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The questions to ask an SEO agency before hiring, plus the answers that signal competence and the red flags that mean walk away. For small business owners.
None of this is secret. Google's own SEO starter guide covers the same fundamentals, from the source.
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Ask an SEO agency five things: what specifically will you do in the first 90 days, who does the work and where are they based, what do I own if we part ways, how do you report results, and can I see the last three clients you worked on. Vague answers on any of these are the warning sign, not the price.
Most SEO sales calls go badly because the agency controls the vocabulary. They talk about domain authority, crawl budgets, and E-E-A-T, and you nod along because pushing back feels like admitting you do not know the field. That asymmetry is the whole problem. You are not supposed to know SEO. You are supposed to know whether this company will make you money.
The good news is that you do not need technical knowledge to vet an SEO agency well. You need a short list of questions that force specific answers, and the discipline to notice when an answer is not specific. A competent agency will welcome them, because owners who have been burned once tend to ask the same things.
The one-line test
If you cannot repeat their answer back to a friend in plain English, they either do not know or do not want you to know.
Work through these twelve in order on your first call. The first five do most of the work, because they separate agencies that have actually run campaigns from agencies that have only sold them. The rest close the gaps around contracts, reporting, content, and who is really touching your website each month.
You will not get through all twelve in thirty minutes, and you do not need to. If the first five produce hedging, generalities, or a redirect back to their process deck, end the call politely and move on to the next agency on your list.
Good answers are specific, hedged where the uncertainty is real, and include things that are not flattering. Bad answers are confident, generic, and always positive. That is the whole heuristic, and it works even when you do not understand the technical content of what you are being told.
The table below covers the answers that come up most often. Notice that in every row the difference is not enthusiasm, it is detail. An agency that has done the work has stories about specific clients and specific months. An agency that has not has adjectives.
| Question | Weak answer | Strong answer |
|---|---|---|
| First 90 days? | We start with an audit, then optimize, then scale. | Weeks 1 to 2 technical fixes and Search Console setup, weeks 3 to 8 rewriting your five service pages, weeks 9 to 12 first four articles plus local listings cleanup. |
| Who does the work? | Our expert team. | Two people. I do strategy and reporting, and a writer I work with regularly does the content. Nothing is subcontracted offshore. |
| Guarantees? | We guarantee first page rankings. | I cannot guarantee rankings and nobody can. I can guarantee the deliverables and show you leading indicators inside 30 days. |
| Timeline? | SEO takes 6 to 12 months, minimum. | Early movement in a few weeks on pages we fix directly, meaningful traction around 60 to 90 days. |
| Reporting? | You get a monthly dashboard. | A monthly call plus a written summary of what we did, what moved, what did not, and what changes next month. |
| Contract? | Standard 12 month agreement. | Month to month. If we are not earning it, you should be free to leave. |
| Link building? | We have a network of high authority sites. | Mostly digital PR, local sponsorships, and supplier or partner pages. You see every link we place. |
| What might not work? | Our process works for everyone. | Your market is competitive and your site has almost no history, so the local pack is a better first target than organic. |
SEO pricing across the market is genuinely wide, and that is not a scam, it reflects real differences in scope. In the proposals we see small businesses bring to us, quotes commonly land somewhere between the high hundreds and several thousand dollars a month, with strategy work and real content production sitting at the higher end. Anything under a few hundred dollars a month is usually a template report and some automated directory submissions.
At Kihan Marketing, SEO is scoped to your goals and growth packages are scoped to your goals, both month to month with no long term contract. Website design is scoped to your project. The reason we publish those numbers is that the vaguest part of most SEO proposals is the part where the money actually goes.
| Tier | What it commonly costs | What you should expect |
|---|---|---|
| Budget or automated | Under a few hundred a month | Automated reports, directory listings, little or no human strategy. Rarely worth it. |
| Freelancer or solo | Commonly a few hundred up to around $1,500 | Real work by one person. Good value if their focus matches your problem, but limited capacity. |
| Small agency | Commonly around $1,500 to $5,000 | Strategy, content production, technical fixes, and a named person accountable to you. |
| Kihan Marketing SEO | From $1,500 | Month to month, no long term contract. Technical, content, and local search handled together. |
| Kihan Marketing growth | From $3,000 | Broader scope for businesses that need SEO plus supporting marketing work. |
Ask this
Ask any agency to break their monthly fee into hours or named deliverables. If they will not, you are buying a black box.
Expect early movement within weeks and meaningful traction around 60 to 90 days. That is the honest range for most small business sites, and any agency that promises faster, or insists nothing at all will be visible for a year, is managing your expectations rather than your rankings.
The nuance matters. Fixing a page that already sits on page two can move within days of Google recrawling it. Building authority for a brand new site in a competitive city is slower, and the first real signal is usually impressions climbing in Search Console well before any clicks arrive. A good agency will tell you which of those two situations you are in on the first call, because it changes the entire plan.
The practical question is not how long until I rank. It is what will I see at 30 days, at 60 days, and at 90 days that tells me this is working. Make them answer in metrics you can log in and check yourself, without depending on their dashboard to interpret it for you.
Some answers should end the conversation regardless of how likeable the salesperson is. These are not judgment calls about taste. In our experience they are the patterns that most reliably precede wasted money, and each one is easy to spot on a first call if you are listening for it rather than hoping you will not hear it.
One mistake we see more than any other is not picking the wrong agency outright. It is signing a twelve month contract with an agency the owner was already unsure about, because the discount for annual billing was tempting and the person on the call was warm and easy to talk to. Uncertainty on the call rarely resolves itself after the contract is signed.
Talk to three agencies, not one and not seven. One gives you nothing to compare against, and seven turns the decision into a research project you quietly abandon. Three is enough to see the pattern, because by the third call you can hear the difference between a specific answer and a rehearsed one without needing to know any SEO.
Then ask yourself a simpler question than which agency is best at SEO. Ask which of these people you want to be on a call with every month for the next year, explaining a bad month honestly. SEO has bad months. The agency that will tell you the truth about them is worth more than the one with the slicker deck.
If you want to run these questions past someone who will answer them straight, Kihan Marketing works month to month with no long term contract. Call (425) 954-3452 and ask us the same twelve questions you plan to ask everyone else. If our answers do not hold up, go ask the next agency on your list.
Start with five: what exactly will you do in the first 90 days, who does the work day to day, what do I own if we stop working together, what does your reporting look like, and who were your last three clients. Then follow up on contract terms, link building methods, content production, and account ownership. The goal is to force specific answers. Vague responses to any of these tell you more than a polished pitch does, and a good agency will not be bothered by the questions.
Quotes commonly land somewhere between several hundred and several thousand dollars a month for a small business, and that wide range reflects real differences in scope rather than pricing games. Under a few hundred dollars usually buys automated reports and almost no human strategy. Kihan Marketing SEO is scoped to your goals and growth packages are scoped to your goals, month to month with no long term contract. Whatever the number, ask any agency to break it into specific deliverables before you sign anything.
Generally no, at least not with an agency you have never worked with. SEO does take time, but that is an argument for patience, not for locking yourself in before you have seen anything. Agencies confident in their results tend to be comfortable with month to month terms because they expect you to stay voluntarily. Long contracts mainly protect the agency’s revenue during months when little is happening. If they insist on twelve months, ask what happens at month four if you are unhappy, and listen closely to the answer.
Expect early movement within weeks and meaningful traction around 60 to 90 days. Pages that already rank on page two can improve within days of Google recrawling them after a fix. Building authority for a new site in a competitive market takes longer, and the first honest signal is usually rising impressions in Search Console before any clicks follow. Ask any agency to tell you specifically what you should see at 30, 60, and 90 days, in metrics you can verify yourself by logging into your own accounts.
No, and any agency offering a ranking guarantee is either misinformed or being dishonest. Nobody controls Google’s algorithm, and outcomes depend on competitors, your site’s history, and how much search volume exists in your market. What an agency can legitimately guarantee is deliverables: the specific pages they will fix, the content they will publish, and the reporting schedule they will keep. If someone guarantees rankings, ask which exact keyword, because the trick is usually guaranteeing a phrase so obscure that nobody ever searches for it.
Everything. Your Google Analytics property, Search Console, Google Business Profile, and website should all sit in accounts you own, with the agency added as a user. Content they wrote for your site stays on your site. You should also receive documentation of what was done and why. Ask this before signing rather than after, because the answer is easy to give honestly at the start and awkward to enforce later. An agency that hesitates here is quietly planning for you to be dependent on them.
Check three things yourself. Open Google Search Console and look at whether impressions and average position are trending up across the last 90 days. Look at your website and see whether pages have visibly changed, using an archive tool if you want dates. Then ask your agency what specifically they did last month and compare that against the invoice. If the report is all rankings with no work log, and nothing on the site has changed in three months, you already have your answer.
Kihan Marketing gives you a written scope and price within one business day. No pressure, and nothing to sign to see it.
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