The awkward thing about an SEO retainer is that it can look identical whether it's working or not. Reports arrive, tasks get ticked, positions move a little, and twelve months later you genuinely cannot say whether the business is better off. That's not necessarily anyone behaving badly — it's a reporting problem.
Here are the questions I'd ask. None of them require you to understand SEO.
1. Can they name the pages that produce enquiries?
Not traffic — enquiries. If nobody can tell you which pages actually generate business, then nobody is optimising towards business. This is the single most revealing question you can ask, and a good agency will have the answer immediately.
2. Does the enquiry trend track the traffic trend?
Put the two lines side by side, month by month, for the last year. If traffic has climbed and enquiries are flat, the work is attracting the wrong people, sending them to the wrong pages, or measuring the wrong outcome. Any of those is worth knowing about before you renew.
3. What have they told you to stop doing?
Every business is spending money or effort on something that isn't earning its place. An adviser who has never, in a year, recommended stopping anything is either extraordinarily lucky in their clients or isn't looking.
4. Are the rankings they report on commercially useful?
It is easy to rank first for terms nobody valuable searches, and to present that as progress. For each term in the report, ask what a person typing it is trying to do. If the honest answer is "research" or "find something free", that position is not revenue.
A first-place ranking for a term with no buying intent is a decoration, not a result.
5. Would they be comfortable with an outside read?
This is the one that tells you most. A confident agency will happily discuss an independent review of the account — they may even welcome it, because it validates work the client doesn't understand. A defensive reaction to the suggestion is itself information.
What none of this means
It doesn't mean fire your agency. SEO is genuinely slow, genuinely uncertain, and a fair amount of good work produces nothing for six months and then quite a lot. Plenty of retainers that look unproductive at month four are earning well by month twelve.
What it means is that you should be able to describe, in a sentence, what you are buying and how you'd know if it stopped working. If you can't, that's the thing to fix — and you can fix it with a conversation before you fix it with a change of supplier.
Common questions
How long should I give an SEO agency before judging results?
Six to twelve months is a reasonable window for search work to show commercial effect on most sites, and shorter for advertising. But you should expect clear reporting on leading indicators long before that — which pages are gaining, for which searches, and whether those searches have buying intent.
Is it reasonable to ask my agency for an independent second opinion?
Yes, and a good agency will not object. You are not accusing anyone of anything; you are doing what you would do before any other significant recurring expense.
Before you spend more, find out what deserves priority.
The Growth Investigation examines your business, your market, your search visibility and your competitors, then sets out the three things I'd do next and why. €349, one-off, 3–5 working days — and I'll tell you first, for nothing, whether I think it's worth doing at all.
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