What Should an SEO Agency Ask You?
Most advice on vetting an agency is about what to ask them. Here's what a genuinely good SEO agency should be asking you, and why its absence matters.
Most conversations about vetting an SEO agency focus on what you should ask them. Almost nobody talks about the reverse: what a genuinely good agency should be asking you. That question order actually matters, because an agency that only pitches and never probes is often building a strategy on assumptions instead of your actual business.
Here’s what a good agency should be asking, and why the absence of these questions is worth noticing.
“What makes a customer valuable to you, beyond just a sale?”
Not all traffic and not all leads are equal. A good agency wants to know what a genuinely great customer looks like for your business specifically, higher order value, repeat purchases, lower support burden, whatever it actually is, because that shapes which keywords and content are worth prioritizing over others that might drive volume without driving value.
“What’s already been tried, and what happened?”
If you’ve worked with a previous agency, run in-house efforts, or tried specific tactics before, a good agency wants the history, including what didn’t work and why, before proposing a strategy. Skipping this risks repeating an approach that’s already been tested and failed.
“Who internally will be our point of contact, and how much time can they give this?”
SEO engagements often need input from your side, content approval, technical access, subject matter expertise, and a good agency wants to know upfront how much bandwidth you realistically have to contribute. This is exactly the kind of detail worth working out before signing, covered in how to brief an agency properly, rather than assuming unlimited availability and being surprised later when approvals stall the whole roadmap.
“What does success actually look like to you, specifically?”
This should be asked directly, not assumed. Two businesses in the same industry can have completely different definitions of success, one wants lead volume, another wants to dominate brand visibility for an upcoming fundraising round. An agency that never asks this is optimizing for a generic definition of SEO success that may not match yours at all.
“What other channels are you running, and how should this coordinate with them?”
SEO doesn’t happen in isolation. A good agency wants to understand your paid search, social, and email efforts, not to take them over, but to avoid working at cross purposes or duplicating effort that’s already covered elsewhere.
“What’s your internal approval process, and how fast does it typically move?”
A roadmap is only as fast as your slowest approval step, one of the clearer, checkable items under what actually counts as scope. A good agency asks about this directly during onboarding, since a business with a six-person sign-off chain for a single blog post needs a very different content cadence plan than one where a single marketing lead can approve same-day.
Why the absence of these questions matters
An agency that skips straight to a proposal without asking questions like these isn’t necessarily incompetent, but it is building your strategy on assumptions rather than your actual situation. If your discovery process felt entirely one-directional, all pitch, no genuine curiosity about your business, that’s worth factoring into the decision as much as anything they explicitly promised.
