Most first calls with a marketing agency are run by the agency. They ask about your business, you answer for forty minutes, they present a package, and you hang up knowing less about them than they now know about you. That is backwards. You are about to hand someone your website, your ad accounts and a recurring invoice, and the first call is the cheapest moment you will ever have to find out whether that is a good idea.
Below are 10 questions I would ask if I were the buyer. For each one, I have written the answer that should reassure you and the answer that should make you slow down. Ask all ten. Anyone worth hiring will enjoy the conversation.
1. Who is actually doing the work?
Not who is on the call. Who opens the file on a Tuesday afternoon?
What you want to hear: a name, a role, and an honest answer about what is done in-house versus subcontracted. Subcontracting is not a scandal. Hiding it is.
What should worry you: "our team", repeated. If nobody names the person, there is usually a reason, and it is usually that the person changes every month.
2. What happens in month one, specifically?
A good answer is boring and sequential: audit, access, fixes, baseline, first deliverable. A bad answer is a list of adjectives.
Ask what you will actually be able to see at the end of week four. If the honest answer is "setup, and not much visible yet," that is fine, and I would rather hear it than a promise of early wins. What you are testing is whether they have done this before often enough to describe how a month of work actually runs here without inventing it on the call.
3. What does this cost, and what is not included?
The second half of that question is the useful half. Almost every retainer has a boundary, and the boundary is where the surprise invoices live: ad spend, stock photography, paid tools, a website rebuild, extra blog posts, and a landing page.
What you want to hear: a number, and a short list of things that sit outside it.
What should worry you: a price that only appears after a second call, or a proposal where ad spend and management fee are quoted as one figure, so you cannot see what you are paying the agency versus what you are paying Google. If you want the longer version of this, I have written about what agency retainers usually include separately.
4. Who owns the accounts?
This is the question that costs people the most money and gets asked the least.
Your Google Ads account, your Google Analytics property, your Meta assets, your domain, your website host. These should exist under your business, with the agency given access to them. Not the other way around.
Google's own documentation makes the distinction plainly. In Google Ads, Admin access lets a user grant account access, change access levels, and cancel invitations for other users (sourced from Google Ads Help). And when an agency manager account links to an account you already have, Google notes that the manager does not get ownership of it by default, and that ownership does not take data ownership or administrative rights away from the client account, which can remove that access by unlinking (sourced from Google Ads Help). The account an agency creates for you from scratch is where the trouble starts, because that one begins life under their manager account.
The same logic applies to your Google Business Profile, which has its own ownership rules and its own recovery path. I have written about who actually owns a Google Business Profile, if that's already a live issue for you.
What you want to hear: "You own everything, we get access, and we will show you where to check."
What should worry you: "It is easier if we set it up on our side." It is easier. For them.
5. How do you report, and how often?
Ask for specifics and see if they can provide details around what kind of metrics are being reported. You are looking for whether they report outcomes or activity. Twelve social posts published is activity. Forty-one calls from the Google listing is an outcome.
What should worry you: a vague description instead of an answer. A line filled with adjectives does not constitute reporting outcomes. Nobody is interpreting “we will help you get visibility” for you.
6. What results are you promising?
The correct answer is that nobody can promise a ranking or a lead volume, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does.
There is a legal edge to this in Canada that is worth knowing. The Competition Bureau states that you cannot make a claim about a product's performance, its effectiveness or its length of life unless you can prove the claim is based on an adequate and proper test, and that the test must have been done before the claim is made (sourced from the Competition Bureau). An agency promising you page one by March is making a performance claim. Ask what test it rests on and watch what happens.
This is general marketing guidance and not legal advice. If a specific claim matters to your business, speak to counsel.
7. How long am I locked in?
Ask for the contract length, the notice period, and what happens if you pause. Long contracts are not automatically predatory. Marketing work does compound, and three weeks is not a fair test of anything. But a twelve-month lock with a ninety-day notice period is a different product from a monthly agreement, and it should be priced like one.
What should worry you: a long term justified purely by "SEO takes time," with no corresponding commitment on their side about what gets delivered inside it.
8. What happens to the work if we part ways?
Who keeps the blog posts, the landing pages, the ad creative, the email templates, the tracking setup? On whose hosting does the site live? Is the contract clear that the deliverables are yours?
The failure mode here is not theft. It is a site built on an agency's own platform that cannot be exported, which converts a normal parting of ways into a rebuild.
9. How will you handle my customer list?
If email, text messages, a customer relationship management system or any outbound work is in scope, this is not optional diligence.
Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation applies to every commercial electronic message sent to a Canadian address, and it applies to messages an agency sends on your behalf. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission sets out three requirements: consent, which is either express or implied; identification information for the sender and anyone the message is sent on behalf of; and a working unsubscribe mechanism. That unsubscribe link has to stay valid for at least 60 days after the message goes out, and a request has to be processed without delay and no later than 10 business days after it is received (sourced from the CRTC).
So ask three things. Where will my list be stored, and under whose account? How will consent be recorded and evidenced? Who is responsible if a complaint lands? A partner who cannot answer those has not done this in Canada before.
Again, general guidance rather than legal advice. Anything consequential is a conversation for a lawyer.
10. What would make you turn down this job?
This is the one I would keep for last, and it is the one that tells you the most.
Anyone who has done this work for a few years has a list: businesses with no budget to sustain the work, owners who want daily availability, anyone asking for guaranteed rankings, and a product the market has already rejected. If the answer is a genuine list, you are talking to someone with judgement. If the answer is "nothing, we can help anyone," you are talking to someone selling capacity.
Use the answers, not the pitch
You will not get ten perfect answers from anyone, including me. What you are listening for is whether the person on the other end is describing work they have actually done or a package they have memorized. Those two sound completely different once you know to listen for it.
Which of the ten do you think your current shortlist would struggle with most?