Guide
The claims that should end a meeting
Updated
Three claims recur in this sector and each is straightforwardly diagnostic. None requires expertise to spot.
A ranking guarantee
Nobody controls search ranking. An agency guaranteeing page one is either guaranteeing something outside its control, or defining the guarantee so narrowly that it is meaningless, usually for a phrase nobody searches.
Ask what the guarantee is measured on and what the remedy is. The answer is nearly always a refund of one month against a twelve month commitment.
A proprietary method they cannot describe
This discipline has no secrets worth keeping. The platforms publish their own documentation and the fundamentals are public.
An agency that cannot explain what it will do in plain language either does not know, or is doing something it would rather you did not see.
Reporting that never reaches jobs
Impressions, keyword counts and traffic can all rise while the phone does not. Any report that stops before booked work is measuring activity.
Insist that the monthly report leads with calls and jobs attributed to source. If they say that cannot be tracked, they are telling you they have not set it up.
What good sounds like
Specific questions about your service area, your margins by job type, your capacity, and which jobs you actually want more of. Those are the questions of somebody planning to sell your business's actual work.
Vagueness about your business and precision about their packages is the wrong way round.