Coffee With Phil
Your Agency Should Be Able to Explain What They Did Last Tuesday
Most business owners can describe what their accountant does. Their attorney, too. But ask what their SEO agency actually did last month and you’ll get a blank stare, or worse, a PDF full of graphs that don’t connect to a single phone call or sale. That gap between payment and understanding is where bad agencies thrive. Time to close it.
What an SEO Agency Actually Does Each Month
SEO isn’t one thing. It’s a bundle of recurring work that breaks into distinct categories, and knowing those categories helps you spot the difference between an agency earning its retainer and one coasting on autopilot. A legitimate operation handles all of this on a monthly cycle:
- Technical SEO: Fixing crawl errors, improving page speed, repairing broken links, managing indexation issues, and keeping your site architecture clean for both Google’s bots and AI systems.
- On-page and semantic optimization: Updating title tags, headers, internal links, and page content so each page targets specific search intent — not just a keyword, but the question behind it.
- Content creation: Writing new landing pages, blog posts, or service pages built around topics your customers actually search for. Good agencies tell you exactly how many pieces they’ll produce each month.
- Link building: Earning backlinks from relevant, reputable sites. Not buying them from link farms. Ask how they acquire links — if the answer sounds vague, it probably is.
- Local SEO: Managing your Google Business Profile, building local citations, monitoring reviews, and making sure your NAP (name, address, phone) data matches everywhere.
- AI and answer-engine work (AEO/GEO): Structuring content so it surfaces in Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT responses, Perplexity answers, and Bing Copilot. We’ve written about why this matters at How ChatGPT Business Listings Are Changing What SEO Agencies.
- Reporting: Not vanity metrics. Reports that show calls, form fills, qualified leads, and — ideally — revenue connected to SEO work.
If an agency can’t tell you which of these they’re doing, and in what quantities, you’re not hiring a partner. You’re buying a mystery box.
The First 90 Days Tell You Everything
A serious agency lays out a clear 30/60/90-day roadmap before you pay a dime. First 30 days: a full audit of your site’s technical health, a competitive analysis, and baseline measurements — where you rank now, how much organic traffic you get, which pages convert, where your Google Business Profile stands. Days 31 through 60 should involve fixing the highest-priority technical issues and publishing the first round of new content. By day 90 you should see early indicators. Improved crawl stats, new keyword positions, and the beginning of a content calendar that makes strategic sense for your specific market.
Agencies that skip this onboarding phase, or hand you a generic “package” with no mention of your actual business, are showing you a red flag. Run toward the ones who want to learn your sales process, your customer objections, and your revenue goals before they touch a single meta tag.
Questions That Separate Real Agencies from Smooth Talkers
Moz published a well-known list of 34 questions to ask before hiring an SEO agency. You don’t need all 34. A handful will expose weak agencies fast. These are the ones our team would prioritize:
- How many pages will you create or improve each month? Get a number, not a range like “as needed.”
- How do you build backlinks, specifically? Any agency guaranteeing a certain number of links per month without explaining where they come from is almost certainly buying them.
- What tools do you use, and will I have access? This also ties into what to look for when hiring an SEO agency — you want to see their stack and confirm it doesn’t overlap with tools you’re already paying for.
- How do you track visibility in AI-generated search results? If they’ve never heard of AEO or GEO, they’re optimizing for 2019.
- What happens if I cancel? Do you keep your website, your content, your Google Business Profile? Agencies that hold assets hostage aren’t partners. They’re landlords.
Why does the tool question matter so much? Because marketing tool consolidation is one of the easiest ways a good agency saves you money. Many business owners pay for three or four overlapping platforms — a rank tracker here, an analytics dashboard there, a separate CRM, maybe a social scheduler — when one coherent stack could replace all of it. A sharp agency audits what you’re already using and cuts the redundancy. That alone can offset part of their monthly fee.
What “Best” Means in a Market Like Las Vegas
Calling yourself the Best SEO agency Las Vegas is easy. Proving it takes local results. Las Vegas businesses compete against tourism brands with national budgets, hospitality companies running massive ad campaigns, and service businesses all fighting for the same Map Pack spots. A credible local agency understands that mix — knows how to optimize a plumber’s Google Business Profile for Henderson while simultaneously helping a boutique hotel rank for high-intent travel queries.
Check whether the agency has its own local presence. Can you find their reviews? Do they show up in local search themselves? An agency that can’t rank its own business probably won’t rank yours. More of the vetting process is covered in another article worth reading before you sign anything.
One Thing to Do This Week
Pull up your current agency’s last report — or your own Google Search Console data if you’re handling things yourself. Ask one question: can you connect any metric in that report to a phone call, a form submission, or a sale? If not, you don’t actually know whether your SEO is working. That’s the gap a real agency closes. Not with prettier charts. With a direct line between their work and your revenue.
Wondering what your agency should actually be doing right now — or whether what they’re doing is working at all? Call (702) 825-7550. We’ll tell you honestly what we see, including if what we see is that your current setup is fine and you should stay put.