The most revealing question on this list is number four: show me the last three months of work you did for a client my size. Every other question can be answered with an opinion. That one requires artifacts, and an agency that has not been doing the work cannot manufacture three months of it during a sales call. The second most valuable question is number six, about reporting, because it decides whether you are buying leads or buying a chart that goes up.
The rest of this is written to be read out loud. Keep it on the desk and work down the list while the salesperson talks. If someone gets offended, that is information too.
Where one of these questions is awkward for NetPageTwo, the honest answer for NetPageTwo is in the same section. A list that only indicts other companies is a sales pitch wearing a costume, and you can smell that from the first paragraph.
“Who writes the content, who touches my website, and where do they sit?”
The person selling you is usually not the person delivering. That is normal. What matters is whether they will say so without flinching. Subcontractors and offshore teams produce good work every day; the problem is the agency that charges you for a senior strategist and routes the job to a $6 writer without telling you.
A good answer names people and arrangements. A bad answer is “we have a full in-house team of specialists” followed by no names, no titles, and a fast change of subject.
NetPageTwo’s answer: one operator, roughly 90 percent of the production run by AI systems built for it, with human review before anything ships. No hidden subcontractors. Some owners hear “AI does most of it” and end the call there. That is a fair reaction, and it is better for both of us at minute ten than at month four.
“On the day I cancel, what do I still have?”
Plenty of owners have left an agency and discovered the site was built on the agency’s platform, the domain sat in the agency’s registrar account, and the blog posts they paid for went dark. Get the following in writing before money moves:
The bad answer sounds reassuring: “everything lives on our platform, we handle all of that for you.” That is a hostage arrangement with a friendly voice on top.
Twelve-month agreements exist for a reason, and the reason is month four. Month four is where results get argued about, and a long contract means you argue from inside the deal instead of outside it. Ask what the notice period is, whether there is an early termination fee, and what the last client who cancelled actually had to do. That last one gets you a real answer more often than the first two.
NetPageTwo is month to month with 14 days notice. That is easy for me to say and hard for a shop carrying twelve salaries, which is exactly why the question separates them.
“Pull up a client roughly my size and show me everything you did for them in March, April and May. Dated.”
Not a case study. Not a slide with logos and a percentage on it. Actual pages that went live with URLs, actual changes made to the site with dates, and the actual report that client received. Names and revenue figures can be blacked out. Redaction is fine. Absence is not.
An agency doing the work has this in a folder and will screen-share it in ninety seconds. An agency that has been billing $2,500 a month for a quarterly blog post will explain that client work is confidential.
NetPageTwo has no roofing clients. None. If proof inside roofing specifically is your bar, say that on the call and rule me out early rather than three months in.
“Give me the list of what gets done in the first thirty days, with dates.”
Month one should produce output you can see, not a discovery phase that fills a calendar. Reasonable things to expect in the first month:
“Onboarding, discovery, strategy and research” spread across thirty days is a bad answer. Discovery is real work. It is not four weeks of work.
This is the question that touches your money, so spend time on it. Rankings and traffic are inputs. They can move while your phone does nothing, and a monthly PDF full of green arrows is the most common way an agency survives a year of producing no revenue.
| What the report shows | What it proves | What it does not prove |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword rankings | Pages are being indexed and ranked | That anyone clicked, called, or booked |
| Sessions and impressions | People are landing on the site | That they were in your service area or wanted a roof |
| Calls tracked to source | The phone rang because of a specific channel | Whether the call was a customer or a supplier |
| Form submissions with source | Someone requested contact from a page you paid for | Whether anyone followed up |
| Booked estimates tied to source | The work produced jobs | Nothing much; this is the number |
“When the report shows rankings up and my calls flat, what will you tell me?”
Ask it as a hypothetical and listen closely. A good answer walks you through how they would diagnose it: which pages get traffic, what happens on those pages, whether the calls are being answered, whether the leads are in your area. A bad answer says that SEO takes time.
Also ask how the report will separate a call from a stranger who found you on Google from a call from a repeat customer who has your number in their phone. If nobody can answer that, nobody knows what the SEO produced.
NetPageTwo’s reporting ties to calls and form fills wherever the tracking exists. If you have no call tracking today, setting it up is month one work, and until it exists no honest person can tell you where your leads came from.
The second question that touches your money. If the agency has two roofers in the same metro, they are on both sides of the same fight, and somebody is getting the second-best keywords.
Here is the part most agencies will not explain to you. Google’s local ranking factors are relevance, distance and prominence, per Google’s own Business Profile documentation. Distance means two roofers on opposite ends of a metro may barely compete in the map results at all, while two roofers four miles apart compete for everything. So “one roofer per city” can be either a meaningless promise or a genuinely expensive one, depending entirely on where you and the other guy sit. Make them tell you which one they are selling.
A bad answer is “we only work with one roofer per market” with no definition of market and no clause in the agreement. A verbal promise of exclusivity is worth exactly nothing on the day a bigger roofer three towns over offers them more money.
NetPageTwo does not publish an exclusivity clause. If exclusivity matters to you, ask for it as a written term before you sign, here or anywhere else.
Ask it flatly, because the phrasing is what gets you the truth: “Does money change hands for placement?”
Paid links violate Google’s spam policies, and every agency in this business knows that. Some buy them anyway because it works for a while. The honest version of a yes explains where they come from and who carries the risk, and the answer to who carries the risk is always you, since it is your domain.
A good answer is either a clean no with a real explanation of how links get built instead, or a specific yes with the risk named. A bad answer is a fog of “white hat, high authority, DA 50+ placements” that never once describes how a link is acquired.
NetPageTwo does not buy placements. Ask anyway, and ask the follow-up.
“When somebody asks ChatGPT for a roofer near them, what specifically are you doing that makes my company the one it names?”
This matters more in local than most owners realize. A Whitespark study of 540 local queries, covered by Search Engine Journal, found AI Overviews appearing in 68 percent of local searches against 39 percent for local packs, rising to 92 percent of informational local queries and 97 percent of hybrid-intent queries. Kevin Indig’s analysis of 1.2 million ChatGPT responses found 44.2 percent of citations came from the first 30 percent of a page’s content.
That second number tells you what “concretely” looks like: the answer to the question belongs at the top of the page, not underneath a hero image and three paragraphs about the company’s founding in 1987. Consistent business details everywhere they appear, a real review flow, and pages that answer the question a homeowner typed instead of the question a marketer wishes they had typed.
“We are an AI-first agency” describes how they produce content. It says nothing about whether an AI engine cites your business, and the two get conflated on purpose.
NetPageTwo is $489 a month for Visibility, or $1,297 a month for Visibility plus Revenue, which adds CRO, unlimited landing pages, bi-weekly calls and Slack. Month to month, 14 days to cancel, no contract. One operator, mostly AI production, no roofing clients yet.
If that is interesting enough to test, book a call and run all nine questions at me in order. Book a call here. Bring the list.
Related: roofing SEO work.
