There is a moment on almost every sales call that people miss because they are busy taking notes. It comes about twenty minutes in, after the slides, when someone finally asks you what you sell. Watch what happens next. Either the person on the other end leans towards the screen and asks a second question, or they slide on to the pricing page.

That small hinge tells you more than the case studies will. If you are weighing up an seo agency, it is worth watching for the moment they get curious about your business rather than your budget. What follows is a short list of the signs worth noticing, most of them easy to miss and hard to fake.

Watch what they ask first

A good first call is mostly them asking, and the questions to hope for are dull ones. Which of your services makes the most money? Which enquiries waste your afternoon? What does January look like next to June? None of that is technical. All of it decides what gets worked on.

Most guides tell you to study the case studies instead. Case studies are worth a glance, but they show you a client who happened to suit that team. The questions show you how the team thinks about a business it has never seen before, which is the only situation that actually applies to you.

Start with the pages you have

Picture a florist with forty-one pages on her website. The traffic chart looks healthy enough. Then someone sorts those pages by enquiries rather than visits, and three of them turn out to carry almost everything: weddings, funeral tributes, and the page that lists delivery areas. The other thirty-eight are a soft drift of blog posts about keeping tulips upright.

Nearly every small site looks like this once you sort it that way. So the first month of good work is often not new work at all. It is finding the few pages that already sit somewhere between position five and position twenty, and giving them the attention nobody has given them since the day they were published.

Ask what they would do with the pages you already own. If the answer skips straight to new content, slow down.

Volume is the easy answer

Twelve articles a month. Thirty links a quarter. Volume sells well because volume can be counted, and counting feels like control.

The reason people fall for it is not carelessness. It is that volume is the only part of the work a non-specialist can verify. You can see whether twelve articles arrived. You cannot easily see whether they were the right twelve. A team that offers to fix three pages and pause the blog is asking you to trust its judgement instead, which is a harder thing to sell and often the better thing to buy.

Ask what they would stop

Put it to them plainly. If you took this over on Monday, what would you stop doing? A vague answer means nobody has looked yet. A useful answer names something specific, gives a reason, and usually costs them a little revenue to say out loud. Answers worth hearing include:

• the blog schedule, at least until the money pages are sorted

• a service page for something you no longer want to sell

• link building aimed at any website that will take an article

• reporting on keywords nobody types with an intention to buy

• work on a page that another page on the same site already competes with

Then listen for whether they explain the trade-off or simply apologise for it. The explanation is the skill.

Read a real monthly report

Ask to see one with the client's name blacked out. You are not checking whether the numbers went up. You are checking whether the report names a decision.

Good reports read like someone thinking on paper. This page moved, we believe it was the new section near the top, so next month we are doing the same thing to two more pages. Reports that only show charts are describing the weather. Nobody inside them is responsible for anything.

A rule for month one

Here is a rule you can hold on to. Buy one clearly scoped month before you sign for twelve, and ask for that month in writing, in language you could repeat to a colleague without checking your notes. If they cannot describe the first month in plain words, the problem is rarely your understanding.

A year is a long time to fund someone else's guesswork. A month is long enough to see how a team behaves when the work turns out to be harder than the pitch.

None of this asks you to learn SEO. It asks for the same attention you already give to hiring anyone else: noticing what they ask, noticing what they are willing to stop, noticing whether they talk about your customers or their deliverables. The good ones are curious about small, specific things, and curiosity is very hard to fake for a whole hour. So sit still on that call, wait for the second question, and trust what you hear.