You signed a contract. Money started going out. Reports started coming in. Everything looked fine.
Here is what you should have asked before any of that happened.
Is any of this actually making you money?
Not impressions. Not sessions. Not ‘reach’. Money.
There is a version of digital marketing designed to keep you comfortable enough to keep paying , dashboards that look productive, calls that feel useful, and reports full of numbers that don’t connect to anything that matters to your business. It is more common than agencies will admit.
Ask your agency to draw a straight line between last month’s activity and revenue. A specific line. If they pivot to brand awareness or talk about ‘the long game’ without being able to show you anything concrete, you have your answer.
Did anyone check whether your site could actually rank before they built it?
Most business owners judge a website by how it looks. Search engines judge it by things you can’t see, page speed, crawl structure, heading hierarchy, mobile responsiveness, internal linking logic. These aren’t optional extras. They’re load-bearing.
A website can win a design award and sit on page four. Both things are true at the same time, and they happen more often than you’d think.
If your agency built your site and also manages your SEO, ask them: what was deliberately built into this site, from the start, to help it rank? Custom website development done properly has SEO baked into the architecture before a single page goes live — not added as an afterthought once the design is signed off.
When did someone last search for you the way a real customer would?
Not in a rank tracker. Not in a dashboard. Actually typed it into Google, scrolled the results, and looked at what a stranger would see.
Your business name. Your service. Your suburb. What came up? Was it you? Was it a competitor who’s been quietly outranking you for eight months? Was it a three-year-old review you never responded to, sitting there as the first thing anyone reads?
Rank trackers show where a URL sits. They don’t show you what a customer actually experiences when they go looking. Those are different things. If your agency isn’t regularly doing the second one, they’re watching a number instead of watching your business.
Are you doing SEO for my competitors too?
Most agencies work with multiple businesses in the same industry. That’s fine, that’s how they build expertise. But if the same team is running SEO for two competing businesses in the same city, someone is being deprioritised. It doesn’t have to be malicious. It happens by default.
The keyword strategy overlaps. The link-building targets compete. The same writer produces content for both. Even with the best intentions, the work is split. You don’t need to demand exclusivity. But you do need to know whether the situation exists before you’re already in it. Ask directly. An agency that gets defensive about this question is answering it for you.
Who decided this was the right marketing plan for your business?
You did or you thought you did. But look back at how that conversation went. Did the agency ask a lot of questions first? Or did they arrive with a proposal that happened to match their core services?
Most agencies lead with what they’re good at selling. Social media retainer, paid ads, full website rebuild. The pitch changes depending on your budget, not your situation. If you needed a few targeted fixes before anything else, you probably weren’t told that because targeted fixes don’t sustain a retainer.
Ask them directly: if budget weren’t a factor, what would you actually tell me to do first? A good agency might say to slow down on something, skip something entirely, or fix one thing before spending on anything else. That kind of answer costs them something. It means they’re talking to you like a client they want to keep, not a sale they want to close.
What would you have left if you stopped paying tomorrow?
This is the question that separates SEO done properly from SEO done to create dependency.
Good SEO builds things that outlast the retainer, pages that rank on their own, content that earns links, and a technical foundation that search engines trust. If you stopped tomorrow, most of that would still be standing.
Good SEO builds things that outlast the retainer, pages that rank on their own, content that earns links, and a technical foundation that search engines trust.
Ask what you’d have to show for twelve months of work if you parted ways next week. The answer tells you whether you’ve been investing or subscribing.
Have they ever told you something wasn’t working before you figured it out yourself?
This one matters more than it might sound.
Any agency can deliver good news. The test is whether they deliver bad news proactively, before you noticed, before you brought it up. A campaign underperforming. A page not converting. A strategy that needed to change three months ago.
Most agencies wait. They optimise for renewal, not for honesty. They hope things improve before the next call. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t, and by then it’s your problem to raise.
Ask for a specific example of a time they told a client something wasn’t working before the client asked. A good agency will have one ,you can usually find those stories in their case studies if they’re worth reading.
Find out where you actually stand.
If any of those questions made you pause or made you realise you’ve never thought to ask them, there’s probably a reason.
A free website audit will show you exactly what your site looks like from the outside: where it ranks, what it’s missing, and what a customer finds when they go looking for you. No pitch. No obligation. Just answers you should probably already have.