Hiring An SEO Agency In NZ? Seven Questions You Need To Ask

We will spare you a lengthy preamble. You are here because you know that search engine optimisation matters to the growth of your business, and because you want an agency to make it happen.

That part is simple. The difficult part is telling one agency from another, because from the outside they look reasonably similar: a website, some case studies, and a promise about growth.

The seven questions below are the ones worth asking. Put them to any agency that wants your business, ours included. If an answer is hesitant, dismissive or vague, keep looking.

How to choose an SEO agency that knows its stuff

These questions are not designed to catch anyone out. They are there to show you how an agency thinks: whether the work is planned or improvised, whether the reporting is honest, and whether the people you meet are the people who will do the work.

Q1. How do you measure success?

If you are going to pay somebody to do a job, you should know how they will know it worked. A good answer describes the measures they would look at for a business like yours: the searches you want to be found for, the visitors those searches bring, and the enquiries or sales that follow.

Ask how they would establish a starting point. Without a baseline, nothing measured later tells you much about what the work actually achieved.

The answer should be specific to your business rather than a list of metrics that would apply to anybody.

Q2. Do you follow Google's best practices?

Every agency will say yes. That is exactly why the next question matters more.

Q3. What are examples of Google's best practices?

Search engines change constantly, and the guidance they publish runs to hundreds of pages. An agency worth hiring should be able to name a handful of fundamentals that have held steady for years, without reaching for a slide deck.

• Pages served over HTTPS, with nothing insecure loading alongside them.
• Images that carry alt text describing what they show.
• Page titles, headings and descriptions that say what the page is actually about.
• Content good enough that a person would choose to read it, written for that person rather than for a search engine.
• Pages that work properly on a phone.
• A site that loads quickly and has a structure a visitor can follow.

If anyone proposes stuffing keywords into your copy, buying links in bulk, or mentions an algorithm loophole they have found, end the conversation politely. Those are the things that put a site at risk.

Q4. Do you guarantee first-page results?

If the answer is yes, look for the asterisk that lets them off the hook. No agency controls the ranking factors, the competition, or the changes a search engine decides to make. An agency can be genuinely good, do everything properly, and still not put a client at number one in a search engine.

A more useful conversation is about what is realistic. What is the starting point, what does the competition look like, what work would come first, and how would you both know it is moving in the right direction? Anyone who refuses to talk about timing is no more helpful than anyone who promises it.

Q5. Do you provide reports, and can I see an example?

The answer should be yes, followed by an example. Reports tend to contain information about somebody else's business, so an agency should either have permission to share one or show you a version with the identifying details removed.

A report worth receiving has three parts: a summary of the key results, the work done since the last one, and the work planned next. Facts rather than spin, plain language rather than jargon, and enough detail to be genuinely useful.

Ask how often you will hear from them, in what form, and who the person to call will be when something needs explaining.

Q6. Who will be doing the work?

This is the question people are least comfortable asking, and the one that most often decides how a project goes.

Find out who will actually do the work: the people sitting in the room, other people in the same business, or contractors elsewhere. None of those answers is automatically disqualifying, but you are entitled to know which one you are buying.

Ask how you will communicate, when you can talk to them, and whether you can meet the people responsible for your account. Being able to sit down with the people doing the work, or at least reach them during your own working day, matters when something needs explaining.

For a New Zealand business it is worth asking, as well, whether the people doing the work understand this market: how customers here search, what they compare, and who you are actually competing with.

Q7. Who are your longest-standing clients, and what do they say?

An agency that does this well will enjoy the question. You are looking for a pattern rather than a list of names: how long relationships last, what kind of work keeps them together, and whether the agency can describe what changed as a result.

Some clients insist on confidentiality, and declining to name them is not a warning sign on its own. What matters is whether the agency can explain the work and its outcome in terms a stranger can follow, and whether they can put you in touch with a reference.

One final piece of advice on hiring an SEO specialist

Read reviews, as many as you can find, across more than one platform. Do not be afraid to contact a reviewer and ask what the service was actually like. An agency with nothing to hide will not mind.

What to look for in the answers

Be sceptical about results, even when you are shown them. Individual outcomes depend on the market, the competition, the condition of the site and the work already done, so a number lifted from somebody else's project tells you very little about what would happen in yours. What is worth asking for is evidence you can read: the work that produced the result, over what period, and how it was measured.

What you can ask for instead is the reasoning. How would they approach a business like yours? What would they look at first? What would they expect to change, and what would they expect to leave alone? What would make them recommend stopping?

Long-term value is worth weighing as well. Search visibility is not a campaign that finishes: the work that earns it is steady, cumulative and rarely dramatic, and it keeps returning long after the invoice for it has been settled.

Be cautious of anyone who answers with a position, a percentage or a date. Those are the answers that sound best and age worst.

If you would like to see how we answer these questions ourselves, our SEO and organic search work sets out what we do and how we report on it. If you would like the vocabulary first, our explanation of what SEO is and how content writing supports it is the place to start.

You can also put the seven questions to us directly, and see what you make of the answers. Good luck.