Most agencies will learn your industry on your budget. A few already know it. Telling them apart takes about four questions.
We are one of the options, so read this with that in mind. It is still the checklist we would use if we were the ones buying.
{ THE SHORT VERSION }
Ask who else in removals they work with, and for how long. Six months is a trial, three years is a track record.
The useful answer from an agency is often a refusal, because a method is a set of decisions about what not to do.
Reports should lead with enquiries and booked surveys. Traffic can triple while bookings stay flat.
Fix your own enquiry tracking first, or you pay agency rates for someone to build it for you.
Start with the obvious conflict
We sell marketing to removal companies, so take this as what it is, a view from inside. We have written the version we would want if we were the ones buying, including the parts that do not favour us.
The four questions that separate them
Who else in this industry do you work with?
Generalists will tell you they work across the trades. That is not automatically bad, but it does mean your account pays for the learning curve.
Removals has specifics that take a while to learn. Demand swings hard with the seasons, so the campaign that works in June is the wrong campaign in January. Comparison sites sell the same enquiry to several companies at once, which changes what a lead is actually worth. Most jobs need a survey before a price, so the thing worth optimising is booked surveys, not form fills. And storage is a second revenue line with completely different economics to moving.
An agency meeting all of that for the first time on your account is charging you tuition. Ask for names, and ask how long they have had them. Six months is a trial. Three years is a track record.
What will you not do?
An agency that says yes to everything has no method, because a method is mostly a set of decisions about what not to bother with.
So the useful answer sounds like a refusal. We will not run ads below a certain budget, because underneath it the data never becomes significant enough to optimise on. We will not rebuild your website before we know where your enquiries currently come from, because it is very easy to rebuild away the pages that were quietly working.
How will you report, and in what units?
Impressions, rankings and traffic are inputs. Enquiries, booked surveys and won jobs are outcomes. The distinction matters more than it sounds, because it is entirely possible to triple your traffic and take no more bookings than you did before.
If the monthly report opens with impressions, the agency is reporting on its own activity rather than on your business. Ask to see a real report from another client, redacted. You will learn more from thirty seconds of that than from an hour of the pitch.
What happens in month three?
Month one is onboarding and everybody is enthusiastic. Month two usually produces a quick win, because on most accounts there is something obviously broken to fix.
Month three is where relationships wobble. The easy wins are done, the slower work is in the ground but has not surfaced yet, and the report looks flat. Search work is the main culprit: the effort and the result are separated by months, so there is a stretch where you are paying and nothing visible is happening.
An agency that has been through this will describe month three to you in advance, without being asked. One that promises page one in six weeks either has not been through it or is hoping you will not notice.
Things that look like signals and are not
Awards. A great many are paid entries with a fee to attend the ceremony. Ask who judged it and what entering cost.
A long client list with no removals companies on it. Volume is not relevance.
Being local to you. This work is done remotely, and an agency that understands your industry beats one that understands your postcode.
Certifications on their own. A Google Partner badge means somebody passed exams and the agency spends above a threshold. It is a floor, not a differentiator.
The contract questions worth asking
Notice period, and whether the term is rolling or fixed. Twelve month lock-ins are common and are worth arguing about.
Then ownership. Specifically the website, the Google Ads account, the Google Business Profile and the analytics. Agencies that keep the ad account in their own name make leaving expensive, because you lose the entire conversion history with it and the campaigns start their learning period again from scratch. Ask before you sign, whoever you go with.
What it should cost
We are not going to publish a single number, because the honest answer depends on how many towns you cover and what you are trying to do. You can still sanity check a quote.
If the retainer is a large share of your monthly margin, it is too big, however good the agency. If it is small enough that it buys two hours of somebody's attention a month, it will not achieve anything either. Ask what the hours actually go on, and what happens in a month where not much is needed.
When you should not hire anyone yet
If you cannot say how many enquiries you had last month and roughly where they came from, any agency will spend its first two months building that for you, and you will pay agency rates for the privilege.
Doing it yourself first is not difficult. Get conversion tracking onto the website so form submissions and calls are recorded. Use a separate phone number on your ads so you can tell the two channels apart. Then ask every caller how they found you and write it down for a month. That is most of the way there, and it makes every decision afterwards better.
The other case is scale. If a retainer would swallow a large share of your margin, do the basics yourself first. A Google Business Profile filled in properly, a steady flow of reviews, and a website that lets somebody ask for a price without hunting for the button. Those cost time rather than money, and plenty of movers have never done them.
Where we fit
We work with 60+ UK removal companies and nothing else. We are affiliated with the British Association of Removers and with Move Assured.
What we do is SEO, Google Ads and websites, and we will tell you when you need none of them yet. The reviews are on the site if you want the other side of it.
