Most SEO pitches sound similar because they are describing the same discipline. The differences show up in the answers to specific, awkward questions — about demand, baselines, staffing and failure. Here are eleven that separate an agency with a methodology from one with a sales deck, and what a good answer to each sounds like.
Questions about your market
1. Does my category have enough search demand to justify this?
The most important question and the one least often asked. A good answer includes actual volume figures and a willingness to say the demand is thin. An agency that says every category benefits from SEO is selling rather than assessing.
2. Which specific terms would you target, and why those?
Look for reasoning about winnability from your current position, not just volume. In our own category analysis, 23 keywords carried 77% of all demand while 951 carried almost none — an agency that cannot distinguish between them will build you a plan aimed mostly at the second group.
3. Who currently ranks for those terms, and what would it take to displace them?
This forces an honest assessment of the ceiling. If the incumbents have a decade of authority, you want to hear that before signing, not in month eight.
Questions about the work
4. What will you do in month one that you will not repeat?
Technical audit, baseline, keyword research and architecture work are front-loaded. An agency describing an identical month one and month six has a content subscription rather than an SEO programme.
5. How do the hours divide between technical, content and off-page work?
There is no single correct split, but the answer should exist and should match your situation. A quote that is almost entirely content production is a publishing service.
6. Who actually does the work?
Not a trick question and not an argument for everyone being senior or local. We staff production work efficiently ourselves. What matters is whether the model is deliberate and accountable, or whether the strategist in the room disappears after the first invoice.
7. How will you handle the AI answers in my category?
Increasingly the question that separates current practice from 2019 practice. When keywords carrying 68% of the search volume in a category return an AI Overview, an agency with no view on it is optimising for a surface a large share of your buyers now skip.
Questions about proof
8. What baseline will you record before starting?
Rankings, traffic, enquiries and technical health, documented at the outset. Without it, no one can settle the question of whether the work did anything. Its absence is the single most common reason SEO relationships end in an unresolvable disagreement.
9. Tell me about an engagement that did not work.
The most revealing question on this list. You are listening for a diagnosis — thin demand, technical debt nobody had scoped, a horizon that was too short — rather than a story where the client is the only problem.
10. What would you refuse to do?
An agency with standards has turned things down. If nothing comes to mind, either the standards or the candour is missing.
11. What happens if it does not work?
Listen for whether any part of the fee depends on outcomes. Performance-based terms are not the same as a ranking guarantee — one risks the agency’s fee against outcomes it influences, the other promises something nobody outside Google controls.
The answers that should end the conversation
| If you hear | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| “We guarantee first-page rankings” | The guarantee is attached to terms nobody searches, or to your own brand name |
| “We have a proprietary algorithm” | There is no proprietary access to Google. This is packaging |
| A price before anyone has seen your site | You are being sold a product, not assessed |
| “Results in 30 days” | Either a misunderstanding of the mechanism or a plan involving shortcuts |
| “We can’t share which pages we worked on” | Reasonable for client confidentiality, not for your own account |
| No baseline offered | Success will be reported against a starting point nobody wrote down |
One question to ask yourself
Before any of the above: what would you do with the result? If organic enquiries doubled next quarter, is there someone to answer them, and would they convert?
We have watched SEO succeed and produce no commercial benefit because enquiries arrived somewhere nobody was checking. The channel is only as valuable as what happens after the click, and that part is not an agency’s to fix.
Frequently asked questions
What is the single most revealing question to ask an SEO agency?
Ask what they would refuse to do. An agency with genuine standards has declined work, argued against a client’s preferred tactic, or turned down a category. One that has never refused anything is describing a sales process, not a methodology.
Should I ask for case studies?
Ask, but weight the answer carefully. Case studies are selected by definition. More informative is asking about an engagement that did not work and what they concluded from it — the answer reveals whether they diagnose or deflect.
How do I check whether an SEO agency is any good at SEO themselves?
Search for them. It is imperfect, because agencies often prioritise client work over their own, but a firm invisible for its own core terms should be able to explain why without becoming defensive.
Is it a bad sign if an agency will not quote a price immediately?
No, usually the opposite. A quote given before anyone has looked at your site is a product price, not an assessment. What matters is whether they can explain what drives the number and what they would need to see.
What contract length should I expect?
Long enough for the work to compound, which usually means six months at minimum. Be wary of both extremes: a month-to-month arrangement encourages visible short-term activity, and a twelve-month lock-in with no exit provision removes your only leverage.
If you are shortlisting agencies, ask us these questions too. We would rather answer them at the start than have you discover the answers at month six. See how we answer these questions ourselves, message us on WhatsApp, or send an enquiry.
Sources
Written by Charlotte Zhang, Operations Partner at Kaizenaire Pte Ltd (UEN 201932071D). Charlotte co-founded Kaizenaire with Ken Tan in 2019 and runs client delivery, after four years in operations at OCBC and HSBC.