How to Tell If Your SEO Agency Is Wasting Your Money: 5 Questions to Ask

Plenty of good local SEO agencies exist, and hiring one is a perfectly sensible decision for a business that would rather buy back the time. The problem is that the good ones and the bad ones make identical opening claims, and nothing in running a plumbing firm or a dental practice has prepared you to tell them apart.

This is not an anti-agency article. It is the shortlist of questions that separates the two, in under ten minutes, using nothing but plain English.

Question 1: "Where will you be measuring my ranking from?"

This is the best question on the list and the one they least expect.

Your Google Maps ranking is not one number. It is a different number for every spot a customer could be standing when they search, because proximity is one of the three things Google weighs. You can be first outside your own shop and invisible across town, at the same moment, for the same keyword.

So a ranking without a location attached is meaningless. We covered why in detail here.

A good answer describes a grid of points sampled across your trading area, and reports how much of that area you win rather than a single position.

A concerning answer is vague. "Our system tracks it." "We check nationally." That means one search, from a server somewhere convenient, which they will show you in month one as evidence of progress. Nobody searches for a plumber from the middle of the country.

Question 2: "What is my primary category now, and what would you change it to?"

Anybody who has actually looked at your Google Business Profile can answer this instantly. Anybody working from a purchased list of phone numbers cannot.

The question is fair rather than a trick, because your primary category is consistently the strongest single ranking factor in local search. If an agency is pitching you on local SEO and has not looked at the field that matters most, they have not looked at anything.

This question ends more cold calls than any other on the list.

Question 3: "Which of these are in the proposal?"

Read them this list and listen to how much of the retainer it accounts for.

• Submission to hundreds of directories. A handful of real directories matter. The rest are automated pages no human visits, usually sold as a subscription that removes your listings the moment you stop paying, which recreates the exact inconsistency it claimed to fix.
• Geotagging your photos. Embedding location data into image files before upload. Google strips metadata from uploaded images. It survives because it sounds technical and is easy to invoice.
• FAQ schema, for Google rankings. Google restricted FAQ rich results to government and health sites in August 2023 and stopped showing them entirely on 7 May 2026. Keep FAQ content for humans and AI assistants; do not pay for the markup as a ranking tactic.
• Seeding your Google Q&A. The feature was discontinued on 3 November 2025. Here is what replaced it. A proposal that still includes this was written from material over a year out of date.
• Daily posts to your profile. Posts expire in about a week and their ranking effect is small and disputed. Daily posting is a large recurring effort for a marginal return.

If a meaningful share of the retainer is those five things, you are buying volume, because volume is what is easy to put on an invoice.

Question 4: "What happens to the work if I leave?"

Your Google profile, your website, your domain and your content should remain yours in full. Ask directly:

• Who owns the website when the contract ends?
• Whose name is the domain registered in?
• Do the directory listings survive cancellation?

The answer to the last one is no for most citation subscriptions. That is worth knowing before you sign rather than eighteen months later.

Question 5: "What would you expect to see, and by when?"

You are listening for a considered answer with a range and a caveat, not a number.

Something like: profile and category work can move things within weeks, reviews compound over a few months, website and link work takes three to six. That is somebody who has done this before. Here is the honest timeline.

A confident single figure is not an answer. It is a sales technique.

Four answers that should end the call

"We guarantee first place." Nobody controls Google's results, and there is no single first place to guarantee. This is either a misunderstanding of their own product or a deliberate one of yours.

"We have a special relationship with Google." There is no such thing. Being a Google Partner is an advertising certification that confers no ranking influence whatsoever.

"This price is only available today." An ordinary pressure tactic. A service worth buying is still worth buying on Thursday.

"We are calling on behalf of Google." Google does not cold-call small businesses to sell rankings. Hang up.

What a fair arrangement looks like

Prices vary enormously by country and market, so treat this as shape rather than figures. We broke down real pricing here. What matters is the structure.

Sign	Reasonable	Concerning
Contract	Rolling, or a short initial term	Twelve months, no exit
Reporting	Coverage, calls, enquiries	Rankings only, no locations given
First month	Audit, categories, profile fixes	Directory submissions
Ownership	You own site, domain, content	They hold the domain
Profile access	You stay primary owner	They take ownership
Promises	Ranges, with caveats	Guarantees

The one setting to check tonight

That fifth row deserves its own section, because it is the difference between a bad month and a disaster.

Never give away primary ownership of your Google Business Profile. Add an agency as a manager, which grants them everything they need to do the work and nothing they need to hold you hostage.

Businesses locked out of their own listing by a former supplier is one of the most common catastrophes in this field, and it is entirely preventable with one setting. Go and look at who has access to your profile right now. If a former agency, web designer or ex-employee is still on there, remove them.

So should you hire anybody at all?

An honest answer, given that we sell local SEO software.

Probably not, if you have a single location, a handful of services, and thirty minutes a week. The 2026 local SEO checklist is the job. Doing it yourself also means you understand it, which makes you a much harder customer to sell nonsense to later.

Probably yes, if you have several locations, a competitive market where the top three all hold hundreds of reviews, a website needing real technical work, or you genuinely will not do the weekly half hour. Buying back the time is a legitimate reason to hire somebody. Paying for magic is not.

If you take one thing from this article, take question one. Ask where they are measuring from. The answer tells you almost everything, and now you can hear it.