Most people don’t seek out the best SEO company by doing extensive research on the company, their capabilities, or their industry experience. They choose whoever called them first after making a website inquiry (or phone call) or whoever’s proposal had the nicest charts.
That’s not laziness. It’s that SEO is genuinely hard to evaluate from the outside. You can look at a web designer’s portfolio and know in ten seconds whether you like the work. You can taste a caterer’s food. But two SEO proposals can look identical, cost the same, and one of them will move your business in rankings and visibility while the other quietly bills you for reports, with no real work being done on your site.
So here’s what we’d ask if we were hiring a Wichita SEO company instead of being one. Nine questions, and the answers that should end the conversation.
1. “What will you actually do in the first 90 days?”
You want to know what’s actually going to happen, not just be told that work is happening. “Technical audit, on-page optimization, content strategy, link building” doesn’t tell you much — every proposal says that.
A real answer sounds like: we’ll start with on-page optimization of the core pages to clean up what’s already live, write two new service pages and four location pages, and get you cited in the top 30 high domain authority directories.
Walk away if: all you get back is vague language and boilerplate buzzwords without anything concrete attached to them. That’s a sign they don’t actually have a plan for your site.
2. “What’s this going to cost, and what happens if I stop?”
Price transparency is a character test. We wrote a whole post on what SEO actually costs in Wichita and what each price band realistically buys, because the number itself matters less than what’s behind it.
The follow-up question matters more, though. Ask what you keep if you leave. Content, pages, and technical fixes on your own site are yours. If the agency’s work lives on their platform, on their microsites, or on links they’ll remove when you cancel, you’re renting rankings, not building an asset.
Walk away if: cancelling means losing the work. That’s leverage, not a service.
3. “Who’s doing the work, and are they in this time zone?”
There’s nothing wrong with an agency using contractors. There’s a lot wrong with an agency that won’t tell you. If the person writing about your business has never seen your business, your content will read like it — generic, safe, and indistinguishable from your competitor’s.
Walk away if: the person in the sales meeting disappears after you sign and you’re handed to someone you’ve never spoken to.
4. “How will you report, and what will you report on?”
Keyword rankings are the backbone of this business, and any report worth reading should include them, especially the keywords that actually carry search volume. But rankings alone are only part of the picture. What matters is whether those rankings turn into traffic, and whether that traffic turns into leads.
Ask, too, whether you’ll have access to the raw data. Search Console and Google Analytics should be in your accounts, with the agency added as a user. Not the reverse.
Walk away if: they own your Search Console, your Analytics, your Google Business Profile, or your domain. Those are yours. Always.
5. “What have you done for a business like mine?”
Not “do you have case studies.” Everyone has case studies. Ask for a client in a comparable market with a comparable budget, and ask what the traffic looked like before and after. Local service businesses in Wichita compete on different terms than a national e-commerce brand, and a strategy built for one will waste money on the other.
Walk away if: every example is a national brand with a budget ten times yours.
6. “How do you handle content — and who writes it?”
Content is where most SEO budgets go, and where most of them are wasted. AI-written filler published at volume doesn’t rank well and can actively drag a site down. Ask to see three pieces they’ve published for a client in the last month, and read them. If you’re bored by paragraph two, so is everyone else.
Walk away if: they can’t show you recent published work, or the samples read like they were written by someone who’s never had a customer.
7. “What’s your link building approach?”
This is where the risk lives. Spammy links, private blog networks, and directory blasts can produce a short-term bump and a long-term penalty that costs more to fix than the campaign ever earned.
A safer answer leans on your own site: building internal authority through well-structured content, earning mentions through genuine local relationships, sponsorships, press releases, and partnerships. It’s slower. It doesn’t get undone by an algorithm update.
Walk away if: they promise hundreds of links per month at a low price. That’s a red flag, not a valid link strategy.
8. “What do you need from me?”
The honest answer is: quite a lot, early on. Access to your site and accounts, time for a kickoff conversation about how your business actually makes money, occasional review of content, and someone who can answer questions about your services.
An agency that says “nothing, we handle everything” is telling you the work won’t require your business’s actual knowledge — which means it’ll be generic.
Walk away if: they never ask what your margins look like, which services you want more of, or which customers you’d rather not have.
9. “What could go wrong?”
Ask it straight. The answer tells you more than the other eight combined.
Anyone who’s done this work for real has watched a redesign wipe out rankings, seen an algorithm update reshuffle a market, had a client’s competitor outspend them. Someone who tells you nothing could go wrong is either inexperienced or managing you.
Walk away if: the answer is “nothing — we guarantee sustained top rankings.” Nobody can guarantee that. Google says so directly.
The shortest version
You’re not buying rankings. You’re buying judgment: someone deciding what to work on next with your money. So hire for how they think, not for what they promise. The nine answers above will tell you which one you’re getting long before the first invoice does.
If you’d like a second opinion on a proposal you’ve been handed — including one from us — we’ll read it and tell you what we’d ask. No charge, no pitch.
