What should I request from a marketing agency before hiring them?

“Not published” means the figure does not appear on that company’s own website as of October 2026 — check for yourself before you sign anything, with them or with us.

The Six Requests

Conversations are easy to have and easy to improvise. Documents are neither, which is why asking for artifacts rather than assurances is the most efficient diligence available before signing.

All six of these should be producible within a day or two by an agency that works the way it describes. The speed of the response is itself informative.

References are worth their own treatment and are covered separately on our page about whether to require references — they are weaker evidence than most firms assume, and these six documents are stronger.

1. A Sample Baseline Report

The highest-signal request on the list, because it separates agencies that measure from agencies that assert.

An agency that documents a starting position will have one of these immediately — it is a standard artifact of how they work. An agency that does not measure will explain why a baseline is unnecessary, offer a proposal document instead, or simply not produce it.

What a real one contains: current rankings for named terms with positions, current call volume, current profile position for main searches, current organic traffic, and the date it was taken. Redacted for client identity is fine; the structure is what you are assessing.

2. A Sample Monthly Report

This tells you what you will be looking at every month for a year, and reports vary enormously in whether they are informative or decorative.

What distinguishes a good one is not length — it is usually shorter. Look for: rankings for specific named terms with the change since last month; calls attributed by channel rather than a single total; spend against result; and, critically, a section stating what changed and why. A report that is twenty pages of charts with no decisions in it is a document designed to look like work.

The question to ask alongside it: "what did you change because of this report?" If the answer is nothing, the reporting is ceremonial.

3. A Content Sample

Specific to legal, and the one with licence exposure attached.

Ask for a page they wrote for a law firm — ideally in your practice area, but any legal content is informative. What you are reading for: whether it is accurate about the law, whether it reads like it was written by someone who understands the subject, whether it would comply with your state's advertising rules, and whether it is the kind of thing you would be content to have published under your bar card.

Warning signs: comparative superlatives, implied outcomes, specialisation claims in states that regulate the word, testimonials without required disclaimers, and the particular flatness of content produced at volume by writers unfamiliar with the subject.

Ask directly whether content is written in-house or outsourced, and whether anyone with legal background reviews it before publication.

4. The Actual Agreement

Ask for the document you would sign, early, before negotiation has any momentum.

Agencies sometimes hold the agreement until the end of the process, which is backwards — it contains the term, the notice period, the ownership provisions and the exit terms, which are exactly what should inform the decision rather than conclude it.

You read agreements professionally. This one takes fifteen minutes. The things to find: the term and how it renews, the notice period, what is said about ownership of the domain, site, content and ad account, what handover obligations exist, whether anything can be withheld on termination, and whether the fee can change.

An agency reluctant to share the agreement before you are "ready to move forward" has told you something about what is in it.

5. Scope as Countable Deliverables

Rewrite the proposal's scope yourself as a list of things that can be counted at month's end, send it back, and ask them to confirm it.

"Four pages a month of at least 800 words." "Google Ads and Google Business Profile managed." "One report by the 10th containing rankings for these twelve terms." If a line cannot be rewritten this way, it is not a deliverable.

This takes twenty minutes and it does two things: it gives you something checkable, and the response tells you whether the agency is comfortable being held to specifics. Confirmation is a good sign. Hesitation about committing to counts is a better piece of information than anything in the proposal.

6. Who Does the Work

Ask for names and roles — who manages the account, who writes, who handles paid search, who you contact — and whether any of it is subcontracted or white-labelled.

White-labelling is common and not inherently wrong, but you should know. It affects quality control, how quickly things change, and whether legal content is written by anyone who has seen a law firm.

The follow-up that predicts your actual experience: "Will these same people be on my account in month seven?" Onboarding attention is the most favourable version of the relationship. Month seven is when accounts drift to whoever inherits them, and an agency that has thought about continuity will answer this directly.

Attorney Pro Marketing's versions: the day 0 baseline is a standard artifact rather than a special request, and the day 14 report against it arrives before you are billed for that period — which means the first real report is something you see while deciding rather than after. Content is written by Alon Darvish — 17 years in practice, over 5,000 cases filed, not outsourced, which is also the answer to request six in month one and month seven.

The agreement is month to month with 30 days' notice, the scope is stated as page counts per tier, and the pricing is published at $2,500, $3,500 and $4,500 rather than quoted — so most of what the six requests are designed to uncover is already visible before you ask.

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