Key Takeaways
- Three questions cover it. Did the phone ring, where did the calls come from, what changed this month. A working agency answers all three from a lead log in under ten minutes.
- Rankings, impressions and traffic charts are not answers. They describe activity. A lead log describes money.
- Most agencies fail the second question, not the first. Attribution is the gap, and fixing it costs $0 to $50 per month.
- You do not have to fire anyone. Ask, give a written 30 day window, then judge the vendor on what shows up in the log.
- If nobody can say where your calls came from after twelve months of retainer, that silence is the finding.
You pay an agency $1,500 a month. Twelve months in, you still cannot say whether that money produced a single paying customer.
That is a reporting problem, not an intelligence problem, and it is easily the most common one we hear from local business owners. Across 35 sales conversations this year, price came up as an objection exactly once. The loudest complaint by far was that owners could not tell whether the money they already spent was doing anything at all.
You do not need a marketing degree to close that gap. You need three questions and ten minutes with your current vendor.
The three questions below are simple on purpose. They are also very hard to fake.
Why You Cannot Tell Right Now
Most agency reporting is built to look busy. Forty pages of rankings, impressions, crawl errors, backlink counts, a chart with a line heading up and to the right. None of that answers the one question your bank account cares about.
There is a second reason the fog persists, and it is more forgiving. Your agency probably does not know either. Plenty of them do real work. They write pages, fix schema, correct citations, chase reviews. Then a customer calls your front desk, your receptionist writes a name on a sticky note, and the link between the work and the call evaporates. No lead log exists because nobody built one.
So when you ask these questions and get a weak answer, you have learned one of two things. Either the work is not happening, or the measurement is not. Those need different fixes, and only one of them involves firing anybody.
Question One: Did the Phone Ring?
Ask it exactly like that. Did the phone ring more this month than last month, and by how many calls?
You want a number. Forty one calls in August, thirty three in July. Not "traffic is up 22 percent". Traffic is not a customer. A ranking is not a customer. A person dialling your number is a customer, or at minimum a real shot at one.
Good answers sound like inventory. Weak answers sound like weather. "You took 41 calls last month, up from 33, and here is the log with dates and durations" is inventory. "Your visibility improved significantly and we are seeing strong momentum" is weather. The second one may well be true. It cannot be checked, which makes it useless for deciding anything. Nobody spends momentum.
If your vendor does not handle your phones, they should still pull call volume from a tracking number, from Google Business Profile call metrics, or from your CRM. Any of those three works. Having none of them after a year of retainer is itself the answer. Ask for the raw log rather than the summary. Summaries are where the awkward rows go missing.
Question Two: Where Did the Calls Come From?
This is the one most vendors fail.
Forty one calls is a number. Forty one calls where you can see which came from Maps, which came from an AI answer, which came from a referral and which came from the sign on your van, that is a lead log. Only the second version tells you where the next dollar should go.
Ask for a per call source breakdown. Perfection is not required. Ninety percent attributed with ten percent sitting in an unknown bucket beats a tidy report that credits every call to "organic search" by default.
The honest version of this answer includes losses. A vendor who tells you eight calls came from a Facebook group they had nothing to do with is telling you the truth. A vendor whose report credits their own channel with 100 percent of your calls is rounding in their own favour. Watch how they handle unknowns. "We cannot attribute 6 of the 41, and here is why" is a real answer.
If they cannot answer today, that is fixable. Our note on what an agency should put in writing before you pay covers how to make attribution a written deliverable rather than a favour you keep asking for.
Question Three: What Changed This Month?
What shipped in the last 30 days, and what moved because of it?
You want two lists. What went out the door: three pages published, twelve citations corrected, a schema fix on the services page, nine review requests sent. And what moved: this page went from position 14 to position 6, this query started returning your name in an AI answer, these two calls landed on the new page.
Shipped work with no movement is fine for a month or two. New work takes time to land. Shipped nothing with claimed movement is the dangerous combination, because somebody else's work is being billed to your invoice.
The pattern worth watching is repetition. When the same three deliverables show up every month for six months with fresh dates, you are paying a maintenance fee dressed as growth. Our breakdown of what should be visible by day 30 separates a legitimate ramp from a stall.
Answers That Hold Up
| Question | Holds up | Does not |
|---|---|---|
| Did the phone ring? | 41 calls, up from 33, log attached | Visibility is trending up |
| Where from? | 22 Maps, 9 AI answers, 6 referral, 4 unknown | Organic search |
| What changed? | 3 pages live, 12 citations fixed, page 14 to 6 | We continued optimising |
What to Do With the Answers
Nothing here says fire your agency. Most owners who run these three questions find a measurement gap, not a fraud. How to read what you get back:
Keep them and add measurement if they handled questions one and three well and stumbled on two. This is the common case. Work is happening, and nobody wired up attribution. Ask for a call tracking number, a front desk intake question and a shared lead log by the end of next month. Give it 30 days. If the log fills, you have turned a decent vendor into a measurable one for the price of a coffee.
Keep them and renegotiate if they nailed question two and fumbled question three. They can see the leads. They cannot point at the work that produced them. That is a scope conversation, not an exit. Ask what the retainer buys in hours or deliverables, and get it written down.
Add a second vendor if all three answers hold up on the channels they own, and the hole sits in a channel nobody covers. Plenty of solid traditional agencies have no view into AI answers whatsoever. Two vendors can split the work without stepping on each other.
Start looking if they cannot answer any of the three, and 30 days after you asked, still cannot. At that point you are judging their response to a reasonable request, not their SEO skill. If you do go looking, set the next one up so you can fire it with evidence, and check their case studies yourself before signing.
Ask This Week
Run the three questions on a call, not over email, and take notes. If the answers come back clean, you have a good vendor and now you have proof of it. If they do not, you have a 30 day plan and one specific thing to ask for.
Want a second pair of eyes on what you get back? Book a 15 minute call and bring your last report. We will tell you what it says and what it leaves out, whether or not you ever hire us.
Rather see the gap before you ask anyone? Book an audit slot and we will run your top customer questions through the AI tools your buyers already use, then send you the screenshots.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the three questions I should ask my SEO agency?
Did the phone ring, where did the calls come from, and what changed this month. Ask them in that order on a live call. The first wants a count of inbound calls or form fills this month against last month. The second wants a per call source breakdown, so you can see which came from Maps, from AI answers, from referrals or from paid. The third wants a list of what shipped in the last 30 days and what moved because of it. A vendor with a working lead log answers all three inside ten minutes. A vendor without one answers with rankings, impressions and traffic charts, which describe activity rather than revenue.
What if my agency cannot answer where the calls came from?
That is the most common failure and the least alarming one. Plenty of agencies do genuine work with zero attribution wired up, because nobody set up call tracking or a front desk intake question. Treat it as a fixable gap, not proof of fraud. Ask for three things by the end of next month: a call tracking number on your listings, a one line intake question at reception, and a shared lead log you can open yourself. Give it a 30 day window. If the log appears and starts filling with real rows, you have upgraded a decent vendor into a measurable one. If nothing appears, the silence is your answer.
How much does it cost to set up call tracking and a lead log?
Call tracking numbers run roughly $2 to $5 per number per month, and the platform fee brings most small businesses to about $30 to $50 per month all in. A single location typically needs one to three numbers: one for the website, one for the Google Business Profile, one for paid ads if any run. A shared lead log costs nothing beyond a spreadsheet. Front desk intake, meaning one scripted question when the phone rings, also costs nothing. So the full attribution setup lands somewhere between $0 and $50 per month. An agency quoting hundreds of dollars monthly for basic call attribution is reselling software you can buy directly.
Is a 40 page monthly report a good sign?
Usually the opposite. Report length runs inversely to clarity. Forty pages of rankings, crawl errors and backlink counts read as volume standing in for results. The vendors with the strongest outcomes send the shortest updates, because three numbers cover the month: how many leads came in, how many turned into jobs, and what shipped. Ask for those three numbers as a standalone email. If the reply is that they live on page 31 of the deck, ask for page 31 on its own. A vendor who cannot summarise their own month in five lines either lacks the data or would rather you did not go looking for it.
My agency says SEO takes 6 to 12 months. Is that a fair answer?
Partly fair, and often misused. Ranking movement on competitive terms genuinely takes months. Measurement does not. By day 30 you should see published work, a lead log with rows in it, and a baseline you can compare against later. The timeline defence turns into a problem when it covers missing measurement rather than missing rankings. Ask what will be visible at 30 days, at 60 and at 90, and get the answer in writing before the next invoice. A vendor who commits to specific 30 day artifacts is confident. A vendor who says it all becomes clear at month six is asking you to spend roughly $9,000 to $18,000 on faith.
How do I tell whether the leads are real jobs or price shoppers?
The lead log answers that, which is why the log matters more than the traffic chart. A working log records the source, the date and the outcome of every call. After 60 days you can sort by source and see which channels produced booked jobs against tyre kickers. Local trades usually find AI answers and Maps carry higher intent than broad paid traffic, because the caller has already described their problem in detail before dialling. Ask your agency to add an outcome column with three values: quoted, booked, dead. Two months of that column teaches you more about lead quality than any agency will tell you in a pitch.
Should I fire my agency if they fail all three questions?
Not on the spot. Ask the three questions, then give a written 30 day window for the missing pieces. What you learn during those 30 days beats the original answers, because you are now watching how a vendor responds to a reasonable request from a paying client. If the lead log appears and fills, keep them. If you get another rankings deck and a paragraph about momentum, start looking. Switching costs real time and restarts your measurement clock, so the bar for leaving should be a documented failure to respond rather than one awkward call. Line up the replacement before you cancel, and put attribution in the new scope in writing.
What should I pay for an agency that reports this way?
Retainers for local service businesses that include real attribution generally run $800 to $3,000 per month, and most single location businesses land between $1,000 and $2,000. Below roughly $500 per month you are typically buying automated reporting and very little human work. Above $3,000 you should expect content production, technical work and a named person who joins calls. Attribution itself should never carry a separate line item. Call tracking, a lead log and a monthly source to outcome summary cost the agency almost nothing to provide and belong inside the base fee. A vendor charging an extra $300 to $500 monthly for reporting is billing you to find out whether their own work produced anything.
About the author
Matthew Johnson is the founder of Pleiades Consultancy. He previously scaled his own marketing agency to multiple six figures before serving as CMO of an Amazon agency, where the client base tripled from 15 to 45 active clients during his tenure. He worked with some of the largest names in e-commerce, including Ridge Wallet, HexClad, BK Beauty, The Woobles, Walkize, Lonely Planet, and Obvi. He now works with local businesses to maximize their client acquisition and visibility through AI search with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot.