Checklist · Home Services
How to choose an SEO company: the questions to ask before you sign
For home services owners who’ve been burned by an agency or are shopping for a new one. These are the questions that separate an agency that reports booked jobs and revenue from one that reports rankings, traffic and “leads.”
The short answer
How do I choose an SEO company for my home services business?
Pick the agency that can show you booked jobs and revenue it produced for companies in your trade, explain how it will track your jobs back to the search or ad that started them, and name the people who will do the work. Then check three things in writing: you own every account, you can leave on short notice, and you know exactly what gets done each month. Walk away from anyone who guarantees a #1 ranking. Google’s own hiring guidance says, “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google” (Google Search Central, “Do you need an SEO?”, updated June 2026).
What should an SEO or marketing agency show me before I sign?
- Results in your trade, measured in booked jobs or revenue. A pest control case study tells you more about your pest control company than a dentist’s ranking chart does.
- How they’ll track it. A specific answer to “how will we know which jobs came from you?” How much can be tracked depends on your CRM, website and booking tools, and a good agency will tell you that up front.
- Who does the work. Names and roles, not “our team.”
Then hold their plan up against a real one. Our trade playbooks lay out step by step what the SEO, ads and website work should include for HVAC, plumbing, pest control, lawn care, pool cleaning and other trades. If an agency’s plan for your business skips most of it, ask why.
What questions should I ask a marketing agency before signing?
Ask these on the sales call. How specific the answers are matters as much as what they say.
Who owns the website, Google Business Profile, ads accounts and tracking?
You should own all of it. The agency gets added as a user.
- Good answer: “You’re the primary owner on your Google Business Profile and we’re a manager. The ads account and domain are in your name, and you keep Admin access.” Google’s setup supports this: on a Business Profile, managers can do almost everything except “add or remove users or remove the profile” (Google Business Profile Help, “Manage your Business Profile owners & managers”). In Google Ads, only Admin users can give or remove access and unlink an agency’s manager account (Google Ads Help, “About access levels in your Google Ads account”).
- Red flag: “We set up the account under our agency.” Or a website on their platform that you can’t take with you. Leave, and you start over with no history.
How long is the contract, and what does it take to leave?
- Good answer: Month-to-month, or a short defined term and 30 days’ notice to cancel. Any setup fee buys something you can name, like a website build.
- Red flag: A 12-month lock-in where leaving early means paying the rest of the year, plus an auto-renewal you have to catch in a narrow window. An agency that’s confident in its work doesn’t need to trap you.
What exactly do I get each month?
- Good answer: A list. Service pages written or rebuilt, Business Profile posts and photos, the searches your ads showed up for reviewed and cleaned out, tests run on the website. And a log of every change. Google suggests asking: “Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site?”
- Red flag: “Ongoing optimization.” “We handle it.” If they can’t say what they’ll do, you can’t check whether they did it.
How will you report results?
- Good answer: Booked jobs and revenue by channel, and what each booked job cost, pulled from your CRM (ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber or whatever you run). Rankings and traffic show up as supporting numbers, not the headline.
- Red flag: Pages of keyword positions, impressions and “leads,” where a lead includes spam calls, vendors and people outside your service area.
How will you connect a booked job to the search or ad that started it?
- Good answer: For ads, booked jobs from your CRM get sent back to Google and Meta (called offline conversions) so the platforms learn which clicks turn into jobs, not just which ones fill out a form. For SEO and the website, calls, forms and online bookings get tracked on the site and matched to jobs where your tools allow it.
- Red flag: “Google Analytics handles that,” with nothing about your CRM.
In a pet waste removal account we run, “pooper scooper” and “pooper scooper near me” looked almost the same on clicks and form fills. Once booked jobs flowed back from the CRM, “pooper scooper” barely booked anything and “near me” became one of the best keywords. Without that data, both would have kept the same budget.
Who’s actually doing the work?
- Good answer: The names of the people on your account, their experience, and whether any part of the work goes to a subcontractor. Outsourcing isn’t automatically bad. Not telling you is.
- Red flag: The senior person on the sales call disappears after you sign, and your account goes to a junior rep handling dozens of clients.
What have you done for companies in my trade and my area?
Google lists both on its own short list of questions to ask: “What’s your experience in my industry?” and “What’s your experience in my country/city?”
- Good answer: A real company in your trade or a close one, with results in booked jobs or revenue, and ideally an owner you can call.
- Red flag: Anonymous ranking screenshots, or results only from online stores and software companies.
How will you handle my competitors?
- Good answer: They’ve already looked at who shows up in the map results and ads for your main services in your area, and can tell you what those companies do well. They also give a straight answer on whether they work with other companies in your trade and market, and how they handle it.
- Red flag: A plan that never mentions a single local competitor, or a dodge on the conflict question.
How long until I see results?
Google doesn’t publish a timeline. It tells you to ask: “What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?”
- Good answer: Different timelines by channel. Ads can book jobs soon after launch once tracking is right. SEO takes months, and a good agency names the early signs to watch, like more calls from your Business Profile or new service pages showing up in local searches.
- Red flag: “Page one in 30 days,” or a vague answer that makes the first six months impossible to judge.
What do you need from me?
- Good answer: A specific list: account access, a monthly export of booked jobs from your CRM, real job photos, the services and areas you want more of, and someone who answers the phone when it rings.
- Red flag: “Nothing, we take care of everything.” An agency that never asks which jobs are profitable can’t send you more of them.
Can you guarantee a #1 ranking?
- Good answer: “No.” Google is blunt: “If they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else.” It also warns about SEOs that claim a “special relationship” with Google.
- Red flag: Any ranking guarantee, “Google-approved” tools, or a money-back promise tied to a keyword nobody in your area searches.
How do you get us reviews?
- Good answer: Ask every customer after the job, usually through a text or email from your CRM with a direct link to your Business Profile.
- Red flag: Buying reviews, writing them, offering discounts for them, or asking only happy customers. Google’s Maps policy doesn’t let businesses offer “payment, discounts, free goods and/or services” for reviews or “selectively solicit positive reviews from customers” (Maps User Generated Content Policy, “Prohibited & restricted content”). The FTC’s rule on fake reviews, announced August 14, 2024, bans buying or selling fake reviews and lets the agency “seek civil penalties against knowing violators” (FTC press release).
What are the red flags when hiring a marketing agency?
Google names several in its own hiring guidance:
- Guaranteed rankings. “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” (Google Search Central)
- Secrecy. Google: “Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.”
- Link schemes. Google says to avoid SEOs that talk about “link popularity schemes or submitting your site to thousands of search engines,” and that “You should never have to link to an SEO.”
- Content that misleads. Google warns that “If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index.”
- The red flag answers above. Accounts in the agency’s name, reports with no booked jobs, fake or gated reviews, and a long lock-in paired with vague monthly work.
Is my SEO working? A 15-minute monthly check
If you’re searching “SEO not working,” run this before you fire anyone. Pull these once a month and compare them to the same month last year, since most trades are seasonal.
| Look at | What good looks like | If it’s not |
|---|---|---|
| Booked jobs from organic search and your Business Profile (CRM source field, plus tracked calls and forms) | Rising, especially for the services you want to grow | Check tracking first. A broken form or untracked phone number can hide real jobs. |
| Searches you show up for (Google Search Console) | More clicks from service + city searches, not just your company name | Clicks only from your brand name means SEO isn’t bringing in new customers yet. |
| Calls and website clicks from your Business Profile | Steady or rising in season | Check hours, categories, photos and review volume against the top three map results. |
| Calls that turn into booked jobs | Most calls from search get answered and booked | Missed calls and slow callbacks lose jobs SEO already won. That’s an office fix, not an SEO fix. |
| Traffic vs. jobs | Both moving together | Traffic up and jobs flat usually means you’re ranking for the wrong searches or the pages don’t make it easy to book. |
If tracking works and booked jobs are still flat past the timeline your agency gave you, ask them to explain it in writing. A good agency has an answer and a next test.
What should I look for in a marketing agency contract?
This is a general checklist, not legal advice. Have your attorney read anything before you sign it.
- Term and notice. Month-to-month or a defined term, and how many days’ notice to cancel.
- Auto-renewal. Whether it renews on its own, and the window to stop it.
- Early termination. What leaving early costs, in dollars.
- Setup fees. What they pay for, item by item.
- Ownership. Your name on the website, domain, content, photos, Google Business Profile, ads accounts and analytics, with admin or owner access for you.
- Ad spend. Whether Google and Meta bill your card directly or the agency bills you, and any markup on spend.
- Scope. The monthly deliverables written out, not “optimization.”
- Reporting. What gets measured, how often, and from which source.
- Who does the work. Named roles, and whether subcontractors are used.
- Exit handoff. What you get back when you leave (logins, files, content, tracking setup) and by when.
Questions
Should I sign a 12-month SEO contract?
Only if the scope, reporting and exit terms are clear and you’d be comfortable paying the full term even if the results aren’t there. SEO takes months, so a minimum term isn’t unreasonable on its own. Paying out the rest of the year to leave is the part to push back on.
How do I switch marketing agencies without losing everything?
Before you give notice, confirm you’re the owner or Admin on your Google Business Profile, ads accounts, analytics, website hosting and domain. Then remove the old agency’s access after the handoff. If any account sits in the agency’s name, ask for a transfer in writing first.
What’s the difference between an SEO company and a marketing agency?
An SEO company works on showing up in Google search and the map results. A marketing agency may also run ads, build websites or handle social media. Ask the same questions either way, and make sure the agency you hire can tie its work to booked jobs on every channel it runs.
Sources: Google Search Central, “Do you need an SEO?” (updated June 5, 2026); Google Business Profile Help, “Manage your Business Profile owners & managers”; Google Ads Help, “About access levels in your Google Ads account”; Google Maps User Generated Content Policy Help, “Prohibited & restricted content”; Federal Trade Commission, “Federal Trade Commission Announces Final Rule Banning Fake Reviews and Testimonials” (August 14, 2024).
