SEO is unusually easy to sell badly. The work is invisible to the buyer, results are slow and hard to attribute, and there is always an explanation for why it has not happened yet. That combination attracts sellers who produce activity rather than outcomes.
None of this means the discipline is fake. It means you need a way to check, and the check has to be something you can perform without being technical.
One: what will exist at the end of month three that does not exist now
The single most useful question. It forces a description of deliverables rather than activity.
Good answers are concrete and countable: four new service pages, a rebuilt Business Profile, the duplicate listings merged, the site loading in under three seconds on mobile, this specific list of pages fixed.
Bad answers are activities with no artefact: ongoing optimisation, continuous monitoring, keyword research, competitor analysis. These may all be real work, but none of them leave anything behind. If the only new thing at the end of the quarter is a report, you bought a report.
Two: can I see three sites you did this for
Then go and look at them. Not the case study page -- the actual sites.
Search for the businesses by name. Search for the service-plus-place terms they should rank for. Look at whether the service pages read like a human wrote them about that specific business, or like a template with the industry swapped.
Be wary of a portfolio you cannot verify. Client names withheld for confidentiality is reasonable occasionally and suspicious as a policy.
Three: who writes the content, and do they know anything about my industry
Most of the durable value in search work is content, which means most of the risk is in who writes it and how.
Ask directly whether it is written by a person who will talk to you, or generated in bulk. Ask what the process is for getting the details right -- because a page about your service that gets the details wrong is worse than no page. Customers who know the subject will spot it, and it will be published under your name.
If the answer involves volume -- twenty posts a month, a hundred pages -- ask how anything can be accurate at that rate.
Four: what happens to the work if we stop
The accounts, the pages, the listing and the domain should all belong to you.
This matters more than it sounds. Agencies that create a new Business Profile under their own account, register your domain in their name, or build your pages on a platform they control leave you with nothing when the relationship ends. Some of this is careless rather than malicious, and the result is the same.
Ask specifically: whose name is the domain registered in, whose account owns the Business Profile, and can I have administrative access to both today. The answer should be yes without hesitation.
Five: what have you found that is wrong right now
Any competent person can spend twenty minutes on your site and your listing and come back with concrete problems: missing hours, no service pages, a blocked robots file, a slow homepage, duplicates.
Someone who cannot name a single specific issue before proposing a monthly retainer has not looked. The proposal is a product, not a response to your situation.
Equally, someone who says everything is catastrophic and only urgent intervention can save you is selling fear. The truth for most sites is a short list of unglamorous fixes.
Six: how will we know if this worked
Agree the measure before starting, and make it a business measure.
Rankings are a means, not an end. So is traffic. The measures worth agreeing are enquiries, calls, and WhatsApp conversations that begin from search. On this site every WhatsApp button is tracked for exactly this reason -- so that "did it work" has an answer that is not a graph of impressions.
Set a review point. Six months is fair for local work. Agree in advance what would cause you to stop.
The uncomfortable answer you should welcome
The best response to some SEO enquiries is that you do not need it yet.
If your Business Profile is unclaimed, your site has no service pages, and nobody answers the phone within a day, an SEO retainer is the wrong purchase. Fix those, then reassess. Anyone who tells you that -- and loses the sale by telling you -- is demonstrating something worth more than the pitch.