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How do I know if my digital marketing agency is legit? It is a question people ask quietly, usually six months and several thousand pounds into a retainer. The reports arrive on time and they are full of activity, and none of it can be checked.
You do not need to understand search to get out of that position. Every check below is administrative or arithmetical, and none asks you to judge the quality of the work.
It helps to know who you would actually be dealing with before money moves, because the person who runs the pitch is often not the person who runs the account.
the lack of communication, especially within the first 90 days, is very concerning. I would dump them based on that alone.
A UK business owner, r/smallbusinessuk, October 2025
That is a harder standard than most retainers are held to, and it is the right one. Silence needs no expertise at all to read.
How to vet a marketing agency this afternoon
Five checks. None of them needs the agency's cooperation for more than about an hour, and four of them do not need it at all.
- Search your brand name and your main service in a private window, and write down what you actually see.
- Ask to be made an owner of your Google Search Console property, not merely a user on it.
- Ask who is listed as the registrant on your domain, and who holds admin on the ads account.
- Look the company up on the public register and check whether its accounts are filed.
- Ask what was shipped last month, and ask for the URLs.
The second check is the quickest. Search Console has two kinds of owner and both hold the same permissions, and an existing owner can grant you the delegated kind in about a minute.
A supplier who cannot do it today either does not hold the access they implied they held, or would rather you could not read the numbers yourself. Both are worth knowing.
The third check is the same test on a longer fuse. The domain and the ads account belong with the business paying for them, with the agency added as a user on both.
The fourth costs nothing and takes two minutes. Companies House shows the incorporation date, the directors and whether the accounts are overdue.
It will not tell you the work is any good. It will tell you whether the company is a company, and occasionally that is the finding.
The questions to ask a marketing agency before you sign
Ask them in writing, before anything is signed, and keep the answers. The same questions belong in the quote itself, where they are considerably harder to walk back six months later.
Who's doing the day-to-day work (not just who sells the pitch)?
A buyer weighing agencies, r/smallbusiness, December 2025
That question does more work than any technical audit. It is really asking whether the senior person in the room today will still be on the account in November.
Is my SEO agency doing anything? What a real report contains
Most monthly reports fail on the same thing. They count what the agency did rather than what changed.
Impressions are the softest number in the pack. In the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click on SparkToro's clickstream analysis.
So a rising impressions chart can sit directly above flat traffic without either number being wrong. Clicks and enquiries are the columns worth reading.
A report should tie back to something that exists now and did not exist last month. Pages published, with their URLs. Problems fixed, with the before and the after.
What an organic report should contain is not a mystery and it is not long. Shipped work written down reads very differently from work described.
How to audit your marketing agency in an hour
Take last month's report and put one follow-up question against every line in it. The questions are obvious, and that is rather the point of them.
| The line | The follow-up | A good answer looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Rankings improved | For which terms, and from where? | A dated before and after |
| Content optimised | Which pages, and what changed? | URLs, and what the words were |
| Technical fixes applied | What was broken? | The error, and the page now passing |
| Impressions up 40% | What happened to clicks? | Both numbers, same window |
| Ongoing link building | Which links went live? | Live URLs you can open |
Every question in the middle column is answerable in one line by somebody who did the work.
Marketing agency red flags: the answers that should worry you
Three answers should stop the conversation, and none of them is about technical competence.
The first is vagueness about deliverables. A supplier who describes a month in momentum, visibility and optimisation is describing a retainer rather than work.
The second is any reluctance to hand over accounts. There is no version of this work that requires the client to be locked out of their property.
The third is a result claimed with no baseline. A 40% improvement with no starting number is not a measurement.
The commoner signs of a bad SEO agency are quieter than any of that, though. An automated analytics email every month, and small tweaks nobody asked for. A report that would read identically for any client on the list.
Arithmetic helps here as well. The UK benchmark day rate for an SEO consultant is £374, against £418 for marketing and communications overall, on YunoJuno's 2026 rates report.
A thousand pounds a month is therefore under three days of senior time. That is not an accusation about anybody. It is the shape of what fits inside the fee.
For scale, the average UK marketing executive base salary is around £30,000 on Indeed, from roughly 6,000 reported salaries, or about £2,500 a month before employer costs. That buys more days than the retainer does and less senior ones, which is the real trade rather than a straight price comparison.
Which means whether the fee is plausible at all is a separate question from whether the work is being done, and the two get tangled constantly.
What is not a red flag
Three things get suppliers sacked that should not, and it is worth being fair about them.
Slow organic results. Search compounds, and compounding is slow at the start by definition. A supplier who promised speed was wrong at the pitch rather than wrong now.
A quiet month. Some months are audit, research and preparation, and from outside they look like nothing at all. The test is whether the quiet month was explained in advance or excused afterwards.
An honest no. A supplier who tells you a channel will not work has just talked themselves out of money, which is not the behaviour of somebody running a scheme.
None of this points anywhere in particular. Most suppliers asked these questions will answer them without difficulty, and the honest ones do not mind being asked at all.
If yours cannot, the next step is not to hire a replacement in a hurry. It is to have somebody neutral read your last report and say plainly what is in it, which may well be that the work is fine and the reporting is poor.
That neutral reader does not have to be us. If you would rather judge by what we would be accountable for first, that is set out on the site, and it is a fair way to decide.