Guide
How to tell whether a marketing agency is worth paying
This is written by an agency, which is worth saying out loud. Read it as a set of questions to ask everyone, including me.
The single most useful question
"How will we know whether this worked?"
Ask it first and listen carefully. A good answer is specific and uncomfortable: booked jobs, tracked calls, form fills attributed to a source, and a before and after you can inspect. A bad answer is impressions, reach, clicks, rankings on unspecified terms, or a dashboard with a lot of green arrows.
Clicks and impressions are real numbers, and they are useful context. They are not the scoreboard. If nobody has agreed on the scoreboard before the work starts, the scoreboard will quietly become whatever number happens to look good in month three.
Genuine warning signs
Guaranteed rankings
Nobody controls Google's results. A guarantee is either meaningless, defined so loosely it cannot fail, or backed by tactics that will cause problems later.
Long contracts with no exit
SEO takes months, so some commitment is reasonable. Twelve months with no break clause and no performance conditions is not a commitment, it is a lock-in.
They own your assets
Your domain, your website, your Google Business Profile, your ad accounts and your customer data should all be in your name with you as the owner. Agencies that hold these are not protecting you, they are protecting themselves against your leaving. This is the single most damaging thing that happens to local businesses when an engagement ends.
No access to your own accounts
You should be able to log into your analytics and your ad accounts whenever you like. Reporting that only exists as a monthly PDF is reporting you cannot check.
Vagueness about what will actually be done
"Content optimisation" and "authority building" are not deliverables. How many pages, about what, published when.
A different story than last month
Strategy should evolve with evidence. If the plan changes completely every month with no explanation of what was learned, there is no plan.
Things that look like red flags and are not
- Refusing to guarantee results. This is honesty, not weakness.
- Telling you not to buy something. An agency that talks you out of spend is worth more than one that never does.
- Asking a lot of questions before quoting. A number produced without understanding the business is a number that will change.
- Being small. A one-person operation that does the work is frequently better than a large one that subcontracts it.
What to ask before you sign
- What exactly will be delivered in the first ninety days?
- What are we measuring, and what is the baseline today?
- Who owns the domain, the site, the profile, the ad accounts and the data?
- What access will I have, and to what?
- What happens if I want to stop?
- Who is actually doing the work?
- Can you show me the current state of my setup and what is wrong with it?
That last one is a good test. Anyone serious should be able to look at your site and your profile and tell you specific things that are wrong, before you have paid anything.
Common questions
Should I hire an agency or do it myself?
If you have time and genuine interest, much of local marketing is learnable and the tools are accessible. Most owners have neither spare time nor the inclination, and the honest comparison is not agency versus doing it well yourself, it is agency versus it not getting done.
How much should a local business spend on marketing?
Common guidance is somewhere between five and ten percent of revenue, higher when actively growing. It is more useful to work from what a customer is worth and what you want to acquire than from a percentage, because the percentage tells you nothing about whether the spend is working.
How long before I should expect results?
Paid advertising can produce leads immediately. Follow-up improvements show up within weeks and often sooner. Local SEO generally takes three months to move meaningfully and six or more to mature. Anyone promising SEO results in thirty days is describing something else.
What if it does not work?
Agree in advance what "working" means and when you will both look at it. A ninety-day review against a baseline agreed at the start is the fairest structure for both sides, and it makes the conversation about evidence rather than about feelings.
Want this done for you?
Tell me what you run and you will get a specific answer, not a pitch deck.