What should you ask an agency before you hire it?
Start with Google's own list. Its page “Do you need an SEO?” suggests asking for examples of previous work, whether the firm follows Google Search Essentials, what results to expect and in what timeframe, how success will be measured, how long the firm has been in business, and whether it will share every change it makes along with the reasoning. Those questions apply to any marketing partner, not only an SEO.
We'd add four, because they decide more than the sales call does:
- What will you build my site on, and why that? The platform sets the ceiling on speed, security and what an AI engine can read. An agency should be able to explain its choice in engineering terms, not taste.
- Whose name goes on the domain, the ad accounts and the analytics? The answer should be yours, every time.
- How will you measure whether ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Mode name us? A vague answer here usually means nobody has looked.
- What won't you sell me? A partner with no answer to this sells whatever is in the catalog.
The warning signs Google itself names
Google is blunt about it: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” The same page warns against firms that contact you out of the blue and firms that are secretive about what they do, and it says “You should never have to link to an SEO.” It also advises giving an outside SEO read access to Search Console, not ownership.
One more matters because it can undo years of work. Google's spam policies treat buying links as link spam, and a manual action can mean some or all of a site stops showing in results. If an agency's plan includes “link packages” at a set number per month, ask where the links come from. If the answer is a network you've never heard of, that's the answer.
What should be in your name before the first invoice?
This is the part founders skip and regret, because it's invisible until the day you want to leave.
| Asset | Whose name | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| The domain | Yours, as registrant | ICANN's transfer policy puts a 60-day lock on moving a domain to another registrar after the registrant changes. Fixing it later costs time you may not have. |
| Google Ads | Yours, with the agency linked as a manager | Google's policy requires a third party to give you your account's customer ID when you ask, and to report cost, clicks and impressions at the account level. |
| Search Console and Bing | You as owner | Google's help page: an owner “has full control over properties,” a full user views data and takes some actions. The agency needs the second, not the first. |
| GA4 and the tags | Your property | Years of history live there. A property in the agency's account leaves with the agency. |
| The site's code and content | Yours | If the site can only exist inside one vendor's builder or license, you don't own a website. You rent one. |
Every account we set up is opened in the client's name, and we're added as a user. The code, the content and the domain belong to the business.
How do you check the work once it starts?
Agree on the measurements before the work begins, and agree that each one carries a date. Ours are three. Our website scan scores the site against the same checks before we touch it and after we ship it. Search Console shows which searches the site appears for and how often it gets the click. And the AI answer check puts the same fixed “who should I hire” questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode, from your own location, more than once each because answers vary, and records whether you were named and who was named instead.
That last one keeps us honest. When we first measured Paich & Co. Tax Services on September 24, 2026, four days after her new site went live, she was named in 0 of 40 answers, and three of the five engines described a similarly named firm in another town when asked about her by name. We reported it as it was, with the plan to fix the mix-up and the date of the next reading. A partner who only shows you good numbers is showing you a selection.
How we answer those questions
Experience. Michael Blair, who founded Zorva Labs and does the work, has been in technology since 1997. He spent 1999 to 2013 in Ascension Health's IT department, where he started its first help desk, became IT Security Officer for three hospitals, and created the first community medical record number shared across multiple hospitals. He has run his own web and marketing business full time since 2013.
The platform. We build static sites served from Cloudflare's edge, and we no longer build on WordPress. The reasons, with our before-and-after scans, are on their own page.
Measured work. Paich Tax's old GoDaddy builder site scored 69 on our scan and our rebuild scored 92 on the same day, September 24, 2026. Southern Belle Construction went from 69 to 99, Harmony Tax from 73 to 97, and Three Stone Roofing from 56 to 98. The case studies carry the rest.
What we won't do. Guarantee a ranking, buy links, put your accounts in our name, or build you a WordPress site.