I used to be a tradie. Now I run a small agency that builds websites and does marketing for other tradies, so I’ve sat on both sides of this more times than I can count. A plumber rang me a while back, still burnt from a contract he’d signed eighteen months earlier. Someone had promised him the world and handed over a PDF report he couldn’t actually read. I’ve heard some version of that story so many times it’s basically its own genre now.
Small business owners get targeted by marketing agencies constantly, tradies included but nowhere near only tradies. You’re flat out, you haven’t got time to learn SEO or Google Ads properly, and whoever’s on the phone sounds confident. Half the time that confidence is the whole product, there’s not much else behind it.
So here’s what I actually check, and what I tell other people to check, before they sign anything.
1. Make sure you own your website and accounts
Who actually owns your website and your accounts is one of the big ones. If an agency builds your site on their own hosting, under their own login, and won’t hand over the keys when asked, you don’t own a website, you’re renting one. You usually find that out the hard way, on the day you try to leave. Ask directly before you sign anything: if we part ways tomorrow, do I walk away with my domain, my hosting and my Google Business Profile intact? A vague answer here tells you everything.
Nobody controls Google. Not me, not the biggest agency in the country, not whoever’s pitching you this week. An agency that promises page one in thirty days is either lying outright or overpromising because they reckon they can force something nobody actually controls. What you can reasonably ask for instead is a clear plan, a real timeline for the work, and someone honest enough to admit that search results move and nobody owns that outcome.
2. Know exactly what you’re paying for
Ask what you’re actually paying for, in plain English, not marketing language. Full digital strategy and growth marketing package aren’t answers, they’re wallpaper. Get them to write down, a sentence each, what they’ll physically do this month. If they can’t, there’s probably not much happening behind the invoice.
3. Read the fine print before signing anything
Watch for contracts that lock you in longer than the trust they’ve actually earned. Twelve months with someone you’ve worked with for two years, fine. Twelve months with someone you met on a cold call last week is a bet on your inertia, not your results. Ask what happens if it isn’t working by month three. If the honest answer is you’re locked in regardless, that’s your cue to walk. The ACCC publishes its own plain English guidance on business contracts, worth five minutes before you sign anything.
This isn’t a hypothetical. In 2018 the Federal Court fined an online business directory called ABG Pages and its director a combined $340,000. They’d admitted locking small businesses into auto renewing contracts without properly explaining the clause, refusing to accept cancellation notices, and chasing people hard enough that one organisation was called 48 times in a single day, and at least 993 times in total over about a year and a half. They’d also listed Telstra and Optus on their site to suggest an affiliation that never existed. ABG Pages was a directory, not a marketing agency, but it’s the same trap, lock people in first, worry about the service later. People not reading the fine print is a business model, and it took a Federal Court case to shut this version of it down.
4. Don’t confuse impressive reports with real results
Reporting is where most of this quietly falls apart. I’ve seen reports running three pages of green arrows with no real phone calls or enquiries attached to any of them, impressions and reach dressed up as results. Ask one plain question every month: how many genuine enquiries came in, and roughly where from? Nobody can hand you a perfectly clean answer, attribution’s genuinely messy even for good agencies, but a decent one has a real estimate and says so plainly. More green arrows instead of an answer means the reporting’s decoration.
There’s a newer one too, the AI premium, and it winds me up a bit. Some agencies are now charging extra for AI visibility or AI optimisation work while the actual fundamentals, an accurate Google profile, a site that loads properly, reviews that get a reply, are still a mess underneath. Ask them straight what they’d actually do differently from the search work you’re probably already paying for, and what would physically change because of it. A vague answer means you’re just paying twice for the same invoice.
5. Find out who’s doing the work
Find out who’s actually doing the work. Subcontracting isn’t automatically a problem, plenty of good agencies work that way and do strong work because of it. What matters is whether anyone can give you a straight answer. A contact that changes every few months, with nobody able to tell you who’s touching your account, that’s the actual red flag, not the subcontracting itself.
6. A good agency should know when to say no
Pay attention when an agency says no to you. A good one will happily tell you something isn’t worth doing yet, or that you’re not ready for a service they could easily sell you anyway. Ask them outright: what would you tell me not to buy right now? Nothing they can name probably means there isn’t anything, and that’s the business model talking.
None of this means every agency out there is dodgy. Most people in this industry are genuinely trying to do a decent job for small business owners who don’t have time to check their work line by line. But the ones who get burnt are usually the ones who didn’t ask these questions early, because the whole pitch was built from the start to make asking feel unnecessary. Five minutes of plain questions, before you sign anything, is time you’ll never regret spending.
I run 5 Star Tradie, which does exactly this kind of work for tradies specifically, so I’m not pretending to be neutral here. I just think the industry would be better off if more small business owners asked these questions out loud, to anyone they’re considering hiring. Me included.
