How to hire an agency, and how to fire one cleanly

Starting here, because it is the advice least likely to come from an agency.

If you have under about $500 a month to spend on marketing, do not spend it on an agency. There is not enough there to fund real work, and you will get automated reports and template content while your budget disappears.

Spend the time instead:

• Complete your Google Business Profile properly. That is 32% of local ranking weight, and it is free.
• Fix your business details everywhere they are wrong.
• Ask your last twenty customers for a review.

Come back when there is budget to build on top of a foundation you already own. You will get far more for the money, and you will be able to tell whether the agency is adding anything.

"I need more customers" is not a brief. It cannot be evaluated, so any agency can claim to satisfy it.

"I need 15 new dental patients a month from local organic search within six months" can be evaluated. You can look at a proposal and ask whether the strategy plausibly produces that.

Write your version down before the first call. Two sentences:

• How many of what, from where, by when.
• What a new customer is worth to you.

The second one matters more than owners expect. If a customer is worth $200, a $1,499 retainer needs eight of them a month to break even. If a customer is worth $8,000, it needs one every four months. Those are completely different decisions, and you should know which one you are making.

Ask every agency these. The answers sort the field quickly.

1. What exactly will you do in month one? Named deliverables. How many pages, which pages, what gets fixed first. "We'll begin our optimization process" is not an answer.
2. Who owns the website, domain, Google profile and ad accounts? The answer must be you, in writing, with admin access.
3. How long is the contract and what happens if I leave? Ask what you keep and what stops working.
4. Can I see reporting from a current client, with the numbers? Redacted is fine. Refusal is informative.
5. Who actually does the work? The person in front of you, or somebody they subcontract to who you will never meet?

A good agency answers all five without hesitating, because they have answered them before and the answers are fine.

Results in your market, not somewhere else

Ask for case studies from local businesses in Orange County or Southern California — not a national brand in a different category. Local search has geographic nuances, and success with a business like yours in a market like yours is the only relevant evidence. Ours are public on the case studies page.

Reporting that connects to your phone ringing

Ask directly: "What does my quarterly report look like and which metrics does it track?"

Good answer: rankings, organic traffic, leads generated, cost per lead, and where possible revenue influenced. Mediocre answer: impressions, engagement and follower counts — activity that looks like progress without telling you whether you got a return.

Terms that do not trap you

They should show scope, reporting and ownership before asking for commitment. If a rigid six or twelve-month minimum comes before you have seen any of that, treat it seriously as a warning.

Local knowledge

An agency based here knows the competitive landscape for dental in Huntington Beach differs from Irvine, which local directories matter for trades in this market, and that a beach city has different seasonal patterns than an inland one. It affects strategy, not just conversation.

A diagnosis before a prescription

A good agency asks about your current marketing, your competitors, your customers and your goals before proposing anything. If a package appears in the first conversation without those questions, you are being sold a product rather than given a service.

1. Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google's algorithm. This means either dishonesty or tactics that get sites penalised. Walk away.
2. They own your assets. Some agencies retain your website, your ad account or your content. You should own 100% of everything — domain, code, content, accounts, with admin access.
3. Vague answers about method. Ask how they build links or structure a campaign. "Trust the process" is not a methodology.
4. Suspiciously low pricing. Full-service SEO for $99 a month is automated, ineffective, or using you as a test case.
5. A twelve-month lock-in demanded before any deliverable.
6. Reports of impressions only. Impressions climbing while your phone stays quiet is the classic pattern.
7. No verifiable local clients or references.
8. "Proprietary algorithm." There is no secret. There is work, done well or badly.

SEO needs one extra layer of scrutiny, because the work is easy to hide behind vague reporting.

Before signing, ask for a plain-English audit checklist showing what they actually reviewed:

• Technical crawl issues and indexation
• Google Business Profile visibility
• On-page titles and service page coverage
• Local citations and consistency
• Content gaps against competitors
• Backlink profile
• Conversion tracking — is it even installed?

If they cannot explain what they checked and what they will fix first, in order, you are buying mystery work.

A good SEO partner can show the work, prioritise fixes by business impact, and explain why a local dental practice needs a different plan than a national e-commerce store. That last point catches a lot of agencies out.

After the initial conversations:

1. Take the free audit. Any credible agency offers one. It tells you whether they understand your situation before you commit anything.
2. Ask for two or three local references you can phone. Not testimonials on a page — actual clients. Ask them about communication, whether promises were kept, and how problems were handled.
3. Review their own marketing. Do they rank for their own keywords? Is their site fast and current? An agency that neglects its own marketing is telling you something.
4. Watch how they sell. Do they listen more than they talk? Do they ask good questions? The sales process previews the working relationship.

Boring and specific. One page. It says:

• What we did this month. Named items.
• What moved. Rankings for your target terms, up or down, honestly.
• How many calls and forms came in. The number that matters.
• What we are doing next month, and why.

You should be able to verify the important parts yourself, in your Google profile insights and your own call log. If you cannot check any of it independently, that is a problem regardless of how impressive the document looks.

Order matters here, and getting it wrong is how people lose their domain.

1. Get your access back first. Domain registrar, website hosting and files, Google Business Profile, Google Analytics, Search Console, ad accounts. Log in to every single one and confirm you are an owner, not a delegated user.
2. Export what you need. Analytics history, content, any reports you want to keep.
3. Then give notice.

In that order, every time. Giving notice first gives a disgruntled provider a window in which they still control assets you depend on. Most agencies behave perfectly well. The order costs you nothing and protects against the ones that do not.

One specific trap: if your website was built on the agency's account and cannot be transferred, you may have to rebuild. Find that out at hiring, not at leaving — which is exactly why question two on the list above exists.

Everything in this chapter applies to Orrku Media.

Ask us the five questions. Ask for local references. Ask what happens to your website if you leave — the answer is you keep it, because you own it. Ask to see a real report before you sign anything.

We publish our prices, we work month to month with no setup fee, and there is no minimum term. That is not generosity; it is the only honest position for an agency that expects its results to keep the client.

If you finish this chapter, interview three agencies, and pick somebody else because they were a better fit — that is the chapter working correctly.