Questions to ask an SEO agency
before you sign anything.
Most SEO agency sales calls are designed to impress, not inform. These questions are designed to tell you whether the person across the table actually knows what they are doing.
Finding an SEO agency in South Africa is not the problem. Finding one that will produce measurable results for your specific business — without a 12-month lock-in, a junior account manager, and a monthly report you cannot interpret — is considerably harder.
These questions cut through the sales process. Use them in any agency meeting, or use them to evaluate whoever is currently handling your SEO. The answers will tell you more than any case study deck.
Questions about their process
“What will you do in the first 30 days?”
A legitimate answer describes a discovery and audit phase: access to GSC, GA4, and any existing keyword data, a technical review, a content gap assessment, and a prioritised action plan. A weak answer describes “onboarding” and “getting to know your business.” An alarming answer involves link building starting in week one before anyone has looked at your site.
“Who will actually be working on my account?”
This question separates the senior consultants from the agencies that pitch with directors and deliver with graduates. Ask specifically: will the person in this meeting do the work, or will my account be passed to someone else after I sign? Ask to meet that person. If they cannot tell you who it is, assume it is whoever is available.
“How do you approach technical SEO versus content versus link building?”
The right answer prioritises in a logical sequence: technical foundation first, content and on-page optimisation second, link acquisition third and only when the site is ready to benefit from it. An agency that leads with link building packages before understanding your site architecture is selling you the easiest thing to invoice, not the most effective thing for your site.
“Can you walk me through a specific technical issue you found and fixed for a client?”
This is the question that immediately separates practitioners from account managers. Someone who has done real technical SEO work can describe a crawl budget problem, a canonicalisation conflict, a Core Web Vitals issue, or an indexing error in concrete detail. Someone who has managed SEO relationships will give you a vague answer about “optimising the site structure.”
Questions about their reporting
“What metrics will you report on, and what does success look like after 6 months?”
You are listening for: organic traffic growth, keyword ranking improvements for specific target terms, and conversion events from organic sessions. You are not listening for: “domain authority” as a primary metric (it is a third-party estimate, not a Google signal), “visibility scores,” or any metric the agency controls the calculation of.
“Will I have access to my own Google Search Console and Analytics accounts?”
The correct answer is yes, unconditionally, from day one. Your data belongs to you. Any agency that creates tracking under their own Google accounts rather than granting access to yours is structurally incentivised to prevent you from leaving — because the data leaves with them. This happens more than you would think.
“What does your monthly report actually contain?”
Ask to see a sample. The things that should be in it: organic clicks this month versus last month versus same month last year, which pages moved (up or down) and why, which keywords changed position and what that means, and what is being done next month and why. The things that should raise flags: long sections on branded keyword rankings (those are not SEO results, that is people searching for you by name), visibility percentage graphs without denominator explanation, or a report so long that reading it is itself a task.
Questions about their approach to your site specifically
“Have you looked at my site before this call?”
A good agency does a quick pre-call review. They will have run your URL through a crawler, glanced at your GSC if you sent access, and come prepared with at least one specific observation about your site. If the answer is no — if this call is their first encounter with your site — you are a prospect in a sales process, not a client in a diagnostic conversation.
“What is the biggest SEO problem you can see with my site right now?”
There is always an answer to this question for any site. Always. If they cannot identify one specific problem — a crawl error, a content gap, a page speed issue, a missing conversion tracking setup — without a paid audit first, they have not looked. If they give you a real answer, even a rough one, they know what they are talking about.
“What is something SEO cannot fix for my business?”
This is a test of honesty, not expertise. The right answer might include: SEO cannot fix a poor conversion rate on a landing page (that is CRO work), cannot fix thin margins on products competing with large retailers on price, cannot replace a sales process that is broken after the lead comes in. An agency that tells you SEO is the answer to every problem is selling you SEO. A consultant who tells you when it is and is not the right investment is telling you the truth.
Questions about their link building approach
This section matters more than most people realise. A toxic backlink profile is one of the hardest SEO problems to recover from — and it is almost always the result of exactly the kind of link building that was sold as a core deliverable.
“What is your link building methodology?”
Legitimate answers involve editorial outreach, digital PR, content-driven link acquisition, or supplier and partner relationship links. Answers that should stop the conversation: bulk directory submissions, guest posting networks, private blog networks (PBNs), or any mention of guaranteed number of links per month at a fixed price. Links are earned or they are a liability.
“Have you ever had to disavow links for a client?”
An experienced practitioner will have done this. It is not a red flag — it is a sign they have dealt with real problems. The red flag is if they do not know what a disavow file is, or if they have never had to use one despite years of doing link building.
The questions about the contract
“What is the minimum contract term?”
SEO takes time to compound. Three months is the absolute minimum to see directional results. Six months is more realistic. A 12-month lock-in is not unreasonable if the work is clearly scoped and the agency is accountable to specific milestones. What is unreasonable: a 12-month commitment with no performance benchmarks, no exit clauses, and no clarity on what is included.
“What happens to my assets if I leave?”
Your content belongs to you. Your GSC and Analytics data belongs to you. Any code added to your site belongs to you. Any agency that retains ownership of assets created during your engagement — or that requires a clawback period before they transfer your accounts — is building in financial leverage over your departure. Read the contract before you sign.
The pattern to watch for: Agencies that struggle with these questions are usually structured to acquire clients, not to retain them on results. The best ones will welcome every question on this list — because their answers are good.
If you have been through a bad agency experience and want an independent read on what your site actually needs — that is what a nogravy Site Audit is for. No retainer required. No sales pitch attached. Just a clear picture of where things stand.