I talk to business owners every week who are either paying an SEO company and wondering if it’s working, or thinking about hiring one and not sure who to trust. Both groups have the same problem: they don’t know what questions to ask.
The SEO industry makes it easy to hide behind jargon. “We’re building your domain authority.” “We’re optimizing your on-page signals.” “Your rankings are improving.” None of that tells you whether you’re getting more customers. And that’s the only thing that actually matters.
Before you sign anything, or before you renew with the company you’re already paying, ask these seven questions. The answers will tell you everything you need to know.
1. What exactly will you do in the first 30 days?
This is the single best filter. If their answer is vague, like “we’ll optimize your online presence” or “we’ll start building your authority,” they haven’t looked at your business. They’re selling a package, not a solution.
A good answer sounds like this: “We’ll fix the inconsistent phone number on your Yelp and BBB listings, add 15 photos to your Google Business Profile, write service pages for the four cities you told us you serve, and submit you to the 20 directories you’re missing from.”
That’s specific. It tells you they’ve already audited your situation. And you can check whether they actually did it.
If someone can’t tell you what they’ll do in the first 30 days, they definitely can’t tell you what they’ll accomplish in 12 months. Walk away.
2. Can you show me results from a business like mine?
Not a national brand. Not an e-commerce store. A local service business in a similar market. Ideally in a similar-sized city with comparable competition.
What you’re looking for isn’t a flashy case study. It’s evidence that they understand how local search works. A roofer in San Antonio has completely different ranking challenges than an online retailer. If they can’t show you a local example, their expertise might not apply to your business.
The best SEO companies I’ve encountered will show you a before-and-after of a local client’s Google Business Profile views, the increase in calls from Google, and the specific changes they made to get there. If all they show you is a graph of “keyword rankings,” ask which keywords, and whether those rankings actually produced phone calls. Sometimes a business ranks number one for a term nobody searches.
3. Will I own everything you build?
This question has ended more agency relationships than any other, because the answer is often no.
Some SEO agencies build your website on their platform. If you leave, the website goes with them. Some set up your Google Business Profile under their email and won’t transfer ownership. Some create content and host it on domains they control, so the backlinks point to their property, not yours.
You need to own your Google Business Profile. You need to own your website and domain. You need to own every piece of content they write. You need admin access to everything, not just a viewer login to a dashboard.
Ask them directly: “If I cancel tomorrow, what do I keep?” If the answer is “you keep everything we built,” that’s a green flag. If there’s hesitation or conditions, that’s a company that’s built their retention strategy on lock-in, not results.
4. How will I know it’s working?
“We’ll send you a monthly report” is not a good enough answer. Reports can show anything. I’ve seen agencies send 20-page PDFs full of graphs that look impressive but don’t answer the basic question: am I getting more customers?
The metrics that matter for a local service business are simple. How many people viewed your Google Business Profile this month compared to last month? How many of those people clicked to call? How many of those people asked for directions? How many form submissions came through your website? Where did they come from?
A good SEO company will set up call tracking so you can hear the actual calls and verify they’re real leads, not spam. They’ll show you Google Business Profile Insights with month-over-month comparisons. They’ll connect your metrics to actual job bookings if possible.
If they can’t explain how you’ll measure success in terms you understand, they’re either hiding something or they don’t know what they’re doing. Neither is acceptable.
5. What’s the contract length and cancellation policy?
This one reveals their confidence in their own work. A company that requires a 12-month contract upfront is telling you they need a full year before you’ll see whether it’s working. That’s too long. A lot can go wrong in 12 months, and you shouldn’t be trapped paying for something that isn’t delivering.
The best arrangement for a local service business is month-to-month after an initial 90-day commitment. The first 90 days is reasonable because SEO does take time to build momentum. Google needs to re-crawl your site, process your new content, re-evaluate your listing. Expecting results in 30 days isn’t realistic.
But after 90 days, you should see directional improvement. More profile views, more website traffic from local searches, more calls. If none of those numbers have moved after three months of work, something is wrong and you should be free to leave.
Any company confident in their work will agree to these terms. If they won’t, ask yourself why they need a contract to keep you.
6. Will you share access to everything you’re doing?
This separates transparent companies from black boxes. You should have access to every tool and platform they use on your behalf.
Specifically: Google Business Profile (owner access, not just manager), Google Analytics, Google Search Console, any call tracking platforms, any reporting dashboards, and the backend of your website. You should be able to log in at any time and see what’s happening.
“We can’t share our strategy because it’s proprietary” is a red flag. There’s no secret sauce in local SEO. The ranking factors are publicly documented. Whitespark publishes them every year. The difference between a good agency and a bad one isn’t that the good one knows a secret. It’s that the good one actually does the work.
If someone tells you their methods are proprietary, what they’re usually protecting isn’t their strategy. It’s the gap between what they charge and what they deliver.
7. What won’t you do?
This is the question nobody thinks to ask, and it reveals more than any other.
A good SEO company will have clear boundaries. They won’t guarantee specific rankings, because no one can guarantee that. Google’s algorithm considers over 200 factors and changes constantly. Anyone who guarantees “number one on Google” is either lying or planning to use tactics that could get your listing penalized.
They won’t buy fake reviews. They won’t use private blog networks to create artificial backlinks. They won’t keyword-stuff your website with invisible text. These tactics might produce short-term gains, but Google catches them eventually, and the penalty is worse than where you started. I’ve talked to business owners whose listings were suspended because their previous agency bought reviews on their behalf. The owner didn’t even know it was happening.
A good company also won’t promise results they can’t control. They can optimize your profile and your website, but they can’t control how many people in your city search for your service this month. They can improve your conversion rate, but they can’t guarantee a specific number of phone calls.
Hearing someone say “we don’t do that because it puts your business at risk” is one of the strongest signals you’re talking to the right company.
The pattern that ties it all together
Good SEO companies are specific, transparent, and confident enough to work without long-term contracts. Bad ones are vague, guarded, and need a year of guaranteed payments before you find out what you’re getting.
That’s really the whole test. Specificity, transparency, flexibility. If a company passes all seven of these questions, they’re worth talking to. If they fail more than two, keep looking.
For what it’s worth, here’s how I’d answer each of these questions about our own work at Good Company AI. We show you exactly what we’ll do before you pay anything, because we run a full audit first. We share everything, every login, every report, every piece of work. You own it all. We don’t do contracts beyond 90 days. And we don’t guarantee rankings, because that’s not how this works. We guarantee the work gets done and you can see the results yourself.
Want to see what that audit looks like for your business? It takes about 30 seconds and it’s completely free.