Hiring a digital marketing agency means handing a stranger your budget, your website, your data, and a piece of your reputation. Most businesses prepare for that conversation with three questions and a gut feeling, then wonder a year later where the money went.
This list fixes the preparation problem. It’s 45 questions organized by topic, and for the ones that matter most we’ve included what a good answer sounds like, because knowing what to ask is only half the job.
We’ve spent 15+ years at SiteMile on the agency side of these interviews, so consider this the list we’d want a smart client to bring in. One note before you start: don’t ask all 45.
Pick the sections that match what you’re buying, choose ten or fifteen questions, and go deep on the answers instead of racing through the list.
Track record and proof
1. Can you show me results for a business like mine?
Not a logo wall. Actual numbers: traffic, leads, or revenue, before and after, over a stated time period, for a company in your industry or one adjacent to it. An agency that’s been around should have at least one story that rhymes with yours.
2. Can I speak with two current clients?
References the agency hand-picks will be glowing, so listen for specifics rather than praise. Ask those clients what went wrong at some point and how the agency handled it. Every relationship has a bump, and the recovery tells you everything.
3. Who’s your longest-standing client, and how long have they been with you?
Retention is the most honest metric an agency has. Marketing contracts churn fast when results don’t come, so a five-year client says more than any award.
4. Have you ever fired a client or been fired? What happened?
An honest answer here is a green flag by itself.
5. What results should we NOT expect?
Good agencies volunteer limits: no ranking guarantees, no overnight traffic, no promises about a specific revenue figure. If the answer to this question is “the sky’s the limit,” the interview can end early.
6. Do you work with any of our competitors?
Conflicts of interest matter most in SEO, where an agency serving two rivals is literally competing against itself for the same keywords. Ask how they handle it, or whether they offer category exclusivity.
Strategy and goals
7. What would you do in our first 90 days?
You want a concrete sequence: audit, analytics access, quick technical wins, keyword and audience research, then the first campaigns. Vague answers about “developing a comprehensive strategy” mean they haven’t looked at your business yet.
8. What do you need from us to succeed?
The honest answer is: quite a lot, at least early on. Subject matter input, fast feedback, access to your data, someone who can approve things. An agency that claims to need nothing from you is planning to produce generic work.
9. How will you learn our industry?
Content written by someone who doesn’t understand your customers reads that way instantly. Listen for a real process: interviews with your team, reviews of sales calls, competitor research, a willingness to be edited by your experts.
10. Which marketing channel would you cut from our budget?
A sneaky one, and worth it. Agencies that recommend everything are billing, not strategizing. The right partner should be willing to tell you that, say, your industry doesn’t convert on paid social and the money belongs in search.
11. What happens if something isn’t working after three months?
You’re checking whether they have a pivot process or just a renewal process.
The team you’ll actually get
12. Who will work on our account day to day, and can we meet them?
The people in the sales meeting are rarely the people doing the work. Meet the actual account manager and at least one specialist before signing, because you’re hiring them, not the pitch deck.
13. How many accounts does each account manager handle?
Industry reality check: at many agencies the answer is 15 to 25. Your account gets roughly two hours of attention a week at that load. Under ten is good. If they won’t say, that’s your answer.
14. What work do you outsource or hand to AI, and what stays in-house?
Outsourcing isn’t a sin, and neither is using AI for drafts. Hiding either is. You want to know who’s accountable for quality, who you can talk to when something’s off, and whether “content creation” means a writer who knows your industry or a prompt and a spell-check.
15. What’s your team’s turnover like?
Agencies burn people out, and every departure resets your account’s institutional knowledge. A stable team is a real competitive advantage that few clients think to ask about.
16. If our account manager quits, what’s the transition plan?
There should be documentation, a warm handoff period, and no gap in delivery. “That won’t happen” is not a plan.
SEO questions
17. Where do your backlinks come from?
The single most important SEO question on this list. Good answer: digital PR, genuinely useful content, manual outreach, relationships with relevant publications. Bad answer: anything vague, anything involving “our private network,” or a suspiciously specific number of links per month at a flat price. Purchased links from link farms work briefly and then get your site penalized.
18. Can you guarantee first-page rankings?
Trick question. The only correct answer is no. Google’s own guidelines warn against SEOs who claim otherwise, so anyone who says yes has just failed the interview.
19. How long until we see SEO results, honestly?
Four to eight months for meaningful movement is the truthful range for most sites. Faster claims deserve heavy scrutiny.
20. How do you approach technical SEO on our platform?
Platform specifics matter enormously. If you run WordPress, the agency should immediately mention things like Core Web Vitals, plugin bloat, and crawl issues from archive pages. A generic answer means they’ll be learning your platform on your invoice.
21. What’s changed in your SEO approach in the last two years?
Between AI-generated search results, algorithm updates, and shifting user behavior, an agency doing SEO the same way it did in 2024 is doing it wrong. This question separates the practitioners from the coasting.
22. Will we own all the content, links, and accounts you create?
Yes is the only acceptable answer, in writing. Some agencies build your rankings on assets they control, so leaving them means starting over. That’s a hostage situation dressed up as a service.
Content questions
23. Who actually writes the content, and can we see unedited samples?
Ask for samples in a technical or niche industry, not just polished lifestyle pieces. Writing convincingly about insurance software or industrial equipment is the hard part.
24. How much content is included per month, and at what depth?
Get specific: how many pieces, what word count, with what research behind them. Four thin blog posts and one deeply researched guide cost about the same and perform completely differently. You want an agency that pushes for depth.
25. How do you decide what topics to cover?
Keyword and competitor research should drive the answer, tied to what your buyers ask before purchasing. “We’ll build a content calendar” without a research process behind it is filler production.
26. What’s your revision process, and what does it cost?
Some contracts include two rounds, some bill hourly after the first. Find out before the first awkward invoice.
27. How do you keep our brand voice consistent?
Look for a real mechanism: a voice guide built during onboarding, a consistent writer assigned to your account, editorial review against documented standards. Not “our writers are very adaptable.”
Paid advertising questions
28. Do you charge a percentage of ad spend, and is there a markup?
The most common billing model takes 10 to 20% of spend, which quietly rewards the agency for spending more of your money whether or not it converts. Flat fees and performance-linked models exist. Whatever the model, the ad accounts should be yours and the spend fully transparent.
29. What’s a realistic customer acquisition cost in our market?
They may not know your exact number yet, but they should reason through it out loud with you: average click costs in your industry, expected conversion rates, your close rate. Watching them think is the point.
30. How do you decide when to kill an underperforming campaign?
There should be a threshold and a timeframe, not a feeling. Agencies that let losing campaigns run are usually the ones billing a percentage of spend.
31. Who owns the ad accounts and the historical data?
Same answer as question 22: you do, always. Campaign history is valuable, and losing it on exit means your next partner starts blind.
Reporting and money
32. What does your monthly report look like? Show me a real one.
A good report connects activity to outcomes: what was done, what moved, what it means, what’s next. A bad one is a screenshot of vanity metrics with a logo on top. Ask for an actual (anonymized) client report, not a template.
33. Which single metric will you use to judge your own performance?
Traffic is easy to inflate and impressions are nearly meaningless. You want the agency volunteering leads, qualified pipeline, or revenue as its yardstick, because whatever they measure themselves on is what they’ll optimize.
34. What’s the all-in monthly cost, including tools, ad spend, and extras?
Get the number with everything in it. Surprise line items for “software licenses” and “additional optimization hours” are how a $2,000 engagement becomes a $3,400 one.
35. What are your contract terms, and what does leaving look like?
Reasonable: three to six month initial terms, then month to month, with 30 days notice and full handover of assets. Unreasonable: twelve-month lock-ins with auto-renewal and cancellation fees. The confidence of an agency shows in how easy it makes leaving.
36. What happens in month one that we’re paying for?
Onboarding months are where clients feel burned, paying full price while “research happens.” Fair enough, research is real work, but you deserve a list of the concrete deliverables that month produces: audit documents, strategy, tracking setup, the first published work.
Working together
37. How often will we meet, and who joins those calls?
Monthly at minimum, with the people doing the work present at least quarterly, not just the account manager relaying messages.
38. What’s your response time on normal questions and on emergencies?
Same-day acknowledgment on normal items and a defined emergency path (your site is down, an ad is misfiring publicly) is a fair bar.
39. What project management tool will we share, and can we see everything?
Full visibility into the task board beats a monthly summary of it. Agencies confident in their work volume have no reason to hide it.
40. How do you deliver bad news?
Every campaign underperforms eventually. The agencies worth hiring tell you first, with a diagnosis and a plan, before you spot it in the numbers yourself. Ask for an example of a time they did exactly that.
41. Why do clients usually leave you?
Nobody expects “our work stopped mattering” as an answer, but the way they handle the question reveals plenty. Defensive answers are data too.
WordPress-specific questions
If your site runs on WordPress, and for 43% of the web it does, add these four. Most general marketing agencies can run your ads and still quietly wreck your website, so this section protects the asset everything else depends on.
42. Who handles WordPress development, updates, and security?
Marketing changes touch your site constantly: landing pages, tracking scripts, new plugins. Find out whether a real WordPress developer implements them or whether an account manager will be installing plugins on production. Those are different risk profiles.
43. How do you add tracking and tools without slowing our site down?
Every marketing tool wants a script in your header, and enough of them will drag your Core Web Vitals down along with your rankings. A good answer mentions tag management, testing page speed after changes, and removing what’s no longer used.
44. Have you worked with our theme, builder, or WooCommerce setup?
An agency fluent in your specific stack ships changes in hours. One learning it live ships them in weeks, on your bill.
45. If you redesign a page, how do you protect its existing rankings?
The correct answer includes preserving URLs or setting proper redirects, keeping the content that earns the ranking, and monitoring Search Console after launch. If a marketing agency looks puzzled by this question, keep them far away from your website. Redesigns done carelessly are one of the most common ways businesses torch years of SEO.
What to do with the answers
Score each agency simple: for every question you asked, mark whether the answer was specific or vague. Specificity is the pattern behind almost every good answer on this list, and vagueness is the pattern behind every expensive mistake. When two agencies seem equal, the tiebreaker is the one that asked you harder questions than you asked them.
And if the WordPress questions are the ones that worry you most, that’s the corner we live in. SiteMile has been building and optimizing WordPress sites for over 15 years, we answer questions 42 through 45 for a living, and we’re happy to be interviewed with this exact list. Get in touch and bring the hard questions first.
