You walk into the meeting and they all say the same thing. In-house team. Proprietary methodology. Results-driven. Here are our case studies. Forty minutes of slides later it’s nearly impossible to tell an agency that will move your business from one that will invoice you very handsome reports.
What separates them is the questions. Not the generic ones from any listicle, but the ones that force them to be specific. A serious agency answers without blinking. One that lives on smoke starts circling.
Here’s what I’d ask.
Who will actually work on my account
Who’s running my project?
Not a profile (“a senior consultant”), a name. And then the second half: are they in this room?
The oldest pattern in this industry is that whoever charms you isn’t whoever works on you. You sign with the sales director and a week later your account belongs to someone who started last month and has never heard of your business. It isn’t illegal and it isn’t rare. It’s normal. That’s why you ask.
Good sign: you get a name, that person is sitting at the table, and they talk. Bad sign: “we’ll assign whichever profile fits best.” Translation: they don’t know, or they’d rather not say.
Who implements the changes?
Almost everyone forgets this one, and it kills more projects than anything else.
Plenty of agencies deliver recommendations. You get a document with fifty prioritised actions, you hand it to your developer, and your developer has their own backlog where SEO sits at the bottom. Six months later half of it isn’t live, traffic is flat, and the agency tells you, with complete technical justification, that they delivered what was agreed.
Ask who does the actual work. If it’s your team, budget for it being slow. If it’s the agency, ask how far they go: do they touch the CMS? Do they write the content? Do they know your stack?
What they’ve done before
Show me a case from my sector, or my scale
Everyone has cases. The question is whether they have one that looks like you.
And when they show it, look at the context before the percentage. A +300% in traffic might be 100 visits becoming 400, which is nothing. A +40% on a site already doing a hundred thousand sessions is a different sport entirely. Ask for absolute numbers, or at least the baseline. And ask how long it took.
If they can’t name the client for confidentiality reasons, fair enough. Give me the sector, the size and the timeline. What doesn’t count is a line going up with no date, no baseline and no context.
The method
What would you do in my first 90 days?
Before signing. They won’t audit you for free, and you shouldn’t ask them to. But anyone who knows what they’re doing can look at your site for half an hour and tell you where they’d start and why.
If you get the list they’d give anyone (keyword research, on-page optimisation, link building), they haven’t looked at your site. If you get something specific to your project, even something uncomfortable to hear, those people have done this before.
Where do the links come from?
Straight out: do you buy them? The honest answer in this industry is that nearly everyone pays in some form. What matters is where, and with what judgement.
If they say “we have a network of blogs” or “we work with over 500 publications”, ask to see three real examples from a current client. If they’re blogs nobody reads, you know what you’re buying and roughly how long it’ll last.
How do we know this is working?
This is where you find out who you’re talking to. If the answer starts and ends with rankings and traffic, you’re looking at an agency that will optimise what it controls rather than what you need. Rankings are a means. What decides whether SEO was worth it is leads, sales and margin.
Put briefly, this is the answer you should hear on each question versus the one that should make you wary:
Who runs your account
You get a name, and that person is at the table.
"We'll assign whichever profile fits best": they don't know.
Who implements
They say how far they go: CMS, content, your stack.
They hand over a document and delivery is your problem.
The case studies
Absolute numbers, with sector, size and timeline.
A line going up with no date, no baseline, no context.
How they measure
They talk about leads, sales and margin.
It starts and ends with rankings and traffic.
The GEO question
They explain what they do in ChatGPT and how they measure it.
They don't know what it is, or say it's the same as SEO.
The question almost nobody asks yet
Do you work my visibility in ChatGPT?
Ask it and watch their face.
More and more buyers ask a model for a supplier before they open Google, and choose from the two or three names it gives them. If your brand isn’t there, you’re out of that decision even if you’re first on Google. That has a name: GEO.
There are three possible answers. They don’t know what you’re talking about, which tells you plenty. They tell you it’s the same as SEO, which is false and also tells you plenty. Or they explain exactly what they do and how they measure it.
“They don't know what you're talking about”
They've stepped out of part of the buying decision. That tells you plenty.
“They tell you it's the same as SEO”
It is false. They share signals, but GEO has its own work. Also tells you plenty.
“They explain what they do and how they measure it”
The good one. They know which models you show up in, how it is measured and what moves the needle.
You can walk in with homework done: checking whether you show up takes ten minutes and costs nothing. We explain how in how to check if your business shows up in ChatGPT. Sitting down with that data on the table changes the whole conversation.
The small print
What happens if I leave?
Who owns the content you’ve written. Who owns the links. Who holds the Search Console and Analytics access. How long the contract runs and what notice gets you out.
This isn’t distrust, it’s hygiene. And the reaction tells you a lot: an agency that gets twitchy here is telling you their retention plan is making it hard to leave.
Do you work with my direct competitors?
Simple question, immediate answer. If they hesitate, you should too.
And now the one that flips it around
Stop watching what they answer. Watch what they ask you.
An agency with a business head wants to know how you make money. Your margin by product line. Which customers you want and which ones cause you grief. Where your revenue comes from today. What happens inside your company if organic doubles, whether you could even handle it.
An agency that only asks for your URL, your budget and your target keywords is going to execute tasks. They might execute them well. But nobody will be thinking about your business, and that’s exactly the difference between paying 500€ a month and paying 3,000€. We break down what an SEO agency actually costs by project type in a separate piece.
If you leave the meeting and realise you did ninety per cent of the talking, answering uncomfortable questions about your own business, that’s a good sign.
Does it matter where the agency is?
For the work itself, not much. SEO runs the same remotely, and proximity doesn’t improve a ranking. Anyone selling you closeness as their main argument is selling you marketing.
There are three things where it does change something, and you can ask about them.
If your committee sits in a room to decide, the agency should be able to sit in that room. Some kick-offs and strategy reviews move further in one hour in person than in four video calls back to back.
If you’re competing in a market concentrated in one place, ask whether they’ve worked there. Not for the postcode: to know whether they understand who you’re up against.
And if something breaks at five on a Friday, you want someone in your time zone who speaks your language.
We have teams in Barcelona and Madrid, and we run projects across Spain and beyond it. The office matters for those three things. For everything else, where we sit is irrelevant.
The questions, to take to the meeting
And the one that flips it around: watch what they ask you about your business.
Frequently asked questions
What should I ask an SEO agency before hiring them?
The questions that force specifics: who will run your account (by name), who implements the changes, what they’d do in your first 90 days, where the links come from, how they measure success, whether they work your visibility in ChatGPT, and what happens if you decide to leave.
How do I know if an SEO agency is any good before hiring them?
By how they answer the specifics, and by what they ask you. An agency with a business head wants to understand how you make money before it talks about keywords. If it only asks for your URL and your budget, it’s going to execute tasks.
Can I ask for a free audit before signing?
You shouldn’t, and a serious agency won’t give you one. An audit is work. What you can ask is where they’d start and why, after spending some time on your site. Anyone who knows their job can do that.
How long should results take?
SEO is a medium-term play. Expect technical order and first improvements in two or three months, movement in positions between the third and the fifth, and most of the traffic between the sixth and the twelfth, depending on how competitive your sector is. Anyone promising results in 30 days is lying to you.
Does it matter where the agency is based?
For the work itself, not much: it runs the same remotely. It matters if you need in-person meetings with your committee, if you compete in a market concentrated somewhere specific and want them to know the ground, or if you want someone in your time zone when something breaks.
Let’s talk about your project
If you’re in that round of meetings and you’d like to ask us these questions, tell us about your project. We’ll answer all of them, including the uncomfortable ones.
