Twelve questions worth asking before you sign
Most sales calls are the agency interviewing you. These flip it, and every one of them can be answered in a sentence by a company that has the answer.
Nothing here is a trick. They are ordinary questions with specific answers, and the reason they work is that a vague reply is itself informative. An agency that needs a follow-up call to tell you its notice period has told you something about its notice period.
Ask them by email before the first call. You will lose an afternoon and save a year.
On the contract
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What is the initial term, and what happens if I cancel in month four?
Four of the twenty-four companies on this site publish a fixed first term. The rest will tell you on request, and the speed of the reply matters as much as the answer.
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How much notice do I owe, and does it run from the date you receive it or from my next billing date?
The second half of that question is where an extra invoice hides.
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If I leave, what happens to the website, the content and the images?
Ask for the clause rather than the answer. Deliverables, site and licence are three different words with three different consequences.
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Who is the primary owner of my Google Business Profile and my call tracking numbers today?
Not manager access. Primary ownership. This is the one that takes weeks to unwind if it is wrong.
On the work
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How many pages will you publish a month, and how many of those are location pages?
A number, not a verb. "Ongoing content creation" is not a quantity.
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Who will touch my account each month, what are their names, and are they employees?
More than half the field publishes no named individual. A straight answer here separates quickly.
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Which parts of delivery, if any, are performed by another company?
Subcontracting a writer is normal. Outsourcing the whole service under your brand is a different arrangement.
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Show me a client in my trade at roughly my revenue, and tell me whether you still work with them.
Case studies stay published long after clients leave.
On the measurement
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What exactly is in the monthly report, and is a call with a person included or billed?
Two companies here publish their report contents line by line. Ask the rest to.
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What counts as a lead, and are existing customers and wrong numbers excluded?
A generous definition makes a report look better with no fabrication required.
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What is the attribution window, and does it differ for a service call and a replacement?
A thirty-day window systematically undercounts replacement work, which is the revenue that matters.
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Which competitors am I benchmarked against, and can I choose them instead?
Name the three whose vans you actually see and ask for the comparison against those.
Two answers should end a conversation regardless of anything else. An agency that will not name a single client, and an agency that cannot tell you its notice period without a meeting.
Everything else is a trade-off you can weigh. Those two are information being withheld at the stage where you are still free to walk.