Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company

Ask what specific work gets done every month, who is personally doing it, how they define success, what the contract term is, and what you keep if you walk away. Five questions. If someone can't answer all five in plain English, you have your answer.

I spent 24 years running Entech Irrigation here in Jacksonville. In that time I built the profile to 518 Google reviews, a 4.9★ rating, and the #1 organic ranking in my category — with $0 spent on advertising. Competitors in my market spent an estimated $262,000 combined on ads over that stretch and still ranked below me.

I tell you that for one reason: I know what these conversations sound like from the owner's side of the table. You're not trying to become an SEO expert. You're trying to figure out whether the person across from you is going to take $1,200 a month and hand you a PDF. Here's how to find out.

1. What specific work happens every month?

Not "we'll improve your rankings." Not a list of twelve service categories. Ask what actually gets touched: which pages, which profile fields, which citations, how many review requests go out, what gets written.

The reason this question works is that vague answers are usually vague on purpose. A monthly retainer with no defined work is a subscription to hope. If someone can tell you exactly what lands in month one, they've done it before.

2. Who is personally doing the work?

This is the question almost nobody asks, and it's the one that decides whether you're happy in six months.

Plenty of agencies sell you in a polished meeting and then hand the account to whoever has capacity. You should know the name of the person who will actually be in your Google Business Profile, and you should be able to reach them. With me, you're talking to the owner — not an account manager relaying messages to someone you'll never meet.

3. How do you define success?

Rankings are a means, not the point. A #1 ranking for a phrase nobody searches is worth nothing, and traffic that never calls you is worth slightly less than nothing.

The honest answer involves calls, form fills, booked jobs, and Map Pack visibility for the searches that actually carry buying intent. Someone searching "emergency sprinkler repair Jacksonville" is a customer. Someone searching "how do sprinklers work" is a reader. You're paying for the first one.

4. What's the contract term?

Long contracts exist to protect the provider from the client leaving, which tells you what the provider expects you to want to do.

My answer: no long-term contract, no hidden fees, cancel anytime. There's a one-time setup fee before monthly management begins, because the setup is real work — but you're never locked in. You can see the whole pricing structure before you talk to me. If a provider won't show you pricing until a second call, ask yourself why.

5. What do I keep if I leave?

Here's the one that costs people real money.

Your Google Business Profile should live in a Google account that you own. Your provider gets added as a manager. That's it. If a company creates the profile under their own account, they control the single most valuable local asset your business has — your reviews, your photos, your ranking history — and you start from zero the day you leave.

Same goes for your website, your domain, and your content. Ask the question before you sign, and get the answer in writing. Any provider who's confident in their work has no reason to hold your assets hostage.

The one question with only one right answer

"Can you guarantee me the #1 spot on Google?"

The correct answer is no. Nobody owns Google's algorithm. Anyone guaranteeing a position is either promising you a ranking for a keyword nobody searches, or promising something they have no mechanism to deliver.

I get asked how long results take, and I won't hand you a date I can't guarantee either. What I will tell you is that reviews and rankings compound — and that your monthly report shows exactly what moved, so you're never guessing whether you're getting your money's worth.

Red flags worth walking away from

• Guaranteed #1 rankings, or guaranteed results by a specific date
• Any claim of a special relationship or "insider contact" at Google
• Hundreds of backlinks per month with no explanation of where they come from
• Setting up your Google Business Profile under their account instead of yours
• Reviews that appear in bursts, or any offer involving reviews you didn't earn
• No access to your own analytics, or reports you can't independently verify
• A proposal that never mentions your website converting the traffic it brings

That fifth one deserves a sentence of its own. Fake or incentivized reviews are against Google's policies and they get removed — usually after you've paid for them. The whole point of a review advantage is that it's real and it can't be bought out from under you. There's a way to earn them at volume without ever crossing that line.

What I'd actually check before the call

Before you take the meeting, spend ten minutes doing this yourself: search your main service plus your city in an incognito window. Look at who's in the top three. Count their reviews. Look at their profiles versus yours — categories, services listed, photos, how recently anyone replied to a review.

You'll usually spot the gap without any help, and you'll walk into that call knowing whether the person is describing your actual situation or reading from a script. Most of what buries local businesses is unglamorous — a wrong primary category, empty fields, reviews that stopped two years ago.

Frequently asked questions