Ten Questions to Ask Before You Hire Any Marketing Agency

Questions to ask before hiring a marketing agency are the ones whose answers can be checked against a published rule rather than taken on trust. The useful ones are not about strategy. They are about who owns the accounts, who touches your Business Profile, who asks your customers for reviews, and what the contract says when the work stops working.

Ten questions follow, each with the answer that should end the meeting. Three matter more than the rest, because there the wrong answer breaches a rule published by Google or the Federal Trade Commission, and the profile, the site and the reviews belong to the business. Policy facts were read as of September 2026.

Whose name is on the accounts, and what happens to them the day I leave?

Ask for the answer as a list of logins rather than a reassurance. The domain registrar, the website host, the Google Ads account, the Business Profile, the analytics property and the call-tracking numbers each have an owner, and it should be your business on every line, with the agency holding removable manager access.

The answer that should worry you is any version of "we handle all that for you". An agency that registers the domain or creates the ad account under its own billing can leave, lawfully, with the asset. So ask the follow-up: is the handover written into the agreement, or is it goodwill?

Will you change my Business Profile name?

The only correct answer is no. Google's guidelines for representing your business say the name should reflect the real-world name used on your storefront, website and stationery, and must not include marketing taglines, service or product information, or location information. Adding a city or a service to rank is a policy breach.

Google's wording is plain: "Including unnecessary information in your business name isn't permitted, and could result in the suspension of your Business Profile." The suspension lands on the business, not on the agency that suggested it, and the profile is usually the largest single source of calls a local service business has.

How will you cover the towns around us?

A good answer describes one page per real service plus a Business Profile service area. A bad answer describes a page per town. Google's spam policies name that pattern as doorway abuse: "Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page."

The same page names blocks of city names as keyword stuffing, and says sites violating the policies may rank lower or not appear at all. Ask who pays to rebuild the site if those pages are classed that way.

Who asks my customers for reviews, and how?

The answer you want is that every customer is asked the same way at the same point in the job, with nothing offered in return. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews makes the alternatives unlawful, and the liability sits with the business whose reviews they are, not the agency.

The rule bars a business from providing "compensation or other incentives in exchange for, or conditioned expressly or by implication on, the writing or creation of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, whether positive or negative". It also bars procuring reviews from employees or their relatives without disclosure. Asking every customer is expressly allowed: the rule carves out generalized solicitations to purchasers.

So the follow-up is about the filter, not the ask. A process that routes unhappy customers to a private form and only happy ones to Google is a sentiment gate, which is the practice the rule was written for.

What is the guarantee based on?

Any guarantee of a position needs a mechanism, and there is not one. Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features says flatly: "No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems." A guaranteed ranking, or a proprietary visibility score sold as a reading of an engine, is an estimate presented as a fact.

The same guide says optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO, and it lists llms.txt files and special markup among the things Google Search ignores. Ask what a separate AI line item actually buys.

Who does the work, what does the report lead with, and what is owed if I leave?

Four questions with short answers, all of which should come without hesitation. Who does the work and can I meet them. How many accounts does that person carry. What is the first number on page one of the monthly report, and in what unit. What is the term, and what is owed if I leave in month three.

The reporting answer is the one people accept too easily. A report that leads with rankings or impressions reports the agency's activity; one that leads with calls, forms and booked work reports your business. Agree the first number before signing, because it is what the engagement will be steered toward.

On terms, listen for what survives the exit: the accounts, the pages written, the phone numbers and the data. A twelve-month term is not automatically wrong; a twelve-month term whose work product does not travel is.

The ten questions, and the answers that should worry you

Take this into the meeting and write the answers down. The value is the comparison later: three firms answering the same ten questions produce a document you can read side by side, which a proposal never is. The right-hand column names what to ask for in writing.

What the answers look like when the work is a built system

Most of the ten questions are hard to answer well because the work is a person's time rather than a system with records. Mirastart builds the booking, missed-call text-back, follow-up, review and reporting systems, and they run in your accounts, so ownership is a setting rather than a negotiation and the report reads from the records the systems write.

The booking system behind this site's own discovery-call page calculates real availability and confirms automatically; the online booking and repair-status software Quick Auto NC runs its bays on is ours, as is the Carolina Sky Painting website. The review request goes to every customer at the same milestone with nothing offered in return, which is the arrangement the FTC rule leaves standing.