Questions to Ask a Small Business SEO Agency

If you have paid for SEO before and could not tell whether it worked, the problem was probably not the agency's effort. It was that nobody agreed up front on what working would look like. These are the questions that settle that before you commit a penny.

The five questions, in one place

• What happens in a normal week, in month four, when nothing is new?

• Who does the work, and will that be the same person in month six?

• What will you not do?

• What number will be different, where will I see it, and by when?

• What would make you tell me I am not a good fit?

The rest of this page is why each one is worth asking, and what a weak answer sounds like.

Why a list of questions is not the point

Most lists tell you to ask about backlinks and reporting. A provider who wants your money has an answer ready for both. The useful questions are the ones where a vague answer is itself the answer, because they force someone to describe what they will actually do on a Tuesday.

Ask what happens in a normal week

Not the onboarding. Not the strategy call. A normal week in month four, when nothing is new and nothing is on fire. Ask them to walk you through it.

• What gets looked at, and how often

• What gets changed on the site, and who changes it

• What happens in a week when they find nothing worth changing

That last one matters most. A provider who has never had a quiet week is either not looking closely or is changing things to look busy.

Ask who does the work

Ask who you will be speaking to in month six, and whether that is the same person writing and implementing. If the answer moves between people, ask what gets written down when it does, because that is where context is lost.

Ask what they will not do

A provider who does everything has not decided what they are for. Ask for the list of things that are out of scope, and listen for whether it sounds rehearsed or considered. The boundary is more informative than the offer.

Ask how you will know it worked

Get a specific answer, in advance, to one question: what number will be different, where will you see it, and by when. If the answer is traffic, ask which pages and from which searches. If the answer is rankings, ask what happens to your business when a ranking moves and nothing else does.

An honest provider will tell you which of those they can attribute and which they cannot. That answer is worth more than a confident one.

The answers that should rule us out

These are the ones where you should not hire Capron Media, and we would rather you found out now.

• You want someone to take the whole marketing function off your hands. We do one thing.

• You need a new website, a redesign, or ongoing custom development. That is not what this is.

• You want to be told a number and a date up front. We will not give you one we cannot stand behind.

• You want to hand it over and not look at it. This works better when you read what changed.

Where to start

If you want to ask these questions of us rather than read about them, book a free SEO consultation. You will speak to the person who does the work, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.

If you are still narrowing the field, how to choose an SEO agency covers the wider decision this page sits inside.

Written by Spencer Capron at Capron Media, in collaboration with our AI agents. The same way we do the work for clients. Spencer reviews everything published here.