What To Ask Before Hiring An AI SEO Company
The test is simple. If somebody on your sales team reads a question and does not recognise it, delete it. The value of this entire approach rests on the questions being real, and a set half filled with invented ones is barely better than a keyword list. get recommended by ai
Pricing in this field is unusually opaque, partly because the work is new and partly because the absence of an independent scoreboard makes it hard for a buyer to tell whether they are getting value. That combination invites vague scoping.
The condition is that the output has to be yours to keep and act on elsewhere, including the prompt set. An audit that only makes sense inside that agency's retainer is a sales document with a price attached.
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.
Entity Coherence Before a model can recommend you it has to be confident that the scattered mentions of your name refer to one company. That confidence comes from consistency across the details that identify you.
Second, the questions have to keep coming from customers rather than from the content calendar. Within a few months the temptation appears to invent questions to fill a schedule, and invented questions produce exactly the marketing-in-disguise sections that get ignored.
Weeks: Your Own Pages A rewritten page that answers a question directly can be retrieved and cited within weeks, sometimes faster. Freshness carries real weight here because retrieval is live, so a page updated this month competes on current terms rather than waiting to accumulate authority.
Three to Nine Months: Earned Coverage The slowest and most valuable part. Getting into the comparison articles, trade publications and community discussions that assistants actually cite depends on other organisations deciding to write about you, which no amount of budget reliably accelerates.
One to Three Months: Listings and Corrections Claiming a directory profile, correcting an address, fixing a miscategorisation and responding to reviews all take effect once the platform publishes the change and the page is re-crawled.
The truthful answer is that different parts of the work move at very different speeds, and knowing which is which lets you judge an engagement at the right moment instead of the convenient one. get recommended by ai
Absence is not disqualifying on its own, since their category is crowded and they may serve a niche. But they should have an interesting answer, and the answer should not be defensive. A practitioner who has run this test on themselves will have thought about it and will tell you what they found.
That is a month of intermittent effort, it costs almost nothing, and in most local categories it is enough to change what an assistant says. Local is one of the few places where the whole discipline is genuinely accessible without an agency. get recommended by ai
The practical response to that uncertainty is to work on the things that are robust to it. Accessible pages, coherent identity, quotable writing and honest third party coverage have helped under every configuration observed so far, and they are the parts you would want anyway. get recommended by ai
A retainer describing ongoing optimisation and strategic guidance with no countable deliverable is a subscription to a relationship. It may still be worth having, and you should know that is what you bought.
Reviews Are the Local Corroboration Layer For a local business, reviews are close to the whole evidence base. There is rarely trade press, rarely analyst coverage, and often no comparison articles at all, so review platforms carry the weight alone.
If the budget is substantial, add the earned coverage work, which is the slowest and most expensive component and the one you genuinely cannot do quickly on your own. Buying that first, before the cheap fixes are done, is the most common way money gets wasted in this field. get recommended by ai
Revisit the answers when the business changes rather than on a content schedule. Price changes, new capabilities and discontinued services all silently invalidate published answers, and an outdated answer stated confidently is worse than no answer at all, because it can be quoted back at you by an assistant that has no way of knowing it is stale.
Ask sales to note the question asked on every call for a month, in the prospect's words rather than paraphrased. Export support tickets and sort by frequency. Pull the query report from Search Console. And read the first message from inbound enquiries before anyone has reshaped it.
Be wary of proposals where the largest line is content production. It is the easiest work to scale, the easiest to bill and the least likely to be the constraint, particularly before a baseline exists. A proposal weighted toward diagnosis, technical fixes and third party corrections is usually cheaper and almost always sequenced better.
