7 Questions to Ask an SEO Agency (If You Want Pipeline, Not Just Reports)

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Most SaaS teams learn the right questions to ask an SEO agency only after the money’s gone. In my experience, that lesson usually costs $15,000 to $20,000, and the agency gets fired somewhere around month four. Traffic climbed, domain rating rose, the report landed every month. Then someone in a board meeting asked how much pipeline came from organic, and nobody had an answer.

I run an SEO agency, so treat this as a poacher-turned-gamekeeper guide. These are the seven questions I’d ask before hiring anyone in this industry, including us. They aren’t trick questions, they’re diagnostic. A good agency answers every one confidently and specifically. An agency still optimising for the old playbook, and the wrong scoreboard, will squirm.

What are the 7 questions to ask an SEO agency?

The short version: ask about link relevance, commercial-page authority, buyer intent, AI visibility, demo-driving pages, competitor AI presence, and pipeline reporting. In my experience running EMGI, those seven expose more in one call than a 38-question checklist ever will.

If you’re still building your shortlist, start with our rundown of the best SaaS link building agencies, then bring these questions into every call.

1. What percentage of our links come from publications our ICP actually reads?

This question exposes how your agency thinks. Are they chasing domain rating and link volume, or are they building semantically relevant links that help Google and AI systems understand your site? A DR70 domain looks good on a slide. What actually matters is whether your buyers would ever read the page the link sits on.

Here’s a concrete example. Say you sell therapy practice management software to licensed psychologists running their own small practices. So where do those buyers actually live? What do they read? Psychology Today, for a start. A good answer names publications like that and connects them to your ICP.

The red flag: an answer built entirely on DR thresholds and monthly link counts, with no mention of who reads the sites. That usually means they’re building links for their own internal dashboard, not your bottom line.

2. Which of our commercial pages have their own links, not just the homepage?

Most agencies default to building links to your blog, because it’s easier, or to hammering the homepage over and over. But your homepage isn’t always where buyers land or convert. Your use case pages, integrations pages and feature pages need authority signals too.

Back to the therapy software example. That company might have an insurance billing page, a clinical notes page, a practice management software page and a use case page for clinical psychologists, each optimised for one specific keyword. That page infrastructure builds topical authority and puts the right page in front of the right buyer. But unless you’re a huge established brand, those pages won’t rank just because you launched them. They need links.

These are also the pages LLMs reference, and where a buyer reads, understands your solution, then books a demo or starts a trial. A good answer maps links to specific commercial pages: “this quarter we’re building authority to your integrations hub and the psychologist use-case page, and here’s why those two”. The red flag is a link profile where everything points at blog posts and the homepage.

3. Are we optimising for buyer intent or just search volume?

Are the people searching your target terms buying, or just learning? Here’s keyword data I pulled from DataForSEO for the video, from the practice management category. “Practice management software” gets 6,600 searches a month at a keyword difficulty of 74. “Therapy notes software” gets around 260 searches at difficulty 65. “Simple Practice alternatives” gets roughly 90 searches at a difficulty low enough that two or three backlinks can break into the top positions.

That 6,600-search head term sounds amazing in a pitch deck, but you’d be fighting category incumbents with serious money behind their brands, and most of those searchers are learning, not buying. Don’t read it as 6,600 ready buyers.

Now look at a term like “best practice management software for psychologists”. A junior strategist skips it for being too small. But that searcher has their credit card in hand. And someone searching “Simple Practice alternatives” already knows the category and believes something better exists. That is quite literally some of the most qualified traffic on the internet.

A good answer sounds like: “we’d start with the alternatives and best-X-for-Y terms your buyers actually convert on, and earn the head term later once the commercial pages have authority”.

The red flag: a strategy deck sorted by search volume, top to bottom.

4. How does our brand show up in AI answers?

Most agencies can’t answer this, and the gap tells you everything. LLMs don’t just pull from an index of pages the way Google does. They lean on training data and on patterns of which brands are consistently mentioned and consistently credible in a topic.

Getting recommended comes down to context and repetition: being mentioned, repeatedly, on surfaces that are topically relevant to your category. Your Ahrefs DR doesn’t matter here. Whether you’re actually visible in the contexts that matter does, and that’s much harder to fake.

When you ask this question, you’re really asking something bigger: do you understand that buyer behaviour has shifted, and that the 2018 playbook can’t work anymore? A good agency says “here’s what we’re doing about it: a monthly prompt panel on your buying queries, share-of-voice tracking against named competitors, and a map of which sources the AI answers actually cite so we know where to earn mentions”. Because this is a newer topic, weaker agencies haven’t rehearsed an answer. Vague hand-waving, or “AI search is just SEO”, is your red flag.

5. Which organic landing pages actually generate demo requests?

This tests plain commercial competence. Does your agency know which pages drive demos and trials, versus which pages just drive traffic? Some of that data won’t be immediately accessible to them, which is fair, but that’s exactly why the conversation needs to happen. You should be identifying the lead-producing pages together and pointing the campaign at them.

A good answer sounds like: “these three pages produce most of your demo requests, so this quarter’s content and links are aimed at them, and here’s how we’ll track it”. We’ve broken down how to connect link building to revenue in our guide to SaaS link building ROI if you want the attribution mechanics.

The red flag: an agency that talks about sessions and rankings but has never asked which pages convert. If they don’t know what a demo is worth to you, how can they prioritise anything?

6. Where are our competitors showing up in AI search that we aren’t?

A serious agency in 2026 monitors your share of voice in AI answers against named competitors, not just your keyword rankings against them. If ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers recommend three rivals on your money prompts and never mention you, that’s invisible pipeline leaking every single day. Would you accept not knowing that?

This is why directories, reviews and Reddit matter as off-page work now. They shape how machines perceive your brand, much like they shape how Google perceives it. A good answer includes a competitor gap analysis across AI surfaces and a plan to close it. The red flag is an agency that has never run one, because you can’t close a gap you’ve never measured.

7. What does your monthly report tell us about pipeline?

The most important question, and ideally the last one you ask. To be fair to agencies: it’s not their job to single-handedly increase your revenue, and I’d argue it’s misleading when one promises “we’ll add X leads”. But they should be working towards pipeline, and the report should show commercial understanding: marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, demos booked, and how the work connects to them.

What you’ll more likely see is “we raised your domain rating, built X links, you rank for Y more keywords”. By themselves those are vanity metrics: the agency reporting what they did rather than the impact they produced. And here’s the hard truth. The CFO finds out eventually if SEO spend isn’t producing organic inbound, and that’s not a conversation you want to be on the wrong end of.

A good answer treats reporting as a shared conversation between agency, in-house team and leadership: how is this work influencing pipeline, how many more demos are we booking? The red flag is a report you could swap onto any other client’s letterhead.

Which red flags should end the conversation?

Some answers shouldn’t just cost an agency points on your scorecard, they should end the call. Why end the call rather than just dock points? In my experience the patterns below reliably predict a wasted budget. Note that they’re behavioural patterns, not brands: plenty of decent people work inside broken agency models.

That last row is why EMGI contracts include a 90-day walk-away clause. I’d rather earn month thirteen than have a contract enforce it. Any agency confident in its work can offer you something similar, so ask.

How much should an SEO agency cost?

In our experience, credible SaaS SEO engagements mostly land between $3,000 and $15,000 per month depending on scope, with focused link building at the lower end and full-service strategy, content and links at the upper end. Anyone quoting a few hundred dollars a month is reselling volume work that fails the seven questions above.

So why do the cheapest and most expensive options fail for the same reason? Price reflects overheads and positioning, not whether the agency understands your ICP and pipeline. A $12,000 retainer producing irrelevant DR60 links wastes money faster than a $4,000 one earning relevant placements. Our pricing philosophy in one line: charge for work that can plausibly influence pipeline, and be able to show which work that is. For month-by-month expectations, see our SaaS link building cost guide.

Frequently asked questions

What should I look for in an SEO agency?

Look for specificity. A good agency talks about your ICP, names the publications your buyers read, maps links to your commercial pages, and reports against pipeline metrics like demos booked. If the pitch is built on domain rating, link volume and keyword counts, they’re selling activity, not outcomes.

How long should I give an SEO agency to show results?

Think in quarters, not months. In our experience you should see leading indicators by month three: relevant links live, commercial pages moving on buyer-intent keywords, early impression growth. Revenue impact typically follows later. What you shouldn’t accept is three months of activity reports with no evidence of direction.

Should an SEO agency guarantee rankings?

No, and you should treat any ranking guarantee as a red flag, because nobody controls Google’s results. What an agency can commit to is process and transparency: which pages they’re targeting, where links will come from, how progress maps to pipeline, and clear exit terms if the fit isn’t right.

What is the 80/20 rule in SEO?

Applied to SEO, the 80/20 rule says a small share of the work drives most of the result. For SaaS, that usually means a handful of commercial pages targeting buyer-intent keywords, backed by relevant authority signals, will outproduce dozens of informational posts chasing search volume. Prioritise money pages first.

Conclusion: take these seven questions into every agency call

Whether you hire us or anyone else, print out these seven questions and send them ahead of the call. Google’s own guidance on hiring an SEO says much the same: ask for specifics, and be wary of anyone promising certainty. Pay attention to which ones make the agency uncomfortable and which ones they answer with real strategy and intent. Vague answers tied to vanity metrics, or over-explaining, tell you another story: you’d simply be overpaying.

The wrong SEO strategy is dangerous precisely because it takes a while to notice it’s going wrong. The real harm isn’t lost deals you can point at. It’s the invisible pipeline that never entered the CRM. There’s an eighth question I didn’t list: who actually does the work on the account. You can see exactly who does the work at EMGI before you ever get on a call with us.