Choosing a digital marketing agency comes down to seven checks: define your goal in your own unit, verify who does the work, demand account ownership in writing, read the exit terms, inspect real reporting, demand real cost answers before the pitch, and ask the 21 questions below. Every step is on this page in full — you can run the whole process without hiring anyone, including us.
The seven steps
- Write down the number you’re hiring for. Not “more visibility” — a number in your unit: leads per month, booked jobs, revenue. An agency that won’t be accountable to your unit will report its own (impressions, “engagement,” ranking screenshots), and you’ll be twelve months in before you notice nothing sold.
- Find out who actually does the work. The oldest bait-and-switch in the industry: senior people run the pitch, then your account is handed to whoever has capacity. Ask, by name, who will touch your account weekly — then ask to meet them before signing.
- Settle ownership before a dollar moves. Your Google Ads account, Analytics, Search Console, domain registrar, website files, social profiles — every one should be created in YOUR name with you holding admin, the agency added as a manager. Agencies holding accounts hostage after a breakup is one of the most common disputes in this industry, and it is 100% preventable at signup.
- Read the exit like it will happen. Notice period, cancellation fees, what transfers on the way out, what happens to content and creative. If the exit terms take a lawyer to parse, that’s the answer.
- Inspect a real monthly report. Ask for a recent client report, redacted. You’re looking for: work performed (listed), results in the client’s unit, and numbers that reconcile with the client’s own analytics. A report you can’t understand is not a reporting problem — it’s the product.
- Get prices you can compare. An agency that publishes pricing has decided to charge everyone the same thing. An agency that won’t quote until they’ve “learned about your business” is often learning about your budget.
- Run the 21 questions. Below, in full. One call, thirty minutes, and most bad fits eliminate themselves.
The 21 questions to ask a marketing agency before hiring
Use them verbatim. The pattern in the answers matters more than any single answer.
Ownership and access
- Will every account be created in my name, with me as admin?
- If we part ways, what exactly transfers to me, and in how many days?
- Who owns the content, designs, and creative you produce for me?
- Have you ever kept an account or asset after a client left? Under what circumstances?
The work and the people
- Who, by name, works my account week to week — and can I meet them now?
- How many clients does that person handle at once?
- What happens to my account when that person is on vacation or leaves?
- What will you do in the first 30 days, with dates?
- What will I be able to point at after 90 days, even before results?
- Which parts of the work are done in-house vs. subcontracted?
Measurement and honesty
- What number will you be accountable to, in my unit — leads, jobs, revenue?
- Will your report reconcile with what I see in my own Analytics?
- Show me a campaign that failed. What did you tell the client, and when?
- What would make you tell me to pause or cancel a channel?
- What results can you NOT promise?
Money and terms
- What is the all-in monthly cost — fees, tools, ad spend, everything?
- Is there a term, a cancellation fee, or an auto-renewal?
- Do you take percentage-of-spend, and how does that shape your incentives?
- What’s the notice period, in days, in the contract?
Fit
- Have you worked with a business like mine — and what’s different about my market?
- Why should I NOT hire you? (The only honest answers name a real limitation.)
Want the list as a one-page PDF for your calls? Email us — same-business-day reply — and we’ll send it over, no signup sequence attached.
Red flags — the ones buyers learn too late
- “Guaranteed rankings” or “#1 on Google.” Nobody can guarantee this. Anyone who does is planning to show you a report of junk links or rankings for terms no one searches.
- The cold outreach opener. “I noticed problems with your website” emails from agencies you never contacted — the good ones are busy with referrals and inbound.
- Fear pressure. “Your site will be removed from Google,” countdown discounts, sign-today pricing. Fear is a substitute for a case.
- Vagueness about the work. If they can’t explain what they’ll do in language you understand, the explanation gap will reappear in every report.
- A price that materializes after they’ve sized you up. See step 6.
- No exit terms, or exit terms with teeth. Cancellation fees and long auto-renewing terms are churn insurance for agencies that expect churn.
- Their own marketing is broken. Dead social links, lorem ipsum in the footer, a site that fails the very audit they’re selling. Small details are the audit.
Who owns the accounts? The question that decides everything
If you take one thing from this page: the Google Ads account, the Analytics property, Search Console, the domain, and the website should be yours from day one, with the agency working inside them as an invited manager. The alternative — accounts created under the agency’s ownership — works fine right up until the relationship ends, at which point businesses discover their ad history, their analytics data, or even their domain is a negotiating chip. Forums are full of owners asking how to recover assets from an agency that stopped answering. The fix costs nothing and happens at signup: insist, in writing, before work begins. Any agency that resists has told you why.
Contract and exit questions
Marketing contracts go wrong at the edges, not the middle. Before signing, locate four things in the actual document: the notice period (in days), any cancellation fee (in dollars), the auto-renewal clause (and how to decline it), and the asset-transfer obligation on termination. “Trapped in a contract” stories almost always trace to one of these four lines nobody read. A fair agency contract survives being read out loud to the client — ours is month-to-month with a one-sentence exit precisely because churn insurance is a tax honest work doesn’t need.
Hiring for one channel? The same rules, smaller
Hiring a web designer: add three questions — who owns the files and hosting, what does maintenance cost after launch, and will the site preserve existing rankings (redirect map, structure). Hiring a social media manager for a small business: add — who owns the profiles and ad accounts, what’s the posting cadence in the price, and how is “working” measured beyond follower counts. Every ownership and exit rule above applies at every size, including freelancers.
Should you hire an agency at all?
Honest fork: if your budget is under roughly the cost of a few skilled hours per week, DIY-plus-learning or a narrow freelancer will beat a thin slice of an agency’s attention. If your time is the scarcest thing in the business and the math on a channel already works, delegation pays. And if you don’t yet know whether the math works, buy diagnosis before management — an audit is cheaper than a bad year. We’re an agency saying this: some of the best calls we take end with “don’t hire us yet.”
When you’re ready to compare actual candidates, our honest comparison of small-business SEO companies discloses criteria and includes us as one row — and our small-business practice and our guide to what agencies really charge are here to be graded against the checklist above. We keep a scored copy of our own answers to all 21 questions; ask and we’ll send it.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need an LLC to hire a marketing agency?
No. Agencies work with sole proprietors, LLCs, corporations, and everything between; the legal structure of your business doesn’t gate the engagement. What an agency should verify instead is that you have the basics the work depends on — a domain you control, access to your existing accounts, and someone empowered to approve things.
How long should you give a marketing agency to show results?
Judge work immediately and results by channel: paid ads should show meaningful signal inside 60–90 days; SEO compounds over months, but the work — fixes shipped, content published, a plan with dates — should be visible from week one. “Be patient” with nothing to point at is not patience, it’s the oldest stall in the industry.
What is a fair notice period in an agency contract?
Thirty days is the honest standard — enough for orderly handoff of accounts and assets, short enough that leaving is a decision rather than a project. Notice periods of 60–90 days, cancellation fees, and auto-renewing annual terms mostly exist to make firing the agency expensive.