SEO questionnaire: what a good agency asks you

This is the buyer’s copy of the questionnaire: what you should be asked and when to walk.

Why do the questions an agency asks matter more than its pitch?

Questions are the cheapest test of how an agency thinks. A pitch shows what it wants you to believe. Questions show whether it diagnoses before it prescribes.

• Asks before it quotesAsks about revenue, customers, website, tracking and SEO history. Scopes work that fits.
• Quotes after one callAsks nothing. Is pricing a template.

Google’s guidance on hiring an SEO (accessed 22 Oct 2026) points the same way. It suggests asking for examples of previous work, what results to expect and in what timeframe. It also warns you to be careful if a company is “secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.”

Every good question does one of four jobs:

• It scopes the work.
• It picks the services and towns.
• It sets how results are measured.
• It checks whether the agency can help at all.

A question that does none of those is filler. The test is simple. If your answer changed, would the plan change?

The picture below lists the five topic areas a good agency should cover.

• Business and revenueProfitable services, job value, capacity and seasons.
• Customers and sellingWho buys, how they contact you and who answers.
• Website, tracking and accessPlatform, Search Console, GA4 and who owns each account.
• Search historyPast agencies, paid links, penalties and site moves.
• Competitors and constraintsRivals, off-limits claims, rules and approvals.

What business and revenue questions should an agency ask?

It should ask how you make money before it asks about keywords. SEO that grows traffic but not booked work is the most common failure, and these questions are the prevention.

Read each row from left to right. The first column is the question, the middle column says why it matters, and the last shows what a weak agency does instead.

A good agency sizes the plan down or aims it at higher-ticket work, and a weak one sells the larger plan anyway.

Lead value is the question we’d never skip. Our SEO ROI calculator takes the same inputs. Our post on the five numbers behind SEO ROI explains how they combine, so you can find what you already know before any call.

What should an agency ask about your customers and how you sell?

It should ask who buys, how they search and what happens after the phone rings. Search traffic is only the first half of the funnel, and an agency that stops at the click can’t explain lost leads.

Listen for these:

• Who is the typical buyer, and who do you not want?
• How do people first contact you: call, form, text, chat or walk-in?
• Who answers the phone, and what happens to missed calls?
• What’s your close rate on inbound leads, even roughly?
• How do you know where a customer came from today?

How much does follow-up matter?

If a quarter of the calls go unanswered, 60 are handled and 60 x 1/3 x $600 = $12,000. The leak is $4,000 a month before SEO changes anything.

Which fix is bigger?

Now compare the two fixes. Ten percent more calls from SEO is 88. With a quarter unanswered, that’s 66 handled, or 22 jobs and $13,200, a gain of $1,200.

The chart below shows the three monthly job values from this made-up example.

• A quarter of calls unanswered$12,000
• 10% more calls, same leak$13,200
• Every call answered$16,000

Source: Hypothetical example

View the data as a table

Item	Value
A quarter of calls unanswered	$12,000
10% more calls, same leak	$13,200
Every call answered	$16,000

An agency that never asks how you follow up on leads isn’t planning to be measured on them. Our post on when an agency should show calls covers what to expect once work begins.

What website, tracking and access questions should come up?

Expect questions about your platform, your tracking and who owns the accounts. These decide whether the agency can ship anything, and who controls your data if you part ways.

A competent agency asks:

• What platform is the site on, and who can publish changes?
• Is Search Console set up, and who is the verified owner?
• Is GA4 installed, and are calls, forms and chats recorded as key events?
• Is the Google Business Profile claimed, and by whom?
• Is a redesign or migration planned?

Ownership is the part to read twice. Google’s Search Console help says an owner “has full control over properties in Search Console” and can add and remove users. A property needs at least one verified owner, or nobody has access.

In Google Analytics 4, an Administrator can manage users and an Editor can’t. A Business Profile can have several owners but only one primary owner.

Our recommendation: the agency is a user, and an entity you control is the owner. The full checklist is in who owns your SEO assets if you leave your agency.

What access should you give before you sign?

For the evaluation stage, Google’s page says to “only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don’t grant them write access).” Read access first, a diagnosis second, wider access after you’ve read and approved a plan.

1. Read access firstRead access to Search Console, no write access at this stage.
2. A diagnosis secondThe agency reviews your site and history.
3. Wider access lastOnly after you have read and approved a plan.

Google adds one more test. If an SEO has FTP access to your server, “they should be willing to explain all the changes they are making to your site.” That’s a fair test of any agency with publishing rights.

If an agency asks for your registrar login or wants to be account owner on day one, ask why. There can be good reasons, such as DNS verification, and it should be able to give them in a sentence. Our guides to Google Search Console and GA4 for SEO help you tidy the accounts first.

What should an agency ask about your search history?

It should ask what SEO work was done, by whom and what happened, because past work shapes what is safe to do next. Skipping this is how agencies repeat an old mistake or trip an old penalty.

Strong questions:

• Have you used an agency or freelancer before? Why did it end?
• Are there paid links, directory blasts or bulk content on the site?
• Have you ever received a manual action message in Search Console?
• Has the site changed domains, platforms or URL structures in the past few years?
• Have there been profile suspensions or listing disputes?

The link question matters because Google’s spam policies list “exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links” as link spam, unless the links are qualified with rel=“nofollow” or rel=“sponsored”. An agency that inherits old paid links without asking can’t judge the risk. See link building mistakes.

“Why did the last agency leave?” is the most revealing question, and a good agency asks it neutrally. The answer often exposes an expectation gap, such as reports that listed rankings but not calls. A new agency fixes that by agreeing on the scoreboard first.

What should an agency ask about competitors, brand and constraints?

It should ask who you compete with and what you can’t say or do. Those answers set the boundaries for content and surface regulated-industry rules before anyone writes a draft.

Look for questions about:

• Who do you lose jobs to, and who do you wish you competed with?
• Which claims are off limits?
• Does an industry rule apply, such as attorney advertising rules or health claims?
• Who approves content, and how long does approval take?
• What proof can you share: photos, licenses, permissions?

Approval speed quietly kills content programs. If drafts wait three weeks for sign-off (a hypothetical, but a familiar one), a monthly plan becomes a quarterly one.

For regulated work, an agency that skips the compliance question is a risk to you. The business owner keeps final say on any claim.

What does it mean when an agency asks almost nothing?

Usually the agency is selling a package, and the proposal will fit you only by accident. These decision rules are our judgment, not research findings.

1. No questions about revenue or lead value: treat any projected return as unsupported, and ask how the forecast was built.
2. No questions about tracking: ask how it will report on calls and booked jobs. If the answer is rankings and traffic, expect rankings and traffic.
3. No questions about ownership: ask for account roles in writing before work starts.
4. A price before a diagnosis: ask what the price includes and what happens at month three if the diagnosis changes the plan.
5. A proposal that could fit any business: ask what’s specific to your site.
6. A cold email promising results: Google says to be wary of firms that “email you out of the blue.” Ask for the proposal in writing and wait.
7. A guarantee of position or traffic: stop. Google says “no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” See our post on SEO guarantees.

If the agency passes, read the quote with the same care. Our posts on how to read an SEO proposal and contract terms to look for show how.

How do you score an agency’s questions after the call?

Score eight areas from 0 to 2 right after the call, while you still remember what was asked. This is our own scorecard, built for comparing agencies side by side. It is not a validated test.

Give each area a score:

• 2 if the agency asked and followed up on your answer
• 1 if it asked once and moved on
• 0 if it never raised the topic

Our rule of thumb: 13 to 16 means the agency is diagnosing. At 8 to 12, ask for a second call and watch what changes. At 7 or below, you’re being sold a template.

Score every agency the same way and keep the sheets. When two quotes arrive close in price, the score is often the tiebreaker.

How should you prepare answers before the first call?

Gather ten facts, mark the ones you’re unsure of, and share them in writing. A prepared buyer gets a sharper diagnosis and a more honest quote.

Copy this prep sheet and fill it in:

Business: services, service area, team size
Top 3 services by profit (not by volume)
Average job or customer value (range is fine)
Leads per month you can handle
How leads contact you (call / form / text / chat)
What happens to missed calls
Close rate on inbound leads (estimate and label it)
Where accounts live: GSC owner, GA4 admin, GBP owner, domain registrar, hosting, CMS
Past SEO work: who, when, what ended it
Constraints: seasonality, approvals, regulated claims, planned redesign

Label every guess as a guess, and decide in advance what budget range you’ll share. A business with no call tracking can still say “about 20 inbound calls a week, we book roughly one in three.”

Once the questions are answered, how to brief an SEO agency covers what to write down. The first 90 days with an SEO agency covers what follows signing.

Unsure about timing? Read when to hire an SEO agency.

What if your own answers to the agency are weak?

They show the agency where the risk sits, and a good one adjusts the plan instead of judging you. Here’s how we read the usual ones.

• “I don’t know our lead value.” Fine. Start logging and use ranges.
• “We want to rank for everything.” The scope is unclear, so a good agency narrows it to the services that pay.
• “We need results this quarter.” We describe 6 to 12 months or more as typical for SEO, not promised. Paid ads or a Google Business Profile cleanup may be a better first move.
• “We can’t change the website.” Then the plan is limited to off-site work and the profile. Say so before signing.
• “We want the cheapest option.” An honest agency says what a lower budget can’t buy.

Good agencies sort these into fix first, plan around, or decline. Declining is good service when the fit is wrong.

What do we ask, and where aren’t we the right fit?

Any agency, us included, should ask these questions and decline the work when the answers show a poor fit.

An engagement with us includes:

• A diagnosis before work starts
• A written plan
• Shipped work each month
• Reporting on traffic, leads, pipeline and revenue as far as your tracking allows

Our SEO service page covers the detail. Our case study evaluation post shows how to read the proof we publish.

We’re probably not the right fit if:

• You want a promised ranking, traffic figure or lead count. We don’t sell guarantees.
• You need the lowest price available, because we don’t position as the cheapest option.
• You need results inside a month.
• You want bulk links or guest-post packages. We don’t do those.
• You want paid ads or social media management. We aren’t a PPC or social agency.
• Your focus is international SEO, which is outside our focus.
• You have no way to follow up on leads and no interest in fixing it. More visibility won’t help.
• You want to resell our work under your brand. We aren’t a white-label vendor.

If that list describes you, a different agency will serve you better, and you should know that before a contract. If it doesn’t, a short website SEO check gives you something concrete to discuss.

What does the evidence not show?

It doesn’t show that any questionnaire improves results. We know of no published study linking agency intake questions to client outcomes, and we aren’t citing one.

Our decision rules and the scorecard are judgment. They come from how we think about diagnosis and scope, not from a dataset. Google’s page covers hiring in general and publishes no official questionnaire.

Are the examples real?

The examples are hypothetical too. The roofer, the 80 calls and the three-week approvals are illustrations, not client results.

We also have no sample of real intake forms to quote. So keep your own notes on what each agency asked and compare them side by side.

Frequently asked questions

If you want to see how an agency would answer these questions for your business, run the ROI calculator first. Then Get Your Organic Growth Plan.

Sources

• Do you need an SEO?, Google Search Central, accessed 22 Oct 2026
• Search Console: permissions and owner roles, Google Search Console Help, accessed 22 Oct 2026
• Verifying site ownership in Search Console, Google Search Console Help, accessed 22 Oct 2026
• Google Analytics 4 access and data-restriction roles, Analytics Help, accessed 22 Oct 2026
• Manage Business Profile users, Google Business Profile Help, accessed 22 Oct 2026
• Spam policies for Google web search, Google Search Central, accessed 22 Oct 2026