Introduction
Every web design agency, marketing consultant and social media freelancer in Christchurch now claims to “do SEO”. Some are excellent. Many will take your money for a year and deliver directory submissions. This guide gives you the exact questions to ask — and the answers that separate professionals from pretenders — before you sign anything.
The 11 Questions
1. “What specifically will you change on my website in the first 90 days?”
A real SEO has a concrete plan: technical fixes, page-level optimisation, content targets. An amateur talks about “strategies” and “synergies”. You want specifics: which pages, which keywords, what content, what technical issues.
2. “How will you get me indexed and ranking in my specific suburbs?”
Local Christchurch businesses live and die by suburb-level and map-pack visibility. Professionals talk about Google Business Profile optimisation, local citations, and suburb landing pages — this is our bread and butter for local SEO in Christchurch. Amateurs talk about “local strategies” without ever mentioning your Google Business Profile.
3. “Show me results for other NZ clients.”
Real case studies have names, industries, and numbers — and ideally live websites you can check. If every success story is anonymised (“one client, an e-commerce brand…”), keep walking.
4. “Who exactly does the work?”
“An experienced team” sometimes means a $4/hour offshore link farm. There is nothing inherently wrong with outsourcing components, but you deserve to know whose hands are on your website.
5. “What reporting will I receive, and can I see it before signing?”
Ask to see a redacted sample report. It should show keywords, rankings, traffic, and what was actually done that month. Reporting that hides behind “strategy calls” is hiding something.
6. “How do you build links?”
The correct answer involves NZ-relevant sources: industry directories, local media, sponsorships, genuinely linkable content. The wrong answers: “we have a private network” (penalty territory), or “links happen naturally” (they do not).
7. “What happens if we stop?”
Good SEO builds assets — optimised pages, content, citations, review profiles — that keep working after you pause. Bad SEO builds dependency, where rankings evaporate the month you stop paying. Ask what you own.
8. “Can you guarantee first-page rankings?”
If they say yes, end the meeting. Nobody guarantees what Google’s algorithm does. The honest answer is a process with measurable milestones. We are explicit about this in our FAQ — no reputable provider guarantees positions.
9. “How do you measure success?”
Rankings are a means, not the goal. The professional answer: organic traffic, enquiries, and revenue — tracked in Google Analytics and Search Console that YOU own. If their answer starts and ends at “rankings”, they are optimising for their report, not your business.
10. “What do you need from me?”
Real SEO needs input: knowledge about your customers, access to your systems, occasionally approval on content. “Nothing at all, we handle everything” sounds attractive and delivers generic output.
11. “What will this cost, honestly?”
Vague pricing that only appears after a “discovery process” is a sales tactic. Transparent ranges — like we publish in our SEO cost guide for Christchurch — let you compare providers on value instead of on who negotiates hardest.
Red Flags That Should End the Conversation
- Cold emails pointing out “critical issues” with your site that do not appear in any real audit
- Pitching you before looking at your actual Search Console data
- Websites that cannot rank for their own target keywords (“SEO agency Christchurch” — check their own results)
- Lock-in contracts longer than six months with no performance clause
- Any mention of Private Blog Networks, “guaranteed links”, or expired-domain tricks
The One Check That Matters Most
Ask them to explain — in plain English, without jargon — why one of their own clients ranks where it does. Professionals light up at this question and talk about search intent, content depth, and technical foundations. Pretenders pivot back to their packages.
How We Answer These Questions
We wrote this list because it is the exact vetting process we recommend to every Christchurch business — and the exact bar we hold ourselves to. You can see our SEO service scope, our published thinking on local search, and live work like our CookTwo app case study before you ever talk to us. If an SEO provider in Christchurch cannot pass their own test, you already have your answer.
Conclusion
Choosing an SEO agency is a hiring decision, not a shopping decision. Vet them like a senior employee: check their references (rankings), their work samples (content), and their honesty (guarantees). Eleven questions and one afternoon will save you twelve months of retainer fees.