching your account — written into the statement of work, not said out loud on a call. 'Our team' is a refusal dressed as an answer.

The agency you meet and the agency you get are frequently different companies. The pitch is run by a founder or a senior strategist. The work lands with a junior account manager and a subcontracted writer. That arrangement is legal and common — and fine, if it is disclosed and priced for. It is only a con when it is hidden.

Read these six questions off the screen during the discovery call. Write the answers down verbatim, because you will be comparing them to the contract later.

• Who writes the content — name and title? Are they an employee or a contractor?
• Who does the technical work? The person, not the department.
• How many hours a month go on my account, and how do they split across those people?
• Is any part of this subcontracted or offshored? To whom, and where are they?
• Will the people doing the work be on the monthly call, or only an account manager?
• What happens if that person quits in month four — who inherits my account?

Then put the answers in the SOW. An agency that will not name people in the contract intends to swap them. We put the person you meet on the work and name them in writing — and any agency worth $2,500/mo can commit to the same thing.

What should be live 30 days in?

Shipped work, not a document. Thirty days into a $2,500/mo engagement you should have conversion tracking live, technical fixes deployed to production, three to five money pages rewritten and republished, and the first content piece live — with the audit as an *input* to that work, never as the deliverable.

If day 30 arrives and the only artifact is a 60-page audit, you paid a full retainer for a PDF. That is the single most common way agency relationships fail quietly: the work is real, the pace is glacial, and by the time you notice you are six months into a twelve-month term.

Ninety days is also the point at which you should be willing to kill it. We run a 90-day rule: a channel with no qualified leads after 90 days gets cut or re-scoped. No contract should be able to stop you from doing the same. If you are unclear what should even be on the list, what SEO services actually include is the scope baseline.

How do you check their claims before you sign?

Thirty minutes and a browser. Ask for three live client URLs — not screenshots, not a slide, live URLs — and verify every claim yourself before the second call. Google's guidance says the same thing in gentler words: 'Check your SEO's business references.'

• Search the keyword they claim to rank for, in an incognito window, set to the client's city. If the client is not there, ask why — on the record.
• Look up the case-study client and email the owner cold. Two sentences: did this agency do the work, and would you hire them again?
• Check the agency's own organic footprint. An SEO firm that ranks for nothing is selling a service it cannot perform on itself.
• Ask which Search Console property the numbers came from, and whether they will show it live on a screen share. Slide decks lie; GSC does not.
• Ask for a loss: a client whose traffic went down, what caused it, and what they did next. An agency with no losses has no history.

The FTC's guidance gives you leverage most buyers never use. An advertiser showing off exceptional results must either 'have adequate proof to back up the claim that the results shown in the ad are typical' or 'clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected performance' (FTC). Almost no agency case study does either. Ask for the typical number and watch what happens.

What does a fair first-90-days proposal look like?

One page. A stated monthly number, a named owner per workstream, deliverables listed month by month, a success metric that is a booked call rather than an impression, and a way out. Ours starts at $2,500/mo, month-to-month — and the number is published on the pricing page, which is the entire point.

'Let's get you a custom quote' after you have explained your city, your services and your competitors is not customization. It is price discovery, run on you. Firms that publish pricing have to be defensible at that price. Firms that hide it are deciding what you can afford.

• A monthly price, and what happens to it when scope changes
• The named humans, with hours, per workstream
• Deliverables for months 1, 2 and 3 — specific enough that you could prove them wrong
• The metric that defines success: booked calls or qualified leads, not impressions or 'visibility'
• How SEO, GEO and AEO are handled — inside the retainer, or dangled as next year's upsell
• Termination for convenience, with 30 days' notice, and full asset handover on exit

That fifth line matters more than it did two years ago. Ahrefs analyzed 863,000 SERPs and 4 million AI Overview URLs and found that just 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews also rank in Google's top 10 for the same query — down from about 76% a year earlier (Ahrefs, March 2026). Ranking and being cited have come apart. An agency with no answer for AI search visibility is selling you half a channel and billing for a whole one. If the number itself is what you're stuck on, what SEO costs a service business breaks down the tiers.

What are the terms you should refuse to sign?

Five clauses, and they are not fine print — they are the deal. The biggest is a twelve-month term with no termination for convenience. It protects the agency's revenue, not your results, and it removes your only real leverage exactly when you need it: month three, when nothing is shipping.

Add the question almost nobody asks: do you work with my direct competitors in my city? For a national B2B firm it may not matter. For a roofer or a law firm fighting over the same three map-pack slots, an agency serving both of you has a structural conflict it cannot resolve in your favor.

And read this line from Google twice: 'you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire.' If your agency buys spam links, Google penalizes your site, not theirs. They move on to the next client; you are the one rebuilding. The exit clause is the only insurance policy you get.

Run this playbook on us, too. Ask who does the work, ask what will be live on day 30, ask to see the Search Console screen. If you want a straight read on what your site needs before you hire anyone — or a second opinion on the agency you already pay — get my free audit and use it as leverage in the next call, wherever you take it.