Hiring Guide
Full disclosure: I am an SEM consultant in Katy, so I have an obvious interest here. But I have also inherited enough wrecked accounts from bad providers to know exactly what separates real practitioners from resellers. Ask these seven questions before you sign anything, including with me.
The single most important question. Many agencies sell you a senior strategist in the pitch, then hand your account to whoever is newest. If the person selling is not the person doing, ask to meet the person doing.
Non-negotiable. Some providers run your ads inside their own account, which means if you leave, your entire campaign history, data, and learnings leave with them. The account should live under your business email with the consultant added as a manager. If they refuse, walk.
A real practitioner can pull up the exact searches that triggered your ads and show you the waste they cut. If reporting is a monthly PDF of impressions and clicks with no search term data, you are paying for a dashboard, not management.
Local knowledge shows up in the details: separating Katy and Cinco Ranch from broad Houston targeting, adjusting bids by zip code, knowing that a Fulshear customer behaves differently from an inner loop one. If their plan for Katy is identical to their plan for any city in America, that tells you something.
Good consultants have an honest answer: here is what we test, here is when we change course, and here is the point where we would tell you to stop spending. Be suspicious of anyone who guarantees rankings or promises results in week one. Paid search is fast, but it is not magic.
Reasonable norms: month-to-month or short minimums for ads management, and clear ownership of everything created for you (ads, landing pages, tracking). Twelve-month locked contracts with cancellation fees mostly protect providers who expect you to want out.
Not a testimonial on a website, an actual conversation. Any consultant doing good work has clients happy to take a five minute call. The ones who cannot produce a single reference are telling you their retention story.
Every question above tests the same thing: transparency. Search marketing is unusually easy to fake because the client rarely sees inside the account. The fix is to hire someone whose default is showing you everything. That is the standard I hold myself to after 10+ years and $50 million in managed spend, and it is the standard you should hold anyone to, including me. If you want to run these questions against me personally, I am easy to reach.