Guides / Choosing an agency and measuring results
What to ask an SEO agency before you hire one
Hiring an SEO agency is hard to judge from the outside, because the results take months and the work is mostly invisible. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO is a useful starting point: it says to ask what they will actually do, to be wary of guarantees, and to keep control of your own site and accounts.
Questions about the work
- What exactly will you change on my site, and can I see a sample report?
- How will you record where I start, so progress can be measured against it?
- Which of my pages and queries matter most, and why?
- Do you cover how AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity describe my business, or only Google rankings?
Questions about honesty
- Do you guarantee a ranking or a traffic number? A yes is a warning sign. Nobody outside Google controls its results.
- Can you show results for a client, with their permission, and how long it took?
- What will you not be able to fix, and who would do that work?
Questions about control
- Will Google Analytics, Search Console and any ad accounts be in my name?
- What happens to the work and the accounts if we stop?
- How is the price set, and what is billed separately?
What good answers sound like
Specific, plain and willing to say no. A good agency names the pages it will touch, explains the measure it will track, and tells you what is outside its control. Vague answers, a long list of tools and a promise of page one are the usual signs of an agency that cannot show its work.
Where Seovixs fits
We record a baseline first, you own every account, we make no ranking guarantees, and each report says what changed and what we recommend next. You can run our free scan on one page before you talk to anyone.
Sources
Free tools: AI crawler checker · llms.txt generator · robots.txt AI rules generator