How to Tell If an SEO Agency Is Any Good Before You Hire Them

By the time most people ask “is this agency any good”, they’re usually already holding a proposal, already comparing prices, and already partway to a decision. This guide is for the stage before that — the signals worth reading during the sales process itself, before a single document has landed in your inbox. A lot of what separates a strong agency from a mediocre one shows up in how they behave when they’re trying to win your business, not just in what they eventually propose.

That distinction matters because proposals can be polished by a good copywriter regardless of how the agency actually operates day to day. Behaviour during the sales process is harder to fake convincingly, simply because it happens live, in conversation, without the benefit of a second draft.

If you’re further along and already have a structured hiring process underway, our independent hiring guide covers the full process end to end, and our 10 questions to ask an SEO agency gives you a specific script for the conversation. This guide sits earlier than both — it’s about reading the signals before you’ve even decided which agencies are worth a formal conversation with.

Why Behaviour Matters More Than It Seems

It’s tempting to treat the sales process as a formality — something to get through on the way to the proposal, which is where the “real” evaluation happens. In practice, the sales process is a preview of the working relationship, compressed into a much shorter window. How an agency listens, how it handles being challenged, and how honest it’s willing to be when the honest answer is less flattering than a confident one — these are the same behaviours that will show up eighteen months into a retainer, just with more at stake by then.

The five signals below aren’t a formal scoring system — for that, see our agency scoring framework. They’re closer to a set of things to consciously notice while a pitch is happening, rather than letting the overall impression form on its own.

Signal 1: How They Handle the First Conversation

Pay attention to the order of operations in your first call. A strong agency spends the majority of that first conversation asking about your business — your customers, your margins, what’s worked before, what hasn’t — before offering any opinion on strategy. A weaker one moves quickly to talking about itself: its process, its tools, its client list, often before it has enough information about you to know whether any of that is actually relevant.

This isn’t about which agency is more personable. Some excellent agencies are fairly direct and businesslike; some mediocre ones are brilliant conversationalists. What you’re actually listening for is the ratio of questions to statements, and whether the questions are specific to your business or generic enough to open any sales call.

Signal 2: Whether They’ll Talk Honestly About Their Own SEO

It’s a fair, slightly cheeky question to ask an SEO agency how their own website ranks, and how they think about their own SEO. You’re not looking for a perfect answer — agencies are often too busy serving clients to prioritise their own marketing, and that’s a reasonable thing to admit. What you’re looking for is whether they answer honestly or get defensive.

An agency that says something like “honestly, our own site is the last thing we get round to, here’s why” is being straightforward with you. One that deflects the question entirely, or claims their situation is a special case that doesn’t apply to normal SEO, is showing you how they might handle a difficult question about your account further down the line.

Signal 3: How They Talk About Past Failures

Every agency that’s been operating for more than a couple of years has had a client relationship that didn’t go well, or a campaign that underperformed. Ask about one directly. What you get back tells you a great deal.

A confident, experienced agency can usually describe a specific example: what the situation was, what they misjudged or what went wrong outside their control, and what they changed afterwards. An agency that insists it has never had a client relationship go poorly, or answers only in vague terms about “challenging industries”, is either being selective with the truth or hasn’t been in business long enough to have hit a genuine setback — both worth knowing before you sign anything.

Signal 4: Sales Pressure Tactics

SEO is a considered, relatively slow-moving purchase. There’s rarely a legitimate reason to rush the decision, and agencies that manufacture urgency are usually doing so because urgency benefits them more than it benefits you.

• “This pricing is only available if you sign this week.”
• “We can only take on one more client this quarter.”
• Repeated follow-ups that emphasise the deadline rather than answer your open questions.

None of these are automatically disqualifying on their own — genuine capacity constraints do exist. But if urgency is doing more work than substance in moving you toward a decision, that’s worth noticing consciously rather than letting it happen by default.

The agencies I’d back myself tend to be the ones least bothered about losing the pitch. They’ll tell you honestly if they’re not the right fit, or if a competitor might actually suit you better for a specific reason. That’s a strange thing to see in a sales process, and it’s exactly why it stands out.

Andy McLoughlin, Founder of Before You Invest

Signal 5: Verifiable Evidence vs Vague Claims

Case studies and testimonials are easy to produce and hard to verify from the outside. That doesn’t make them worthless, but it means the specificity matters more than the existence of them.

Vague claim	Verifiable evidence
“We’ve helped hundreds of businesses grow their organic traffic.”	A named client (with permission), a specific starting point, and a specific outcome over a stated timeframe.
“Our clients love working with us.”	Independent reviews you can find yourself, not just quotes curated on their own website.
“We’re SEO experts.”	A named team member you can look up, with a visible professional history in the field.

Ask for one specific, verifiable example rather than a general claim, and see how easily it’s provided. A well-run agency should have this readily available, because it’s simply how they’d describe a real piece of work to anyone.

Putting It Together: Trust, But Verify

None of these five signals is a guarantee on its own. An agency can ask great questions in the first call and still turn out to be a poor fit; one can fumble the “tell me about a failure” question out of nerves rather than dishonesty. What matters is the pattern across all five — and whether that pattern holds up once you move from conversation to paper.

It’s also worth trusting a strong negative signal more than you trust a strong positive one. A single red flag — real defensiveness about a failure question, real pressure to sign quickly — tells you something reliable about how the agency operates under a bit of friction. A single green flag is encouraging, but it’s easier to perform for the length of one sales call than five consistent ones are.

That’s the point where a behavioural read needs to meet a structured one. Once you’ve got a shortlist that feels right from the sales process, our agency scoring framework gives you a way to evaluate them formally, category by category, rather than relying on impression alone.