Key Takeaways

• Move Beyond Keywords: Modern SEO isn’t just about keywords; it’s about building topical authority that AI models can interpret and recommend.
• Prioritize GEO: Ask potential agencies how they approach Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and if they focus on ‘answer pathways.’
• Focus on Business Value: SEO is an investment. Look for agencies that prioritize ROI, leads, and sales over vanity metrics like traffic volume.
• Verify Experience: Ensure your agency understands E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and provides concrete case studies, not just empty promises.

If you are looking to hire an SEO company, do you know what to look for and what questions you should ask? In the past, hiring an SEO agency meant focusing on keyword density and link volume. Today, it’s far more complicated than that. 

The modern search landscape—powered by AI overviews and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)—prioritizes entities, topical authority, and clear ‘answer pathways.’ When you hire an SEO agency, you aren’t just paying for rankings; you are hiring a partner to help your business be interpreted, understood, and recommended by AI models like Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.

So now the question is; how do you determine which SEO company to hire for your needs? 

This article explains some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) basics along with which services are important, what you should be looking for, and which questions to ask before working with an SEO agency.

What Should You Expect from an SEO Agency?

SEO agencies today act as strategic partners who manage the intersection of technical performance, topical authority, and AI-readiness. Here are a few foundations to keep in mind as you begin your search. 

How Does SEO Works With Your Website?

Professional SEO companies utilize techniques to make a website more search engine friendly and user friendly. The easier it is for a search engine to read your website the easier it is to improve your visibility. We’ll get into the AI component later in this article.

There are two main aspects to SEO:

1) Onsite Optimization – Website Optimization
2) Offsite Optimization – Website Reputation with the search engines and other websites

What Is Onsite Optimization?

Onsite optimization is the systematic process of enhancing your website’s structure and content to make it readable and relevant to search engines and AI models. This foundational work includes technical audits, keyword-optimized content, and internal linking structures.

On-site optimization should include:

• Site design and development analysis
• Server setup and configuration analysis
• Tuning your pages, domain name, file names
• Keyword research
• Writing keyword-rich, AI-optimized content
• Navigation and menus
• CSS optimization
• Site structure optimization
• Search engine friendly site maps
• Internal link optimization
• Testing and improving content or source code quality
• Minimizing flash content
• Many other individual factors that when combined, make a difference

What Is Offsite Optimization?

Offsite optimization concentrates on increasing the number of inbound links and the description of the current links leading to your site.

Off-site optimization includes:

• Finding other websites that would benefit from linking to your website. (Note: you need something that would benefit their visitors; why else would someone link to your website?)
• Indexing reviews to ensure the important pages on your website are properly indexed in the search engines
• In-bound link text evaluation

Link Acquisition can help with attaining top rankings in the ‘organic / natural’ results returned by the search engines. The search engines see inbound links from quality websites as a vote or referral that there is something worth seeing on your website.

How to Set Clear Goals for your Business

As a business owner, your SEO goal is probably about getting you more business in the form of leads, sales, appointments, etc. However, when you talk to your average SEO firm, they want to talk about getting traffic to your website, improving your rankings in the search engines, and making your company more “visible.”

On the surface, it might seem like more traffic equals more sales. But unfortunately, that doesn’t happen all the time. We have seen companies getting thousands of visitors to their website, but the business is starving for sales. 

Side Note: If you need immediate visibility while waiting for organic growth, you may want to look into Google Ads services.

There are two aspects of getting sales from your website:

1. Getting the right people to see your message.
2. Having the right message on your website so you get the sale (or lead or appointment).

Either write the marketing message yourself or get a copywriter to write it for you. Very few SEO agencies will have people competent in creating effective marketing messages, but, 1^st On The List, has marketing copywriters if you need them!

Why Traffic Isn’t The Only Metrics That Matters

There are three types of traffic that every business is familiar with:

1. Lookers
2. Researchers
3. Buyers

However, on the Internet, there are two additional categories:

1. Useless, random traffic
2. And ‘Bot’ traffic generated by spam-bots

If the SEO services agency can get buyers to your website, where they are greeted with the right messaging, then you might get a sale!

Unfortunately, most online traffic is not buyer traffic. So while an SEO Agency might get your website more traffic, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting the ROI you’re hoping for. It’s for this reason that ‘traffic’ is often considered something of a vanity metric. Make sure the agency you hire also prioritize ROI, leads, and sales 

SEO Services to Look For When You Hire an SEO Company

Below is a checklist of some of the main services that should be offered by any SEO company you plan to work with.

Website and Server Analysis

There are many reasons as to why your webpages may not be indexed by the search engines. Before optimization for your site really begins, you need to have a technical SEO audit done to be sure that there is nothing stopping the search engines from properly indexing your webpages. Technical SEO is no longer just about ‘no errors.’ It is the foundation for AI-indexing. A robust technical strategy ensures your structured data and schema markup are properly implemented, allowing AI models to accurately ‘read’ your website’s entities and geographic relevance. If your agency isn’t talking about Schema or Entity mapping, your site will remain invisible to AI summaries.

Keyword Research

What are the keywords and phrases a customer would use to find the goods or services you offer? And more importantly, which word searches will result in a sale or ‘conversion’. The most generic keywords are rarely the most effective at generating the results your business is looking for.

AI Optimization & Content Writing

Don’t settle for agencies that simply ‘rewrite content.’ You need an agency that builds Answer Pathways. Modern content must be structured in question-answer formats that make it easy for AI to synthesize and cite your business as a trusted source. Ask your potential agency if they structure content to capture ‘Zero-Click’ search intent while still driving qualified traffic.

Site Maps

The internal link structure needs to be clean and efficient. Internal link optimization is an effective method of grouping similar pages in order to clearly define your websites categories. A site map will allow easy access for a search engine ‘spider’ to view all the pages on your website for indexing.

Inbound Links

A link building campaign should be performed depending on how many links you currently have and the type of website. Google in particular puts a great deal of value on the amount of quality inbound links pointing to your website. Stop thinking of links as just ‘juice’ or ‘points.’ Today, high-quality links act as the backbone of your topical authority and create ‘topical clusters’ navigated by AI. Your agency should focus on acquiring links that connect your brand to other established entities in your niche, signaling to search engines and AI models that your business is a verified, trusted source of information.

Reports

Today, ranking reports are not as important as visitor and conversion analytics. Over time, optimization should improve both the number of visitors to your website and the conversions that occur. A good analytics program will monitor and report this through visitor traffic and conversions ( sales).

Ongoing Updates

Search engines are constantly refining the algorithms used to determine rankings. So, competitive businesses in your field are likewise constantly optimizing and adding content to their own sites. Therefore, SEO shouldn’t be considered a one time investment or short-term process. Even if you get the results you’re looking for, you need to be consistently improving in order to retain them.

Traditional SEO and Modern GEO Summary

Feature	Traditional SEO	Modern GEO (AI-Ready)
Focus	Keyword Rankings	Topical Authority
Goal	Drive Clicks	Capture Answer Snippets
Measurement	Traffic Volume	Quality Leads/Conversions
Strategy	Link Building	Entity Mapping

5 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company

Here are a few questions to ask SEO agencies during the interview process. 

1. How many years of experience do you have?

The general philosophies and techniques of SEO can always be book-learned. However, real industry experience is priceless. A reputable SEO firm should be able to provide you with examples and case studies of search visibility, lead generation and ROI results in a variety of industries. Additional questions to ask include:

• Who will be working on my SEO Campaign and what experience do they have?
• What experience does your firm have in my industry?
• Do you have experience in solving ‘XYZ problem’ for another client? ( XYZ being your major problem)
• Based on your experience, what will be some of the biggest hurdles in my SEO Campaign’s success?
• Can you provide a case study on how you improved a client’s visibility in AI-generated snippets?

2. How does your agency maintain E-E-A-T and Google guideline compliance?

You will want to hire an SEO company that continues to stay up-to-date on recommended best practices and uses only white-hat techniques. Additional questions to ask:

• What are some ways you ensure adherence to Google’s quality guidelines?
• What are your most important SEO techniques?
• How will you protect the integrity and quality of my website?
• What recent conferences, courses, and training have you completed to ensure you are up to date?
• How do you optimize for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?

3. How do you measure SEO and GEO success?

Reputable SEO companies will work with you to outline attainable goals, targets, and timelines. They should send you regular reports and updates that measure things such as keyword visibility, website traffic, visitor demographics, time on site, bounce rate, and lead conversions. It is important that you know the goals of the SEO firm and that they align with your goals. Additional questions to ask:

• What are some of your most common KPI’s for SEO Campaigns like mine?
• How often can I expect to hear from my SEO Manager?
• How often will I receive an SEO report?
• Can we adjust KPI’s as my campaign evolves?
• What kind of results can I expect to see and in what timeframe?

4. Which keywords can you guarantee?

This one is a trick question. You want to hire an SEO company that can look you in the eye and explain that keyword positions simply cannot be guaranteed. Generally speaking, the more popular a keyword, the more competitive the keyword, which means the more work and time it will take to rank. We’ve worked tirelessly for multiple years to rank a website for very popular keywords while other keyword terms may rank within a week or a few months. There’s no way anyone can guarantee anything when it comes to top rankings. Additional questions to ask:

• How do you perform keyword research?
• How will we decide the “right” keywords for my SEO Campaign?
• If we don’t track keyword rankings how can I understand my website’s keyword visibility?
• How do you build topical authority beyond just keywords?

5. What happens if we part ways?

This is one of the most important questions to ask an SEO company. Some may require contracts, while others do not. Regardless of whether you are locked-in for a predetermined time, you need to understand what happens if you do choose to part ways. There are a variety of reasons a business may cancel or pause their SEO services. Best practices dictate that the business retains their content, access to their website (if with the same company) and all logins/passwords for accounts. Additional questions to ask:

• Will anything change on my website?
• What can I expect to happen to my visibility/rankings when we part ways?
• What is your average client turnover rate?

Let the SEO Agency ask you questions too!

One of the biggest missteps that we see is SEO Companies not asking their prospects enough questions about their website, industry, competitors, and goals. On the flip side, we also encounter plenty of inquiries from companies interested in our services but unwilling to share the important details that we will need to properly strategize, plan, and price an effective SEO Campaign. 

Any SEO Company you are considering hiring should be genuinely interested in learning about you and your business. The more they understand about your business, customers, key value drivers, how you make money, additional marketing and advertising channels, competitors, and other important information, the stronger your SEO Campaign will be.

Looking for a quick way to vet an agency? Follow this hierarchy:

1. Technical Foundation: Do they audit for AI-readiness?
2. Content Strategy: Do they write for humans and AI answer pathways?
3. Authority Building: Do they treat link acquisition as entity-mapping?
4. Conversion focus: Do they optimize for sales, not just clicks?

How to Hire An SEO Agency FAQs

How does SEO differ from GEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) focuses on ranking in traditional search results, while GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) optimizes content to be featured in AI-powered search summaries.

Why shouldn’t I just optimize for keywords anymore?

While keywords matter, AI models prioritize entities, context, and topical authority to answer user questions directly.

What is the biggest red flag when hiring an SEO firm?

Guaranteed rankings. Reputable firms focus on strategy and growth, not ‘get-rich-quick’ ranking promises.

Should I do SEO in-house?

While some tasks can be done in-house, professional agencies bring specialized tools, technical audits, and the experience needed to navigate an evolving AI search landscape.

Contact 1st on the List

If you still have questions about how to hire an SEO company or to learn more about 1st on the List, please get in touch via our contact page.

You can call us toll-free at 1-877-563-0459 or send us an email.