TL;DR
Google publishes an official page called "Do You Need an SEO?" with the exact questions you should ask before hiring an agency, and keep asking after you hire one. Most agencies fail half of them. Backlinko's survey of 1,200 business owners found only 30 percent would recommend their current SEO provider. Another 30 percent would leave a negative review. This article turns Google's own guidance into a 30-minute audit you can run on your current agency this afternoon. Bring a spreadsheet, not a lawyer.
Google Just Told You What to Ask
Most owner-operators hire an SEO agency the way they hire a plumber. Someone recommends one. The proposal looks professional. Eighteen months later, traffic is flat, invoices keep coming, and nobody can explain what happened to the budget.
Google has a page for this. It is called "Do You Need an SEO? Tips for Hiring an SEO," and it got a real update alongside Google's new generative AI optimization guide. The update adds a new line to the list of services an SEO might provide: "optimizing for generative AI." It also sharpens warnings about third-party tools, AI-generated content, and agencies who claim special access to Google.
This is not marketing copy. This is Google Search Central telling you, in plain language, what separates a real SEO relationship from an expensive guess. Most owner-operators have never read it. Most agencies hope you never do.
Google's 7 Questions (And What They Actually Mean)
Google lists interview questions for hiring an SEO. Here they are, with what each one actually tests.
1. "Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?"
This tests whether the agency has real case studies with real numbers. A serious agency shows a client in your revenue range with traffic and revenue data over a defined window. A weak agency shows a rankings graph with no context.
2. "Do you follow the Google Search Essentials (previously known as Webmaster Guidelines)?"
This tests whether the agency operates inside the rules. Link schemes, cloaking, and doorway pages still exist. So do agencies who quietly use them and blame the algorithm when your site gets a manual action.
3. "What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?"
This tests whether the agency has a model of your business or a script. "Results vary" is not an answer. A real answer names a metric, timeframe, and mechanism.
4. "What's your experience in my industry?"
This tests domain knowledge versus generic tactics. An agency that has ranked five HVAC companies understands seasonal search volume and local pack behavior. An agency new to your industry is learning on your invoice.
5. "What's your experience in my country/city?"
This tests local and geographic fluency. National SEO tactics and local SEO tactics are not the same discipline.
6. "How long have you been in business?"
This tests survivorship. SEO agencies close fast. If yours has run less than two years, ask who is doing the work and what happens to your account if they pivot.
7. "How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?"
This is the most important question on the list, and the one agencies dodge hardest. Google is asking for a paper trail. Every change. Every reason. Not a monthly PDF with three bar charts.
Google adds a checking mechanism most owners skip: call the agency's past clients and ask whether the service was useful and produced results. Google also warns that a real audit should give you "realistic estimates of improvement," never a guarantee of first place, and that you should grant only Search Console read access at first, never write access.
The 4 Questions Most Agencies Fail
Run these seven questions against your current agency and a pattern emerges. The failures cluster in four spots.
Failure 1: Question 3, results and measurement. Agencies love reporting on rankings and traffic. Few connect either one to revenue. If your monthly report has never once mentioned leads, calls, or closed deals, this is a fail. Traffic is an input, not an outcome.
Failure 2: Question 7, transparency on changes. This is the big one. Ask your agency for a list of every change made to your site in the last 90 days, with a one-line reason for each. Most agencies cannot produce this document because it does not exist. They have a task list, not a decision log. Google's own language is specific: "detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them." A task list is not reasoning.
Failure 3: Non-commodity content. Google's new AI optimization guide draws a sharp line most agencies still ignore. Google's own example: an article titled "7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers" is commodity content. It rests on common knowledge that could originate from anyone and adds little unique insight. An article titled "Why We Waived the Inspection and Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line" is non-commodity content. It comes from a specific, verifiable experience nobody else could have written. Pull up your agency's last 10 blog posts. If most could have been written by any competitor, or by an AI with a generic prompt, you are paying for commodity content. Google states plainly that non-commodity content will influence your visibility in generative AI search more than any other suggestion in the guide. That is where the use is, and most agencies are still producing volume instead of specificity.
Failure 4: Question 1, real case studies in your bracket. Ask for three client examples in your revenue range, in your industry or a close analog, with a start date and a measurable outcome. Most agencies show their best client ever, usually a business ten times your size, or a logo wall with no numbers attached. That is not a case study. That is a hope you're supposed to share.
How to Run This Audit in 30 Minutes
You do not need a consultant. You need 30 minutes and your last three monthly reports.
Minutes 0-5: Pull the paper trail. Email this exact request: "Please send a list of every change made to our website and search presence in the last 90 days, with the reason for each change." Note the response time and completeness.
Minutes 5-10: Check the content. Open your last 10 published pages. For each one, ask: could a competitor with zero unique experience have written this? If yes for more than half, you are buying commodity content.
Minutes 10-15: Trace one keyword to one dollar. Pick your top target keyword. Ask your agency to show the path from that keyword's ranking to an actual lead or sale in your CRM. If they cannot trace it, question 3 fails.
Minutes 15-20: Call one past client. Google recommends this explicitly. Ask three questions: was the service useful, was the agency easy to work with, and did it produce results you can point to.
Minutes 20-25: Check Search Console access. Log into your own Search Console account and check who has access and at what level. If your agency has more than read access and you never upgraded them, that is a governance gap regardless of performance.
Minutes 25-30: Score it. Give a pass or fail on each of Google's 7 questions. Four or more fails means a structural problem, not a communication hiccup.
When to Fire Your Agency
Fire on any one of these, no second chances:
- They cannot produce a change log when asked directly.
- They guarantee a ranking position. Google states plainly that no one can guarantee a number one ranking on Google.
- They claim a special relationship with Google or a priority submit service. Both are fabrications Google calls out by name.
- Their content library is more than 70 percent commodity content after 12 months of retainer.
- A past client, when called, describes the relationship as confusing or says they never understood what they were paying for.
Slow-fire, meaning renegotiate scope or set a 90-day improvement window, if:
- They pass on transparency but fail on industry-specific results.
- Reporting exists but never ties to revenue, and they are willing to fix that in writing.
- The account has had high team turnover but the current person is responsive and competent.
The data backs the urgency. Backlinko's survey of 1,200 business owners found only 30 percent would recommend their current SEO provider, and 44 percent of those who left cited dissatisfaction with results. Separate benchmark data puts average SEO agency churn near 38 percent annually, nearly double full-service marketing agency churn. That is not a rounding error. That is an industry where the default outcome is a failed relationship.
What "Show Me the Receipts" Taught Me at Hartford Steam Boiler
When I was an innovation scout at Hartford Steam Boiler, one of 15 in a 55,000-person organization, I learned that the best audits ask one question: "Show me the receipts." Not the pitch deck. Not the roadmap. The receipts. Who did what, when, and what changed because of it.
Big organizations build entire departments around separating claimed impact from verified impact. Owner-operators do not have that department. You have you, and maybe one ops person, and a Tuesday afternoon between customer calls. That is why Google publishing this checklist matters. It compresses what used to require a dedicated analyst into seven questions you can ask over email.
Google just gave you the receipts to audit your SEO agency. Use them.
Reference Framework: The 90-Day Bottleneck Audit
This SEO audit is one application of a broader discipline I call the 90-Day Bottleneck Audit. Every 90 days, pick one operational dependency, an agency, a vendor, a key process, and ask whether you actually understand what it does for you, or whether you have just been trusting the invoice.
The audit has three steps for any vendor relationship, not just SEO.
- Request the decision log. Every vendor should be able to show what they changed and why, on demand, without a week's notice to prepare a report.
- Trace one output to one dollar. Pick the single metric they report on most and follow it to an actual business result. If the thread breaks, you have found your bottleneck.
- Talk to someone outside the relationship. A past client, a competitor who uses a different vendor, an industry peer. Outside information corrects for the fact that you only see what the vendor chooses to show you.
Run this quarterly on your three biggest fixed costs and you will find the leak before it becomes a crisis.
Doctrine Connection: Verification Beats Optimism
The reason most owner-operators keep underperforming agencies for years is optimism. They're probably still working on it. Maybe next quarter. That's not on them, the algorithm changed. Optimism is a fine emotional posture and a terrible audit methodology.
Google's checklist works because it replaces optimism with verification. It does not ask you to trust your agency's story. It asks you to request evidence: past work, methodology, timeline, industry experience, and a documented change log. Every question is falsifiable. Every question has a yes-or-no answer backed by something you can hold in your hand.
Verification beats optimism in every part of running a business, and nowhere more than in marketing spend, where results are slow enough and noisy enough that a confident story can survive for years without ever being checked against reality.
FAQ
Q: My agency has produced some rankings improvement. Does that mean the relationship is fine?
Not by itself. Rankings without a documented path to leads or revenue is exactly the failure mode Google's question 3 is designed to catch. Ask them to trace one ranked keyword to one closed deal. If they can, you have real signal. If they can't, you have a vanity metric.
Q: What counts as "non-commodity content" for a home services or trades business?
Google's own contrast is useful here. A generic "how to prepare your home for winter" post is commodity. A post titled "Why We Recommend a Different Furnace Filter Than the Big Box Stores, and What It Cost Us in Callbacks Before We Changed" is non-commodity, because it comes from a specific, verifiable business experience nobody else can copy.
Q: Is it reasonable to expect my agency to share every single change they make?
Yes. Google's own guidance says your SEO should share with you all the changes made to your site and provide detailed information about their recommendations and the reasoning behind them. If your agency treats this as an unreasonable request, that itself is the answer.
Q: How long should I give an agency before running this audit?
Run a lightweight version of it in the first 30 days to confirm access levels, communication cadence, and case study quality. Run the full audit at the 90-day and 180-day marks, when enough work should exist to produce a real change log and early results.
Q: What if the audit reveals problems but switching agencies feels too disruptive right now?
Use the slow-fire path. Set a written 90-day improvement window with two or three specific, measurable requirements, tied directly to the questions they failed. If they meet the bar, you have fixed the relationship. If they don't, you have a clean, documented reason to move on, and a paper trail to show the next agency what standard you expect.
Disclosure
This article was researched using Google's official Search Central documentation and third-party SEO industry survey data, cited throughout. It reflects Jeff Barnes' independent analysis and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by Google. Statistics on agency satisfaction and churn are drawn from publicly available industry surveys and are cited with links to their original sources. This is general business guidance, not a substitute for reviewing your specific contracts or consulting a professional for your situation.