7 Questions to Ask Before You Sign With a Marketing Agency
7 Questions to Ask Before You Sign With a Marketing Agency
Most contractors evaluate agencies on the pitch. The pitch is the least informative part. Every agency has a good one.
These seven questions get at the things that actually determine whether you'll be happy in month eight. Ask them out loud and watch how quickly the answers come.
1. Do you work with my competitors?
The only acceptable answer is a clear no, with terms. If an agency serves three HVAC companies in the same metro, they are optimizing against themselves, and someone is getting the leftovers.
Ask specifically: one client per trade per metro, in writing? If they hedge, you know where you stand.
2. Who owns the content if we part ways?
You'd be surprised. Plenty of agreements leave the articles, the pages, even the domain in the agency's possession.
If you spend two years paying for content and can't take it with you, you weren't building an asset. You were renting your own website, and the rent goes up when you try to leave.
3. What exactly am I getting each month, in numbers?
Not "content and optimization." How many articles. How many posts. What gets published, on what schedule, by whom.
Vague scope is how a retainer quietly shrinks in month four when a bigger client shows up.
4. Who writes it, and have they ever spoken to a technician?
Content written by someone who has never been on a job site reads like it. Homeowners can tell, and so can Google, which has spent years learning to reward material that shows real experience.
Ask whose name goes on the article. If the answer is nobody's, ask why.
5. What's your pricing, and why isn't it published?
Hidden pricing usually means the number is sized to what the agency thinks you'll pay. There's no other reason to keep it secret.
You publish your prices to homeowners. It's fair to expect the same from someone selling to you.
6. What happens to the ad spend?
Ad money should go directly from you to Google or Meta, unmarked up, in an account you own. If an agency runs ads through their own account and bills you a bundled number, you cannot see what you actually paid per click.
Ask to be the owner of the ad account. The answer tells you a lot.
7. When will I know if this is working, and what will you show me?
The honest answer is three to six months for local search, and the metric should tie to booked jobs — not impressions, not "engagement."
Anyone promising page one in thirty days is selling ads and calling it SEO. That isn't necessarily bad, but you should know which one you're buying.
The pattern
Every one of these questions is really the same question: is this arrangement built so that I keep something, or so that I keep paying?
Good agencies answer all seven quickly, because they've already decided where they stand. Hesitation is the signal.
For what it's worth, our answers are on the site: one client per trade per metro, you own everything, pricing published, ad spend never marked up, six-month initial term because that's how long the work takes.