Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO

Five questions do most of the work: What do you think is holding this site back, and how did you decide? What will you deliver each month, in countable units? Where will the links come from? What would a bad month look like in the report? Who owns the content if we stop?

Everything else is refinement. The value is in the answers rather than the questions, so know what a strong one sounds like before you dial. Most hiring calls fail because the buyer asks questions with obvious right answers. "Do you follow Google's guidelines?" gets a yes from everyone. The questions below are hard to answer well without having done the work.

Ask these before the call

Two things make the conversation far more useful, and both take ten minutes.

Know your own numbers: how many referring domains you have, roughly how many pages are indexed, and what your organic traffic did over the last twelve months. Search Console gives you the last two free. Without them you can't evaluate a diagnosis.

And know your target: the two or three keywords that actually generate revenue. "More traffic" is not a brief, and a provider who accepts it as one will report on traffic that doesn't convert.

The diagnostic questions

"Having looked at our site, what do you think is the binding constraint?"

Strong answer	Weak answer
Names one specific problem — thin content on money pages, an indexing issue, a referring-domain gap — and says which evidence pointed to it	Lists everything: technical, content, links, speed, schema, "and we'd start with a full audit"

A provider who can't name a primary constraint before the contract will not prioritise well after it. You are also testing whether they looked at your site at all.

"What would you do in the first 30 days, and what would we see?"

Strong answers are unglamorous and specific: fix the four templates blocking indexation, rewrite three commercial pages, build the prospect list. Weak answers front-load discovery — a month of audit with no output is a month of billing.

"What did you get wrong on a recent client, and what changed as a result?"

The single most informative question on this list, and the hardest to fake. Everyone who has done this for five years has a story about a migration that went sideways or a link campaign that produced nothing. A provider with no failures has either not worked long or is not being straight with you.

The scope questions

"What are the deliverables each month, in countable units?"

Insist on numbers: articles, pages optimised, technical fixes, referring domains. Hours are an input, not an output. If they quote hours, ask what those hours produce.

"Who specifically does the work, and what else are they on?"

Agency sales calls are often run by the founder; the account is often run by someone else. Ask to meet the person who will touch your site. Ask how many accounts they carry.

"What do you need from us, and how much of our time?"

Strong providers answer this quickly and specifically — approvals within 48 hours, a subject-matter expert for an hour a fortnight, CMS access. Vagueness here predicts a stalled engagement that gets blamed on the client.

The link building questions

This is where retainers most often quietly under-deliver, so ask harder here than anywhere else.

"How many new referring domains will we gain per month, and what's the budget for them?"

A number, or the link work is nominal. Compare it against your own arithmetic — how many links it takes to outrank a competitor and how to set a link building budget give you the figure to hold them to.

"Where do the links come from? Walk me through the last three you built."

You want the mechanism: outreach to whom, on the basis of what, published where. Then ask for the URLs and go look — the checks in how to tell if an SEO agency is legit take fifteen minutes.

"Do you pay for placements? If so, how much per link?"

Not a trap. Plenty of legitimate providers buy placements, and being straight about it is a good sign. What matters is the price: quality placements start around $100–$500 (the average cost of a backlink), so anything materially cheaper is coming from somewhere you don't want to be.

"What happens to the links if we stop working with you?"

Rented links disappear when the invoice does. Ask before, not after.

The measurement questions

"What does the monthly report contain, and what would a bad month look like in it?"

The second half is the real question. A report that can only show success is not measurement. Good answers include referring domains gained, pages indexed, impressions and clicks by page group, and conversions — the standard in reporting link building results.

"When would you expect to see movement, and on what?"

Strong answer: a range with conditions attached — long-tail pages in eight to twelve weeks, commercial terms in six to nine months, subject to the link gap closing. Weak answer: a confident month, or a refusal to estimate at all. How long SEO takes to show results is the benchmark to check the answer against.

"What would make you tell us to stop spending?"

Almost nobody asks this. A provider who can describe the conditions under which the work isn't worth funding is one who is thinking about your outcome.

The commercial questions

"What's the minimum term, and what's the notice period after it?" Six months plus 30 days is reasonable; twelve months locked is not.
"Who owns the content, accounts and analytics if we leave?" All of it should be yours, in writing.
"Is the retainer fixed, or does it include pass-through costs?" Content, placements and tools are sometimes billed on top. Find out now.
"What's not included that we'll end up needing?" Development time and design are the usual answers.

Three questions not worth asking

"Do you follow Google's guidelines?" Universal yes. Ask about link sources instead — that's the question this one is trying to be.
"Can you guarantee first position?" Nobody can, and Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO flags the guarantee as a warning sign. Asking for one invites the wrong provider to say yes.
"How many keywords will we rank for?" Easy to inflate with terms nobody searches. Ask about revenue-relevant terms by name.

Should you hire at all?

Worth putting to yourself before any of the above. If your site has thin content and under twenty referring domains, a retainer buys less than the same effort spent directly. The early work — fixing on-page basics, publishing pages worth citing, acquiring the first links — is largely DIY-able, as can I do SEO myself sets out.

Link acquisition at that stage doesn't have to be an invoice line either. Reciprocal exchange trades one in-content link for another between site owners in related niches; Backlinkster matches the pairs and verifies each placement is live by code, so you can see exactly what you have. Five swaps a month are free, and the plans cover more.

Hire when you know what you'd ask someone to do and simply don't have time to do it. Hiring to find out what to do is how retainers become audits that never end.

Frequently asked questions

What questions should I ask before hiring an SEO? Ask what they think the binding constraint on your site is and how they decided; what they will deliver monthly in countable units; where links will come from and at what cost per referring domain; what a bad month looks like in the report; and who owns the content if you leave.

What is the best single question to ask an SEO agency? "What did you get wrong on a recent client, and what changed as a result?" It is very hard to answer convincingly without real experience, and the response tells you how the provider handles a campaign that isn't working — which is the situation you actually need them to be good at.

How do I know if an SEO's answers are any good? Strong answers are specific, name a primary constraint rather than listing everything, attach numbers to deliverables, and include conditions and caveats. Weak answers are comprehensive, hedged, and measured in hours rather than outputs.

Should I ask for references from an SEO agency? Ask, but weight them lightly — references are self-selected. A verified case study you can check in a public backlink tool is worth more than three phone calls, and three live URLs of links they built is worth more than either.

How much should I expect to pay? Agencies average $3,209 a month across a survey of 439 providers, though the most common band across all provider types is $501–$1,000. How much an SEO agency costs per month breaks down what each tier buys.

Is a freelancer or an agency better for a small business? Freelancers average roughly $1,349 a month against $3,209 for agencies, and for a site under 100 referring domains an experienced freelancer usually delivers more per dollar. Agencies earn their premium on breadth — technical, content and links running in parallel — which smaller sites rarely need at once.

The bottom line

Go into the call knowing your referring domain count, your target terms, and what a strong answer sounds like. Then ask the four questions that are hard to fake: what's the constraint, what gets delivered, where do the links come from, and what would a bad month look like. You'll know inside twenty minutes.