How to Choose an SEO Agency: 15 Questions to Ask and 8 Red Flags

To choose an SEO agency, judge it by what it can explain and prove, not by what it promises. Interview a few, ask the questions below, check references you can verify, and walk away from anyone who guarantees rankings or sells links.

Google has its own page on this, Do you need an SEO?, and much of what follows builds on it. Google’s key warning is worth keeping in mind throughout: you are responsible for the actions of any company you hire.

First: do you need an SEO agency at all?

Google says that if you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself, and recommends starting with its SEO Starter Guide. Even if you hire someone later, knowing the basics helps you spot advice that’s wrong.

In our view, an agency is worth it when:

• You’re redesigning or migrating a site. Google calls this a great time to hire, because mistakes made then are expensive to undo.
• You’re entering new markets or languages, where technical setup and research per country matter.
• The site is large or technical enough that crawling, indexing and site structure need specialist work.
• You have the budget but not the time, and someone needs to own the work every month.

15 questions to ask an SEO agency

About their approach

1. What would you look at first on our site, and why? A good answer is specific to your site and business. A generic pitch that would fit any company means they haven’t looked.

2. Do you follow Google’s Search Essentials and spam policies? Google suggests asking this directly. Listen for a clear yes and examples of what they won’t do, not a vague “we use white hat techniques”.

3. How do you build links? Good answers involve content worth citing, digital PR and relationships. Bad answers involve packages, networks, “guest post placements” with a price per link, or “DR 50+ links”.

4. What changes will you make to the site, and will you explain each one? Google says an SEO should share all the changes and the reasoning behind them. You should be able to understand and approve what goes live.

5. Which tools do you use, and how do you check their findings? Google points out that third-party tools don’t have access to Google’s ranking data. A good agency checks tool findings against Google’s documentation and Search Console before acting on them.

About results and measurement

6. What results do you expect, and in what timeframe? Expect ranges and conditions, not a promise. “We expect more impressions for these topics within a few months, then clicks, if we can publish X pages and fix Y” is a real answer.

7. How will you measure success? Listen for business outcomes: organic clicks, leads, sales, sign-ups. “Rankings” and “links built” alone are not success measures. Our guide to SEO KPIs covers the metrics we think matter.

8. What will the monthly report contain? Ask to see an example. It should show work done, results against agreed goals and next steps, using data from Search Console and your analytics.

9. Can you show examples of previous work, and can we speak to a past client? Google suggests asking for examples and checking references. Case studies should come with enough detail to be believable: what the site was, what was done, over what period.

About your business and market

10. What do you need to know about our business? Google advises looking for an SEO who is interested in you: what makes you different, who your competitors are, how customers find you. If they don’t ask, find someone who does.

11. What’s your experience in our industry and our markets? For international sites, ask specifically about multilingual sites, hreflang and research per country. Translation alone is not international SEO: in Ahrefs’ study of 374,756 domains using hreflang, 67% had at least one error (see our international SEO statistics).

About ownership, access and the contract

12. Who owns the accounts, content and data? You should own your Search Console property, analytics, domain, hosting and every piece of content they produce. The agency gets user access, not ownership.

13. What access do you need? For an audit, read access is enough. Google specifically advises giving only read access to Search Console at that stage.

14. Who will actually do the work, and how will we communicate? Know who your contact is, who does the technical work, and how often you’ll hear from them.

15. What happens if we stop working together? You should keep everything, and nothing on your site should depend on the agency continuing (no links you must keep, no content hosted on their servers).

8 red flags when choosing an SEO agency

1. Guaranteed rankings. Google says it plainly: no one can guarantee a #1 ranking.
2. A “special relationship” with Google or “priority submission”. Google lists both as warning signs.
3. Link packages or a price per link. Buying links that pass ranking credit is link spam under Google’s spam policies. If it goes wrong, it’s your site that pays.
4. Secrecy. “Proprietary methods” they won’t explain. Google says to be careful with any company that won’t clearly explain what it intends to do.
5. Unsolicited emails claiming your site “isn’t listed” or has “critical errors”. Google says it gets these too.
6. They want links back to themselves. Google says you should never have to link to an SEO. A hidden “SEO by…” footer link on your site is a common version.
7. They create the accounts in their own name, or won’t give you admin access to your own data.
8. Reporting that only shows what they control: a list of links built, ranking screenshots for long-tail phrases nobody searches, or traffic numbers without conversions.

What the consequences of a bad agency look like

Bad link building doesn’t just waste money; it leaves a trail. Our own site shows what link-package links look like once they exist: in September 2026, someone pointed 1,198 junk domains at digitalusmedia.com with anchors like “Premium Authority Link Building” and “Buy Backlinks”, and our Google impressions fell from 1,393 to 24 in the same month. We didn’t buy those links, but a business whose agency did would face the same cleanup. The details are in our negative SEO attack case study.

How to compare proposals

Put the proposals side by side and check:

Look for	Why
An audit or diagnosis first	Work should follow findings, not a fixed package
Specific deliverables per month	You know what you’re paying for
Goals tied to your business	Leads or sales, not “top 10 for 50 keywords”
Clear reporting with Search Console data	Google’s own numbers, not only tool estimates
No link quantities	Links should be earned, not counted out
You own everything	No lock-in

Our rule of thumb: the best proposal is usually the one that tells you something about your site you didn’t know, and explains how to fix it.

Start with a small paid project

If you’re unsure, start with an audit or a fixed-scope project before a long retainer. You’ll see how the agency works, how clearly it explains its findings and whether its recommendations hold up. Our technical SEO audit checklist shows what a thorough audit covers, so you can judge the scope you’re offered.

Ask us the same questions

We’d expect you to ask us all fifteen. Our principles are the ones in this guide: no ranking guarantees, no link packages, and every change explained. If you’d like to hear our answers for your own site, start with our SEO services.