Before you sign with a marketing company, make them answer these questions.
Every marketing pitch sounds the same on a call: more leads, better rankings, a dashboard you can check anytime. The differences that actually matter — who owns what, what happens if you cancel, whether the reporting means anything — only show up once you ask pointed questions or read the contract closely. This is that checklist, written so it's useful even if you end up hiring someone else.
What questions should you ask before hiring a marketing company?
Ask who legally owns your website, domain, Google Business Profile, and call-tracking data after the contract ends; what exact deliverable you get each month; what the cancellation terms are; and whether any ranking or lead-volume promise is guaranteed in writing. A vendor that hesitates on any of these four is telling you something.
Most trade-business owners vet a marketing company the way they'd vet a coffee shop — on the pitch, the price, and whether the salesperson seemed sharp. That's backwards. The pitch is the one moment the vendor is guaranteed to perform well. What matters is what happens in month four, when the initial enthusiasm has worn off and you're trying to figure out whether anything is actually working.
So the questions worth asking aren't about tactics — every vendor will say they do SEO, ads, and reviews. The questions worth asking are about control and exit: what do you own outright, what happens to it if you stop paying, and what does the vendor have to show you, in writing, to prove the work is happening. A vendor confident in their work answers these in one sentence. A vendor selling you the sizzle changes the subject.
Write the answers down during the sales call. Compare them to what's actually in the contract before you sign — verbal promises about ownership and reporting that don't appear in the document you're signing are not promises, they're sales talk.
Who should own your website, domain, and Google profile — you or the vendor?
You should, without exception, and this is the single most common way trade-business owners get trapped. A vendor that builds your site on their own hosting, registers your domain under their own account, or manages your Google Business Profile with their email as the primary owner has effectively put a leash on your business — one they can pull whenever a payment is late or a relationship sours.
This isn't a hypothetical. It's a common enough pattern that it has a name in the industry: vendor lock-in. The mechanics are boring, which is exactly why it works — nobody reads the domain registrar login screen on day one, so nobody notices whose email address is attached to it until they try to leave.
The fix is just as boring: before any work starts, confirm the domain registration is in your name at a registrar you control, hosting is billed to your account, and you (or a person you designate) are listed as the primary owner on your Google Business Profile. None of this costs the vendor anything real to grant. If a vendor resists granting it, that resistance is the answer to whether you should sign.
| Asset | Who should hold it | Red flag |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name registration | Your business, at a registrar you control | Domain registered under the vendor's account or email |
| Website hosting account | Your business, billed to you directly | Site lives on the vendor's shared hosting with no export path |
| Google Business Profile | You as primary owner, vendor as manager | Vendor is primary owner; you're a manager or not listed at all |
| Phone number | Your business, ported from any prior carrier | Vendor issues you a tracking number you don't control |
| Call recordings & lead data | Exported to you on request, any time | Data lives only in the vendor's dashboard, no export offered |
What is the 'retainer with no deliverable' trap?
It's a monthly fee billed for ongoing 'marketing activity' with no specific, checkable output attached — no named pages built, no specific campaigns launched, no call volume reported against a baseline. Without a defined deliverable, there's no way to tell whether the retainer bought anything or simply renewed itself.
A retainer isn't inherently bad — plenty of legitimate ongoing work (content, ad management, review follow-up) is billed monthly because the work itself is ongoing. The trap is a retainer with nothing concrete attached to it: no named deliverable, no report you could hand to someone else and have them understand what was done, no baseline it's measured against.
The test is simple. Ask what you'd receive this month if you paid the retainer and ask nothing else of the vendor. If the honest answer is vague — 'ongoing optimization,' 'continued management' — that's the trap. If the answer is specific — three blog posts targeting named keywords, this ad spend against this cost-per-lead target, this many review requests sent — that's a retainer doing its job.
Get the deliverable in writing, even loosely. 'Approximately' is fine. 'We'll keep working on it' is not a deliverable, it's a mood.
What red flags mean you should walk away immediately?
Guaranteed rankings are the clearest one. No vendor controls Google's ranking algorithm, and any company promising a specific map-pack position or page-one placement by a specific date is either badly misinformed about how ranking works or knowingly overselling. The more aggressive version of this red flag pairs the guarantee with tactics that put your Google Business Profile at risk — keyword-stuffed business names or fabricated addresses are policy violations that can get a profile suspended, not ranking hacks that get it promoted.
A second flag: multi-year contracts with an early-termination penalty that exceeds a couple months of fees. Marketing work should be able to justify itself inside a reasonable window. A contract that locks you in for the length of a mortgage, with a penalty designed to make leaving more expensive than staying, is a business built around retention through friction rather than results.
A third: reporting you can't independently verify. If a monthly report shows 'ranking improvements' or 'traffic growth' with no source you can check yourself — no Google Business Profile insights, no Search Console access, no call log — the numbers exist only inside the relationship you're trying to evaluate. Ask for read access to the underlying account, not just a PDF summary of it.
- Guaranteed rankings or a specific date to hit page one — nobody controls that outcome.
- Contract length that outlasts a reasonable results window, paired with a steep early-exit penalty.
- Reporting you can't check against a source you hold yourself (Search Console, GBP insights, call logs).
- Any push toward a business name, address, or review pattern that violates Google's own guidelines.
- Vagueness about who owns the domain, hosting, or Google Business Profile after the contract ends.
How can you tell if a vendor's reporting is real or theater?
Real reporting ties back to something you can check independently. A vendor claiming ranking improvement should be able to show it inside Google Search Console or the Google Business Profile performance dashboard — both of which you can be given direct access to, at no cost, regardless of who manages them day to day. If a vendor won't grant you read access to these, ask why; there's rarely a good technical reason.
Theater reporting tends to lean on vanity metrics presented without context — 'impressions up 40%' with no baseline, no time frame stated plainly, and no connection to calls or booked jobs. Ask every report to answer one question in plain language: did this month produce more calls or fewer, compared to a stated prior period, from a source you can verify. If a report can't answer that, its purpose is to look busy, not to inform a decision.
The simplest ongoing test: ask the vendor to walk you through last month's report live, on a call, answering follow-up questions in real time. A vendor doing real work can do this without notice. A vendor producing a templated report every month for every client usually can't.
Questions we get asked on this
- No. Your domain should be registered in your business's name at a registrar you control, with your own login. A vendor can manage DNS settings on your behalf, but ownership of the registration itself should never sit with them — if it does, they can hold your website hostage the moment the relationship ends, intentionally or not.
- Not automatically — some legitimate work (a full website rebuild, a multi-month SEO campaign) reasonably spans several months. The red flag isn't length by itself, it's length combined with a punishing early-termination fee. Ask what it costs to leave after month three. If the honest answer makes leaving nearly as expensive as staying for the full term, that's the design, not an accident.
- It means either they don't understand how ranking works or they're comfortable overselling it — no outside company controls Google's ranking decisions. Legitimate vendors describe what they'll do (categories, reviews, content, technical fixes) and how they'll report progress, without promising a specific outcome. A guarantee tied to a refund if it's not hit is marginally better, but the guarantee itself is still not something anyone can honestly make.
- Sign into the Google account you believe is attached to the profile, go to Business Profile settings, and check People and Access. If you're listed as Owner, you're in control. If you're a Manager or not listed at all, someone else — often the vendor — holds primary ownership and can remove your access at will.
- A written scope of exactly what's delivered, on what timeline, with named milestones you can check off. Confirmation, in the contract, that the domain, hosting, and Google Business Profile will be registered in your business's name. And the cancellation terms in plain language — what it costs to leave, and what you keep if you do.
- You can, as long as you control the assets underneath — the domain registration, hosting account, and Google Business Profile ownership. If those are in your name, a new vendor can pick up where the last one left off. If they were held by the outgoing vendor, switching often means starting over, which is the whole reason ownership matters more than almost anything else in the contract.
Want a second opinion on a contract before you sign it?
Send us the scope and terms. We'll tell you plainly what's standard, what's a red flag, and what you should ask to have changed — whether or not you end up working with us.
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