Do any of these trigger anxiety for you:
- “Hey John, I know you’re busy, and so am I; therefore, I’ll be quick…”
- “Hey John, I’ve checked your website, JohnTopGPlumber.com, and found three ways you can increase the call volume you’re getting…”
- “Hey dear, can I speak to the owner?!”
These sentences sound familiar? They resemble the cold-calling scripts people use to find SEO clients.
As soon as you hit the publish button of your website, you’ve likely been added to hundreds of excel sheets of lead lists for cold callers to prospect and dial, cold emails to hit up over Gmail with the professionally-sounding email kevindurant35@gmail.com (guilty as charged), social media marketers to DM, and so on.
Over time, you might have gotten curious enough from all of those pitches and ads to finally check out what SEO is all about and go online. You’ve been funneled and scheduled a call with the agency you want to hire.
The clueless Top G plumber you are, John, you probably have no idea what to expect, and that’s what we aim to change with this article.
Today you’ll learn what to ask your SEO agency both before getting on a sales call and during your SEO partnership.
~4 Minute Read
Quick Answer
Ask your SEO agency about what industries they've served in the past, their industry-specific results in your niche (or at least similar niches), the honest timeline for SEO results, what metrics they track to demonstrate results, and what type of keywords they will go after (will explain).
What to Ask Your SEO Agency
Before The Initial Sales Call?
Now, here’s the thing.
We’ll go over 7 questions you should ask your SEO agency, but we’re speaking primarily to local home service businesses that serve a certain area, BUT the principles are the same for almost all industries.
1. What Industries Have You Served in The Past?
Some agencies are generalists, meaning that they serve all clients from all types of industries (local businesses, eCommerce, SaaS, and so on), while other agencies are niched down to only one or a few industries.
For instance, here at Krstic SEO, we primarily work with home service businesses, like roofers, water damage restoration companies, or plumbers.
Not to say that a generalist agency is a deal breaker. Quite the opposite; the biggest SEO companies in the world are mostly generalists but they have large teams of people, enough to tackle almost any industry.
But still, you’d ideally hire an agency that specializes in your industry only or has vast experience serving your industry and a few other closely related industries.
2. What Results Have You Achieved in My Industry?
Found an agency for your niche? Perfect!
Now it’s time for them to spill the beans about what results they’ve achieved in the past for clients in your specific industry.
Try to get as close to the money results as possible—how much money has their work brought in for the clients, or how many leads did they bring them.
You only care about money for your business, and so should your SEO agency.
Hence, you want to see if they think the same way as you do. You also want to check if they know the numbers within your industry (average customer value, repetitive business, sales cycle, and so on).
If they do, great, then you can move on.
3. How Long Will It Take to See Results?
Ah, there we go. Our favorite.
If you’ve read our article on how long does local SEO take, you’d see that we’ve made some claims not that common in the SEO space, more specifically claims about instant results.
Yes, SEO can provide INSTANT results, but it’s important to clarify what do these “results” really mean.
You’re very unlikely to see instant leads every week from your SEO, but what you are likely to see is some type of movement in Google results for your website in the matter of weeks of starting out your campaign.
Run this through your SEO agency and have them provide honest, accurate timelines of their SEO results. Have them go over the specifics and look at the websites they display in their case studies.
If you hear anything resembling “the average timeline for your SEO ROI to start kicking in is 6-12 months,” then that’s a green flag, but if you don’t hear the possibility of achieving ANY SEO results pretty much right away, then look for someone else to hire.
4. What Metrics Do You Track to Measure SEO Results?
Good question.
By “metrics,” we mean a few things:
- Organic keywords, AKA the number of keywords (and their positions) your site gets displayed for on Google.
- Organic traffic, AKA the traffic you receive from your SEO results on Google (not ads).
- Leads (calls/quote form submissions).
- Sales (if an eCommerce platform or other type of website accepting payments online).
You should have your agency tracking all of these, even though you only care about leads.
If you do not track keywords and traffic, you will not know if your website’s rankings have even changed at all. But if you do have these tracked and your keywords and traffic are growing every month, then you’ll know that your SEO is working, even though the lead volume hasn’t drastically changed (yet).
5. What Type of Keywords Will You Be Targeting?
There’s a difference between keywords your website can rank for.
Some of them have no “buyer intent” behind them, but rather the person searching them simply wants to find out a piece of information with no intention of spending any money either then or any time soon.
Think of keywords like “what is SEO” or “best SEO blog.”
But, however, if the keywords resemble something like “SEO agency near me” or “SEO services for plumbers,” then we have verifiable buyer intent behind them.
What does this even mean?
Google a keyword like “SEO services for plumbers.” What do you see?
I’ll tell you what – you see 10 sales pages from different SEO agencies selling their services to plumbers who have Googled that keyword.
These companies wouldn’t be ranking with their sales pages if the intent behind that keyword wasn’t to buy something. It’s not companies that determine what type of content will rank for a keyword; it’s Google, and the SEO companies’ jobs are to adjust to Google’s preferences.
Google wants its users to have the best user experience possible and, among other things, that includes enabling them to satisfy their intent as fast as possible, including spending money!
But if your SEO agency only goes after keywords like “what is SEO,” then you’ll not be placed in front of buyers but information seekers, who don’t want to spend money on your services.
It’s important to know the difference and make sure your SEO agency will target money keywords.
Conclusion
That’s it!
Keep your conversation as closely related to your wallet as possible while keeping other SEO success factors, like keywords and traffic, in mind.
Learn more:
- Keyword Research for Local SEO
- Link Building for Local SEO
- How to Rank in Multiple Cities Near Your Business
Good luck!
Bogdan is a local SEO expert with over 3 years of experience helping businesses grow using Google. When he is not helping businesses grow, he works on his own SEO projects, works out, takes long walks, and watches Suits, which is completely ironic given how rarely he dresses up in a suit himself.