Search engine optimisation is one of the few marketing investments where the gap between a genuine specialist and a confident salesperson can take months to become obvious — and by then you have paid the invoice many times over. For Irish businesses, from a solicitor’s office in Dublin to a hotel in Kerry or a dental clinic in Swords, the stakes are entirely practical: rankings, enquiries, phone calls and revenue. No shortlist of questions will guarantee results, but the right ones will quickly separate a company with a repeatable method from one with a good pitch deck. The questions below are the ones worth asking in the meeting, before anything is signed, and the answers you get should be specific, written down and easy to check later.
Who Will Actually Do the Work — and Do They Understand Your Market?
The person sitting across the table from you is very often not the person who will touch your website. Ask directly: who will be doing the day-to-day work on my account, and will I have a named contact? If the answer involves a “team” without names, or suggests work is outsourced to a subcontractor in another time zone, you are entitled to ask how quality is controlled and who is accountable when something breaks. For a small Irish business, it matters enormously whether your SEO consultant knows your sector or is applying a generic template to forty unrelated accounts.
Sector knowledge shows up in the small details. A solicitor’s practice needs content written with legal accuracy and an understanding of what clients actually search for before they pick up the phone — “family law solicitor Dublin” is a very different query to “how do I get a separation agreement”. A tradesperson needs urgency, service-area pages and a phone number that is easy to tap. A clinic needs sensitivity and trust signals. A retail or hospitality business needs product or menu relevance and seasonal planning. Ask them to explain how they would approach your specific business and listen for whether the answer sounds researched or rehearsed.
Local relevance deserves its own question. Ask: how will you help me appear in my own area rather than somewhere across the country? A competent answer will mention Google Business Profile fundamentals — correct categories, service areas, opening hours, photographs, and a consistent process for generating and responding to reviews — as well as location-specific pages and local citations. A business in Portmarnock, Clontarf or Blanchardstown competes within a catchment, not nationally, and its SEO plan should reflect that. Being number one for a keyword nobody in your county searches is not a win.
Finally, ask who writes the content and how they learn your business. If the answer is “we use an AI tool and publish”, press further on editing, accuracy and tone. Poorly edited content about your services is worse than no content at all, because it is publicly visible and it damages trust with the very people you want to convert.
What Is Included, What Is Extra — and What Does the Contract Actually Commit You To?
Vague deliverables are the single most common source of disappointment in SEO. Before signing, ask for an itemised written scope and insist that it is attached to the agreement. A credible process typically starts with a full digital audit of the website, covering technical errors, indexation problems, page speed, broken links, oversized images, outdated plugins and thin or duplicated content. From there it should include keyword research, content improvements, new pages where the site lacks them, and an ongoing plan for the month ahead. If any of that is missing from the proposal, ask why.
Be specific about the mechanics. Ask: what exactly will be fixed in the first month, and what will you send me to prove it? Technical SEO is unglamorous but measurable — faster pages, clean code, correct redirects, properly structured headings and schema. Ask whether they will build new pages, who supplies the images, and whether the fee covers copywriting or only optimisation of existing text. For local businesses, clarify whether Google Business Profile management, review support and local citations are part of the package or a separate line item. If Google Ads or social media are on the table, confirm that ad spend is separate from management fees and ask who owns the ad account.
Then turn to the commercial terms. Ask about the minimum term, the notice period, and how you exit if the relationship is not working. A monthly arrangement with no tie-in contract tells you the company expects to earn your business each month rather than trap it. Ask whether the number of keywords is capped, whether there are limits on pages or hours, and what happens if you want to pause. Ask for the fee in writing, including VAT, and check that nothing in the proposal quietly renews for twelve months. A specialist SEO Company Dublin should be able to explain all of this in plain language without deflecting.
Ownership is the question most businesses forget. Ask: if we part ways, what do I keep? You should own your domain, your hosting, your content management system, your analytics, your Google Ads account and your Google Business Profile. Ask whether the work will be done on your own accounts or on theirs, and get it confirmed in writing. Leaving a provider only to discover they control your analytics history or your business listing is an avoidable and expensive mess.
How Will Success Be Measured, and What Happens When Results Are Slow?
Rankings are a useful indicator but they are not the outcome. Ask what they will actually report on: keyword positions, organic traffic, and — most importantly — enquiries, calls and form submissions. A proper setup includes conversion tracking through Google Analytics GA4 or an equivalent, so you can see which pages generate contact rather than simply which pages get visits. Ask them to establish a baseline in the first month: where you rank now, what traffic you receive, and what the site converts at. Without a baseline, nobody can honestly claim progress later.
Ask about timelines and be suspicious of certainty. Search engines take time to recrawl, reindex and reassess a site, and meaningful ranking changes typically begin to appear in the first two to three months, with competitive sectors taking longer. Anyone who promises a number one position by a specific date is either misrepresenting how search works or planning to chase worthless keywords. A better question is: what are the review points, and what happens if we reach month four with no movement? The answer should involve diagnosis, adjustment and honest conversation, not deflection.
Link building deserves a direct interrogation. Ask: how do you acquire links, and can you show me examples of sites you have obtained links from? Safe link building means relevant, editorially given links from real websites. If the answer involves buying links in bulk, private blog networks or “1,000 backlinks for a fixed fee”, walk away — those tactics can trigger penalties that take far longer to recover from than they took to acquire. Ask also what they do if a Google algorithm update hits your rankings, and whether they will review your backlink profile for toxic links as part of the audit.
Finally, ask about reporting and accountability. What will the monthly report contain, who will explain it to you, and how quickly will they answer a question? Ask what happens if performance dips — will they tell you proactively or wait until you notice? Ask for a monthly update call rather than a PDF dropped into your inbox, because SEO decisions depend on context: a new competitor, a site migration, a seasonal drop. A company that welcomes scrutiny in month one is a company that expects to still be answering your questions in month twelve.
Porto Alegre jazz trumpeter turned Shenzhen hardware reviewer. Lucas reviews FPGA dev boards, Cantonese street noodles, and modal jazz chord progressions. He busks outside electronics megamalls and samples every new bubble-tea topping.