What questions should I ask an SEO agency before I sign?

0:00
Ask them who owns your website and your Google Business Profile. If they can’t give you a straight answer in 30 seconds, walk away. That one question filters out more bad agencies than any amount of review reading ever will. I’m Jeremy Ashburn. I work with home service contractors every day, and I’ve seen good operators hand over their entire digital presence to agencies that owned everything and delivered nothing. This video is a checklist. Print it out, use it on your next agency call, and you’ll know in 20 minutes whether they’re worth your money. Before you talk about rankings or traffic, you need to know who owns what. There are four things you have to nail down. One, your website. Is it built on a platform you own or is it hosted on the agency’s proprietary system? If you leave, do you get the files, the design, all of it? Some agencies build on platforms they control. You leave the site disappears. Two, your domain name. Your domain should be registered in your name in an account you control with your payment card on file, not the agency’s. Ask them to show you the registrar login or at minimum send you a screenshot of the WHOIS record. Three, your Google Business Profile. You should be the primary owner. The agency can be a manager. If they’re listed as the owner and you’re the manager, that is a serious problem.

1:32
Four, your ad accounts, Google ads, Local Services Ads, meta. All of it should be in your name under your billing in your business manager. Agencies can have access. They should not be the account owner. Ask these four questions before anything else. If the answers are fuzzy, that tells you everything. Standard contracts in this space run six to 12 months. That’s reasonable. SEO takes time, but you need to know exactly what happens when it ends. Ask, what is the minimum contract length? Ask, what happens if I want to leave before it’s up? Is there a buyout clause? Is there a penalty? Do you keep the content they wrote? Do you keep the backlinks they built? Do you keep access to your own call tracking numbers? Ask, what do you own after the contract ends? A lot of contractors don’t ask these questions until they’re trying to leave. And by then it’s too late. Get it in writing before you sign anything. Rankings are vanity. I’ll say that plainly. A position one ranking for a keyword nobody searches is worth exactly zero dollars to your business. Ask the agency, what is my monthly report show? The right answer includes phone calls, track to SEO, form fills, and ideally revenue or booked jobs tied back to those leads. The wrong answer is a PDF of keyword positions with a paragraph about domain authority.

3:02
Ask to see a sample report before you sign. If the sample report doesn’t include call volume, you should ask why. Also ask, do you use call tracking and do I own those numbers? There are tracking providers where the numbers are issued in the contractor’s name. There are others where the agency controls the numbers and they disappear when you leave. Know which one you’re getting. This one is simple. You should have your own Google Analytics property set up under your Google account. The agency should have view access. You should have admin access. Same with Google Search Console. Your property, your login, agency listed as a delegated user. Ask, will I have my own GA4 property with admin access? Ask, will I have owner level access to Search Console? If they say they manage it all in house and you just see the reports they send that is not acceptable, you should be able to log in and see your own data anytime you want. This is a question most contractors forget to ask and agencies rarely volunteer the answer. Ask, do you currently have any other clients doing the same work in my market? Say you’re a plumber in Asheville. Ask, are you doing SEO for any other Asheville plumbers right now? A good agency will give you a straight answer. Some will offer a soft version of exclusivity, one client per trade per market. Others will tell you they serve multiple competitors and they think they can still

4:35
get you results. You have to decide how you feel about that, but you deserve to know before you sign, not six months in when you notice their other client is outranking you. A lot of agencies sell the work and then outsource it. That is not automatically bad. Good agencies have quality processes regardless of who executes. But you need to know, ask, who is writing my content? Is it a staff writer here, a contractor, or an AI tool? Ask, who is building my citations and links? Is that done in -house or through a vendor? Ask, who is my point of contact? And are they also the person doing the work? The answer to that last one is usually no, which is fine, but you should know who you’re calling when something breaks. Also ask, how many clients does my account manager handle? If the answer is over 50, plan on being reactive instead of proactive with your communication. Picture a typical garage door company doing about 15 calls a month from organic search. They sign with an agency without asking the ownership questions. 12 months in, they want to leave. They find out the domain is registered to the agency. The Google Business Profile ownership is under the agency’s Gmail. And the call tracking numbers are agency issued. They leave anyway. They lose the domain history.

6:06
They lose control of the GBP for about three weeks while Google sorts out the ownership dispute. And their call volume drops to roughly four calls a month during that transition. That is a painful scenario and it is entirely avoidable. Now, picture the same company asking those four ownership questions on the first call. The agency either answers cleanly or they don’t. And the company moves on before signing anything. The checklist takes 20 minutes. Fixing the problem after the fact can take months. This is a newer one and it matters right now. You may hear agencies tell you they can get you into AI overviews, into ChatGPT answers, into the AI mode results. Some of that is real work. Structured data, authoritative content, strong brand signals. These things do influence AI visibility. But be careful with guarantees. If an agency says they will get you featured in AI overviews within 90 days, ask them exactly what they mean by that and how they measure it. Ask how do you track AI search visibility? Ask what specifically do you do that is different from standard SEO to target AI generated results. A sharp agency will give you a specific answer about structured data, entity, optimization, or content depth. A vague answer usually means they’re describing normal SEO with a new label on it.

7:36
That is not necessarily bad SEO. It just means the AI claims or marketing language, not a distinct service. Here are the things that should make you stop. Guaranteed number one rankings. Nobody can guarantee that. Google doesn’t even guarantee that to itself. Any agency that promises a specific position is either lying or selling you something that relies on tactics that will eventually get your site penalized. Lock in with no exit clause. A 24 -month contract with no early exit option is a warning sign. No sample report. If they can’t show you what your monthly reporting looks like before you sign, ask why. Vague answers on ownership. If a simple question like who owns the domain gets you a five -minute run around, you have your answer. Keyword stuff proposals. If their pitch deck is full of phrases like number one on Google and dominate local search but has no mention of calls, leads, or revenue, they are optimizing for their sale, not your business. Pressure to sign fast. Good agencies don’t need to close you today. When you’re evaluating any SEO agency for your home service business, keep three numbers in your head. One, cost per lead. Not cost per click, not cost per ranking. What does each inbound call or form fill cost you? Two, lead to job conversion rate. What percentage of those leads become booked work?

9:08
Three, average job value. Take those three numbers and you can calculate whether the monthly SEO spend makes sense for your business. If the agency can’t help you think through those numbers, they are not running your SEO like a business investment. They are running it like a subscription you renew because canceling feels like too much trouble. You can use this checklist on any agency call, whether that’s us or someone else. The questions don’t change. Who owns the assets? What do the reports show? Who does the work? Do you work with my competitors? What happens when I leave? If you want to know where you actually stand right now in local and AI search, get your free AI visibility check at PushLeads.com slash check or call 828 -348 -7686. We’ll show you what your visibility looks like across Google Maps and AI generated results. And you’ll have real numbers to take into any agency conversation.