If you run a roofing, plumbing or HVAC company, SEO pitches show up every week. Emails, cold calls, someone who found a typo on your site. They all talk about more calls, and from the outside they all sound alike.
The way to tell them apart is to ask each one the same questions and compare the answers. Here are ten questions worth asking, what a good answer sounds like, and the answers that should end the conversation. They apply to any company you talk to, including us.
Table of Contents
Know What Local SEO Should Cover
Local SEO for a home service business has three parts: your Google Business Profile, your website, and your presence across the rest of the web, such as citations, reviews and local links. A company that only touches one of the three is selling part of the job. Keep that in mind as you ask the questions below.
It also helps to know where you stand before the calls start. Search your main services in two or three towns you serve, note where your profile and website appear, and save what you see. Then you can check each company's audit against your own notes.
Questions About Ownership
1. Who owns the website and the domain?
You should own your domain, registered in your name. Ask what happens to the website if you leave: can you take it with you, and in what form? Some companies build on their own systems and keep the site when you go. That can be fine, but you should know it before you sign.
2. Who owns the Business Profile and the other accounts?
You should be the primary owner of your Google Business Profile, with the company added as a manager. The same goes for your analytics, ad accounts and anything else in your business name. A company that wants to own your profile is a problem.
Questions About the Work
3. What exactly happens each month?
Ask for a plain list: pages written, profile updates, posts, citations fixed, links earned, technical fixes. Vague answers like ongoing optimization are not a list. Ask, too, who you will talk to each month and how quickly they reply when something on the profile breaks.
4. Who writes the content, and do they know my trade?
Ask who writes your service and city pages. A writer who knows the difference between a condenser and an air handler, or between step flashing and drip edge, writes pages homeowners trust. Ask to see a sample page written for your trade.
5. How will you handle my Business Profile?
Listen for categories, services, photos, posts, review replies and regular checks. Listen for warnings too. A careful company tells you that changing your name, address or primary category can send the profile back through verification, and plans those changes. Any suggestion to add keywords to your business name is a red flag.
6. Where will links come from?
Good answers mention local sources: suppliers, trade associations, community sponsorships, local news. Be wary of anyone selling a set number of links each month from sites with no connection to your trade or your area.
Questions About Reporting and Contracts
7. What will the monthly report show?
You should get a report you can read in a few minutes: the work done that month, how your positions moved for the searches that matter, and calls or form leads if tracking is set up. A pile of charts nobody can explain to you is not a report. Ask to see a sample report before you sign.
8. How long is the contract, and what happens if I leave?
Know the term, the notice period and what you keep. Ask what happens to your site, your content and your accounts on the way out, and get the answer in writing. Month to month terms and longer contracts both exist, and either can work if you know exactly what you are agreeing to.
9. Do you work with my competitors in my area?
Some companies take one business per trade per area. Others do not limit it. Neither answer is automatically wrong, but you deserve a straight one.
The Question That Tells You the Most
10. What do you promise?
This one sorts companies quickly. Nobody controls Google's results, so nobody can honestly promise a set ranking by a set date. An honest answer describes the work, says the timing depends on your market and your competition, and points to a monthly report that shows every move. Anyone who hears that answer and still tells you a date is selling the date, not the work.
Ask what a company will do each month, not what it says it will get you.
Red Flags to Walk Away From
- A promised spot in the map pack by a certain date.
- Advice to add keywords or town names to your Business Profile name.
- Offers to write reviews, buy reviews or set up profiles in towns where you have no office.
- City pages copied from one template with the town name swapped.
- No clear answer on who owns your site, domain and profile.
- Reports with no list of the work done.
- Pressure to sign today to keep a special price.
- A pitch built on one screenshot of one search taken from one spot.
What to Do Next
- Ask every company the same ten questions, in writing if you can.
- Compare the answers side by side, not the sales pitch.
- Confirm you will own your domain and your Business Profile.
- Make sure the monthly work and the report are spelled out.
- Walk away from anyone who promises rankings.
We are glad to answer every one of these on a call. Our Local SEO plan covers your profile, your website and the off page work, with a monthly report that shows what we did, starting at $999/month. See how it fits a trade on our HVAC SEO and general contractor SEO pages, or how we handle the Google Business Profile.