Do I own the website, or am I renting it from you?
This is the single most important question and the one most contractors skip. A lot of marketing companies build your site on a platform they control, license the template to you month to month, and hold the keys. Stop paying, and the site goes dark, sometimes within days. You spent two years building domain authority and a review history on a property you never actually owned.
Ask directly: is this hand-coded or built on a proprietary platform I can't take with me? Who holds the domain registrar login? Who holds hosting? If they hesitate on any of those three, that's your answer. A shop with nothing to hide will hand you the keys the day the site goes live, not make you beg for them if you ever leave.
This matters more for contractors than almost any other industry, because your site is doing double duty: it's your 24-hour bid sheet and it's the thing Google and AI answer engines cite when someone asks "who's a good roofer near me." If that asset lives on rented land, you're building someone else's equity, not yours.
- Ask for the domain registrar account to be in your name from day one, not transferred later
- Ask whether the site is a custom build or a templated platform product
- Ask what export or migration options exist if you switch agencies
- Get the answer in writing, not a verbal assurance on a sales call
A contractor who's been burned by this before will tell you it's not a hypothetical. It's the most common reason we hear from contractors calling us after a bad experience elsewhere: they didn't own anything, and starting over cost them a year of rankings.
How do you prove a lead came from this campaign, not somewhere else?
Any agency can tell you "we generated 40 leads last month." Far fewer can show you which channel each lead came from, what page they landed on, and whether it turned into a booked job. Attribution is the difference between a marketing report and a sales pitch dressed up as one.
Ask what tracking is actually in place: call tracking numbers tied to specific campaigns, form submissions tagged by source, and a dashboard you can log into yourself rather than a PDF that shows up once a month. If the answer is "we'll send you a summary," push harder. You want raw numbers, not a narrative.
Also ask how they separate a real lead from noise. Not every phone call or form fill is a homeowner ready to book a job. Spam calls, wrong numbers, and out-of-area inquiries shouldn't count toward your lead total, but plenty of reports quietly include them to make the number look better.
| What to ask for | Weak answer | Answer that means something |
|---|---|---|
| Lead source | "We generated leads this month" | Named channel per lead: organic search, map pack, paid, referral |
| Access | Monthly PDF summary only | Login to a live dashboard, anytime |
| Quality filter | Every call or form counts as a lead | Spam and out-of-area contacts flagged and excluded |
| Outcome | No mention of what happened after the lead | Some visibility into booked jobs, even if self-reported by you |
You don't need to become a marketing analyst. You just need enough visibility to know whether the money you're spending is turning into jobs on the schedule, or into a report that reads well and means nothing.
What's actually included in the monthly fee, and what gets billed separately?
Contractor marketing invoices have a way of growing quietly. The proposal says one number. Six months in, you're paying that number plus a content fee, plus a "technical maintenance" line, plus an ad spend management fee on top of the ad spend itself. None of it was hidden exactly, it just wasn't spelled out up front.
Ask for a line-item breakdown before you sign anything: what's covered in the base fee, what triggers an extra charge, and how often those extras tend to come up. If the agency can't answer that cleanly in the sales conversation, expect the invoice to be a source of friction later.
Specifically ask about these common add-on traps:
- Content or blog writing, billed separately from the core SEO fee
- Website edits or updates after the initial build (some shops charge per change request)
- Ad platform management fees on top of the ad spend itself
- Review management or reputation monitoring as a bolt-on
- Contract cancellation or early termination fees
A shop with a clean, all-in fee structure will say so plainly and won't need three follow-up emails to clarify what a number covers. That's not a guarantee of quality, but a fee structure you can't get a straight answer on in month one is a preview of the relationship.
What happens to my rankings and my site if I cancel?
Ask this one before you're unhappy, not after. Some agencies build SEO gains on tactics that unravel the moment you stop paying: rented domains, links tied to their network, or citations registered under their agency email instead of yours. Cancel, and your rankings don't just plateau, they can fall off a cliff within weeks.
Ask specifically: is my Google Business Profile registered under my email or yours? Are backlinks and citations built to point at a domain I control? If I leave, does the work stay in place, degrade slowly, or disappear?
A contractor marketing company built on white-hat, durable fundamentals (content on a site you own, citations under your business's own accounts, links earned rather than rented) should hold most of its value even after you walk away, because the underlying asset is yours. That's a fair test of whether an agency is building you something real or just renting you visibility for as long as you keep paying.
This question tends to make weaker agencies uncomfortable, because the honest answer reveals how much of the campaign was actually built to last versus built to keep you locked in. Ask it anyway. It's the fastest way to separate a shop that owns its craft from one that owns your account.
Can I see real work for a contractor in my trade, not just a logo wall?
A logo wall proves an agency has had clients. It doesn't prove the work was any good. Push past the logo wall and ask to see an actual live site or campaign for a contractor in your trade, or one close to it. Roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and landscaping all have different buyer behavior, different seasonal patterns, and different objections a website needs to answer. An agency that's only worked with restaurants and dentists is starting from zero on your trade, even if they're good marketers in general.
Ask pointed questions about what you're shown: how long did this client work with you? What did the site or rankings look like before you started? What's the honest state of it today? A shop that's proud of its work will walk you through specifics without flinching. One that's padding a portfolio will get vague fast.
Be equally alert to the opposite problem: an agency that claims results it can't back up. Real case work comes with real numbers and real timelines, not a percentage improvement pulled from nowhere. If a claim sounds too clean, ask what it's based on and how it was measured.
You're also allowed to ask what didn't work. Every agency that's been doing this a while has a campaign or two that underperformed. One that admits it and explains what they learned is more trustworthy than one that claims a perfect record.
How do you handle AI search visibility, not just Google rankings?
Homeowners are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, and similar tools "who's a good roofer near me" and getting a short, specific answer instead of ten blue links. If your marketing company is still selling you a strategy built entirely around 2015-era SEO tactics, ask directly how they're adapting for this shift, because it's not a future trend anymore, it's already changing which contractors get called.
Ask what they actually do differently for AI search visibility versus traditional SEO. A real answer touches on structured content that directly answers common questions, schema markup that gives AI systems clean facts to cite (service area, what's included, pricing ranges, timelines), and a site built around clear factual blocks rather than vague marketing copy that's hard for an answer engine to summarize.
Ask if they can show you whether your business currently gets cited or mentioned in AI search answers for your trade and area, and what specifically they'd change to improve that. If the answer is a blank stare or a pivot back to "well, our SEO is really strong," that's a gap worth noting. Traditional SEO and AI search visibility overlap, but they're not identical, and an agency that hasn't updated its approach in the last two years is optimizing for a search landscape that's already shifting under your feet.
What's the contract length, and what does it take to get out of it?
Contract terms tell you how confident an agency is in its own work. A shop that locks you into 12 or 24 months with steep early termination fees is often betting you won't see results fast enough to walk away comfortably, so they make walking away expensive instead. A shop confident in its process tends to offer shorter terms or a clear off-ramp, because they expect the results to be the reason you stay, not the contract.
Ask these specifically before signing:
- What's the minimum contract length, and is there a month-to-month option after an initial term
- What's the notice period to cancel
- Is there an early termination fee, and how is it calculated
- What happens to work in progress (content, ad campaigns, an unfinished site build) if you cancel mid-cycle
SEO specifically takes time to mature, real timelines run 4-9 months for competitive terms, so a short trial period isn't always realistic and an agency that promises fast rankings in a saturated market should raise an eyebrow, not lower your guard. But a 24-month lock-in with punitive exit fees is a different problem: it's a business model built on retention through friction rather than retention through results. Ask which one you're signing.