Consistency Matters More Than Anywhere Else Local identity resolution depends on the business details agreeing across a long tail of directories, many of which nobody has looked at in years. Old addresses, disconnected numbers and previous trading names sit in these places indefinitely.
When to Change Supplier Three conditions justify it individually. Raw answers cannot be produced on request. The prompt set has been changed without disclosure, which invalidates every comparison in every report you have received. Or two quarters have passed with the agreed inputs completed and no movement on citation presence, accuracy or source coverage.
Before leaving, make sure you take the prompt set, the baseline archive and everything published. If those were not yours under the contract, that is a lesson for the next agreement rather than something to negotiate at the exit.
The realistic expectation is that a well written comparison or specification page starts appearing in citation lists within four to eight weeks if the access work is already done. If it has not appeared in three months, the problem is usually that the page argues rather than answers.
The Signals That Mean Something Four things are hard to fake and worth watching closely. Your own pages beginning to appear in cited sources, which is directly observable in any assistant that shows citations.
One further term worth watching for is any acronym an agency has coined itself. A proprietary framework name is not evidence of proprietary capability, and it is frequently a way to make comparison between proposals harder. The response is the same as for the established terms: ignore the label and ask which surfaces get measured, how often, and what evidence you receive.
How to Judge Progress at Each Stage Use different measures at different points rather than asking for mentions from month one. At the end of month one, ask whether the baseline exists and whether access problems were found. At month three, ask whether listings are corrected and whether your own pages appear in citation lists at all.
The shortlist is shorter than a conventional local results page, which raises the stakes on being included. Being fourth on a map still gets calls. Being fourth in a recommendation that names three businesses gets none.
What a Local Business Should Do This Month Run five prompts asking for a business like yours in your town, from a signed out session, and record who gets named and what gets cited. Then fix every listing on the sources that appeared, starting with the phone number and address.
One final question is worth reserving for the end of the meeting. Ask what they think you should stop doing. An agency with a real diagnosis always has an answer, and an agency that only wants to add work to your existing spend usually does not. answer engine optimization
One thing that reliably compresses the timeline is starting the slow work first. Outreach and coverage take months regardless of what else is happening, so beginning them in week one rather than month four moves the whole programme forward by a quarter at no additional cost. Most plans do the opposite, sequencing the slow work last because it is the least certain.
Write these plainly and prominently. A page that says we serve the wider area and offer competitive pricing contains nothing a model can use. A page that says we cover a fifteen mile radius, charge a fixed call out fee, and can usually attend within four hours can be quoted directly into an answer.
Expect the shape of progress to be uneven rather than gradual. Nothing appears to move for weeks, then several things change at once as a batch of corrected sources is re-crawled. Teams reading a flat month as failure tend to intervene precisely when the earlier work is about to land, which is why the checkpoints matter more than the weekly readings.
Ask What Happens in Month One A proposal that opens with content production has skipped the diagnosis. There is no way to know what to write before you know which questions matter, which assistants answer them badly and which sources they draw on.
They will not quote statistics without sources, and they will not present a tool's sampled estimate as a count of what happened. If none of these boundaries come up unprompted, ask directly and listen for whether the answer sounds rehearsed or considered.
Get Represented Accurately Off Your Own Site This is the step most brands underestimate. Assistants frequently cite review platforms, industry directories, forum threads and journalism rather than the brand itself, because independent sources read as less self interested.
Fair Reasons for Flat Results Not every flat quarter is a failure, and being unfair about this loses good suppliers. A saturated category takes longer. A site that needed substantial technical work will have spent the first months on it. Earned coverage depends on other organisations publishing, which nobody can schedule.