Here are nine questions to ask any SEO agency in the sales call — each with what a good answer sounds like and what a bad answer sounds like. The questions matter, but the meta-question matters more: pay attention to how comfortable the agency is with the questions themselves. Discomfort is the signal.
Take these into your next discovery call. Write down the answers verbatim. Trust the pattern more than any one answer.
1. Who, specifically, will do the strategic work?
Good answer: A specific name. A short bio. An offer to put you on the phone with that person for 10 minutes before you sign anything. The salesperson knows who’ll do the strategy because the team is small enough that they all talk to each other.
Bad answer: “We have a team approach.” “You’ll be assigned a dedicated strategist after onboarding.” “Our senior strategists oversee every account.” Translation: the strategy will be done by a junior who you’ll never meet during the sales process, and the senior who “oversees” the account spends about 20 minutes a month looking at your file.
2. What’s the shortest contract you offer?
Good answer: Month-to-month, or a short minimum followed by month-to-month. Said plainly. Not defended. The agency is comfortable letting you leave because they think they’ll earn the next month.
Bad answer: “12 months is industry standard for SEO because it takes time to show results.” This is one of the most common lines you’ll hear, and it’s a sleight of hand. SEO does take time. Locking you in for 12 months does not, in any way, help SEO produce results faster — it just protects the agency from the consequences of underperforming. The contract length and the timeline of SEO have nothing to do with each other.
3. How do you measure whether your work is producing cases?
Good answer: Call tracking, form attribution, signed-retainer counts where the firm can share that data. Conversion-to-case ratios. Revenue-attributed-to-organic when possible. The agency talks about cases, not impressions.
Bad answer: Organic traffic. Keyword rankings. Impressions. Domain Authority. “Engagement metrics.” Anything that sounds impressive on a slide but doesn’t translate to whether your phone rang last month with people who became clients. If the answer is the second one, the agency has chosen comfort metrics over firm metrics — they report what’s easy to make go up, not what produces revenue.
4. Are you working with other law firms in our market and practice area?
Good answer: “No, and we won’t take on a competing firm while we’re working with you.” Or, if they do work with another firm in your space, full transparency about it and an honest conversation about how they’d handle the conflict.
Bad answer: A pause. A redirect to “we never share strategy across clients.” “Our internal firewalls prevent any conflicts.” Translation: yes, they work with your competitors, and they’re trying to make it sound less consequential than it is. Two firms in the same market and practice area cannot both rank first. The agency cannot do their best work for both of you. Walk.
5. Can I see two specific case studies with real numbers?
Good answer: Yes. Here’s a firm name (or at minimum, firm type and market). Here’s what we started with — rankings, traffic, case volume. Here’s what we did, month by month. Here’s where they ended up. We can connect you with the owner of one of these firms if you want to verify.
Bad answer: Aggregated stats. “Our average client sees a 250% increase in organic traffic in the first year.” Percentages without baselines. “Confidentiality prevents us from sharing client names.” A specialist who has done good work has clients who will vouch for them by name. Vagueness in case studies is almost always either the work didn’t happen or the work didn’t work.
6. What would you tell us NOT to spend money on?
Good answer: A specific list. “I wouldn’t pay for a Justia premium listing in your market because the firms who get the leads from that have all been on it for 10 years already.” “I wouldn’t bother with high-volume blogging — for your practice area in your city it doesn’t move cases.” Opinions about what’s overpriced or ineffective, delivered without hesitation.
Bad answer: “Well, every channel has its place if used strategically.” “Most things work if executed correctly.” This is the answer of someone whose business model is selling you the full menu. A specialist has strong opinions about what’s worth doing. A salesperson has flexibility about what’s worth selling you.
7. What do the first 90 days look like?
Good answer: A specific sequence. Month one is audit and a written plan with three or four priorities. Month two and three is execution on those priorities — usually practice page rewrites, GBP cleanup, citation work, review velocity. A clear deliverable at the end of month one that you’ll have in your hand. A clear set of work products at the end of month three.
Bad answer: A list of generic phases. “Onboarding, then research, then strategy development, then execution rollout.” Vague timelines. The famous “SEO takes 6 to 12 months to see results” line, used to push specific accountability over the horizon. If the agency can’t tell you concretely what they’ll do in the first 90 days, they don’t have a plan — they have a process.
8. What happens if rankings don’t improve?
Good answer: “At 90 days we look at what worked and what didn’t, honestly. If the work isn’t producing, we talk about why and decide together whether to continue. We’ve parted ways with clients before when we couldn’t move the needle — it’s better for everyone than dragging out a bad fit.” Real accountability, with no defensiveness.
Bad answer: “SEO is a long game, results compound, you have to trust the process.” Some version of “the only failure is quitting too early.” This is the rhetorical move that protects the agency from being measured. It’s also the line that keeps firms in 18-month bad engagements waiting for the turnaround that never comes.
9. Who owns the work product if the contract ends?
Good answer: “You do, upon payment. Content, audits, recommendations, citation work, schema markup — once you’ve paid for it, it’s yours. If you ever leave, we’ll do a clean transition with all assets in your hands within two weeks.” Simple, clean, no hedging.
Bad answer: “Our proprietary content frameworks remain our intellectual property.” “We license the deliverables for the duration of the engagement.” “Most of our clients renew anyway, so this rarely comes up.” Translation: if you leave, they’ll claim the right to pull down work you paid for, hold accounts hostage, or otherwise make the exit painful. This clause is leverage, and it gets used.
The meta-question
The most important thing you can do during a sales call isn’t ask any specific question — it’s notice how the agency reacts to all of them. A confident, honest operator gets sharper when the questions get harder. They lean in. They start enjoying the conversation because you’re asking the things that separate them from the agencies that can’t answer.
An agency that’s selling something it can’t deliver does the opposite. They get defensive. They redirect. They start name-dropping clients or awards. They get visibly impatient to close. Watch the body language on the Zoom — the eye contact, the pace of speech, the moments where they pause too long or rush past a question without really answering it.
The agencies that have a problem with these questions are the agencies you have a problem with. The questions are the filter.
Bring these nine questions, in writing, to your next call. Don’t apologize for asking. Don’t soften them. The kind of agency that handles them well is the kind of agency worth hiring. The kind that doesn’t was never going to deliver anyway — you just would have found out a year later, after a much more expensive education.
Related reading: how to vet an SEO agency before hiring, red flags when hiring an SEO agency, and our approach.