Most SEO proposals are written to be unfalsifiable. They promise "improved visibility" and "authority building" on a timeline vague enough that nobody can ever be wrong. The good news: a handful of direct questions cut through it fast. Here are the ones we'd ask if we were on your side of the table.
Will you fix it, or just recommend it?
Most agencies audit your site, hand you a list, and wait for your developers to act on it. Months pass and nothing ships. Ask plainly: when you find a slow page, a broken canonical, or a missing schema, do you implement the fix in the codebase, or do you write a ticket and move on? The answer tells you whether you're hiring people who change your site or people who describe it.
What actually happens in month one?
A real engagement starts with a technical audit and the fixes that unblock everything else: crawlability, render speed, internal linking, duplicate templates. If the first month is "keyword research and a content calendar" with no engineering, you're paying for activity, not results. Ask for the concrete list of what they'd change first, and why those before anything else.
How will you show it worked?
Rankings and traffic are easy to show and easy to game. The metric that matters is whether search sent you more of the right people, and whether those people did something. Ask how they tie their work to conversions and pipeline, not just position changes. A partner who only reports keyword counts is reporting on themselves, not on your business.
Who actually does the work?
Pitches are run by senior people; the work often isn't. Ask who is on your account week to week, how long they've done this, and whether the same people stay on the engagement. Continuity is most of the value in SEO, because the compounding only happens when someone remembers why last quarter's decisions were made.
If it isn't you
Sometimes the honest answer is that SEO isn't your highest-leverage spend right now, and a good partner will tell you that instead of selling a retainer. Ask what they'd do if they were spending your money. The reply is the most useful signal in the whole conversation.