What Should I Ask About Who Works on My SEO Account?

Before you compare SEO proposals, ask a practical question: who will actually work on your account, and what will they be responsible for? The person presenting the strategy may not be the person fixing technical issues, improving category pages or reporting on results. Understanding that distinction can help you judge whether an agency’s structure fits your business—not just whether its pitch sounds convincing.

For an ecommerce business, this matters because SEO work crosses several areas: commercial planning, technical implementation, category and product content, and site architecture. A strong account team should be able to connect those activities to business goals and explain who owns each one.

Use the questions below to understand an agency’s account staffing, the relationship between a senior strategist and the delivery team, and whether the people assigned to your account have the experience and capacity your site needs.

Start with the commercial goals

Before discussing tasks, ask the agency how it will understand your business objectives. More organic traffic may sound positive, but traffic alone does not tell you whether SEO is helping your store. A useful strategy should consider what you sell, how customers buy, which products matter commercially, and what limits growth.

Questions to ask

How will you learn about our revenue goals, margins, stock position and priority product ranges?
Which commercial outcomes will SEO support, and how will we measure them?
How will you distinguish useful organic growth from traffic that does not contribute to the business?
Who on the account team will connect SEO recommendations to our trading priorities?

Listen for a clear explanation of how the agency will establish a baseline and agree on meaningful measures with you. Depending on your business, these might include organic revenue, non-brand traffic to priority categories, qualified visits, conversion rate or visibility for commercially important searches. The right measures depend on your goals and analytics setup; no single metric tells the whole story.

Ask what the agency can influence and what it cannot control. SEO teams can research, recommend, implement where agreed and monitor performance. They cannot guarantee a particular ranking, a Google page one result or a specific amount of revenue. Search demand, competition, site changes, stock availability and other factors all affect outcomes.

Understand the agency structure

“You’ll have a dedicated team” can mean different things. It might mean several specialists regularly contribute to your account, or it might mean a single account manager coordinates work completed by people you rarely meet. Neither setup is automatically wrong. What matters is whether responsibilities, availability and decision-making are clear.

Ask who does what

Who is our day-to-day contact?
Who sets the SEO strategy and makes recommendations?
Who carries out technical audits, content work and performance analysis?
Who reviews the work before it reaches us?
Who is responsible for tracking progress against the agreed goals?

Ask for the names or roles of the people expected to work on your account. Find out how much time each person is likely to spend on it and whether that allocation could change. You do not need a minute-by-minute schedule, but you should understand whether the proposed team has enough capacity to deliver the plan.

Also ask what happens when a team member is away or leaves. A sound agency structure should not depend on one person holding all the account knowledge in their head. Look for shared documentation, clear handovers and a sensible process for introducing replacement staff.

Clarify the senior strategist vs delivery team relationship

A senior strategist can bring valuable experience, but their involvement should be specific—not just a name on a proposal. Ask what decisions they make, how often they review the account and how they stay connected to the people delivering the work.

The delivery team turns plans into research, recommendations, analysis and implementation support. If the strategist is too detached, the plan may not reflect real constraints. If delivery is not guided by a clear strategy, the team may complete tasks without a strong commercial purpose.

Questions about senior involvement

How often will the senior strategist review our account?
Will they attend planning or performance meetings?
Who can we speak to when a significant commercial or technical decision comes up?
How does the strategist make sure recommendations are realistic for our platform and team?
Who can challenge or change the strategy if results or business priorities shift?

Look for a direct answer about involvement and ownership. “A senior person oversees everything” is difficult to assess unless the agency explains what oversight includes. A useful answer might describe regular strategic reviews, quality checks on major recommendations and access to a decision-maker when priorities need to change.

Ask about ecommerce-specific technical SEO

Ecommerce SEO has technical considerations that may be less prominent on a small brochure site. Product variants, filters, pagination, discontinued products, duplicate URLs and structured data large inventories can all affect how search engines discover and interpret pages. Ask whether the people assigned to your account have worked with ecommerce platforms and catalogue structures similar to yours.

Technical questions worth raising

How will you assess crawlability and indexation across categories, products and filtered pages?
How will you decide which URL variations should be available to search engines?
How do you approach canonical tags when products or filters create multiple URLs?
How will you handle discontinued products, out-of-stock items and product variants?
How will recommendations be tested and coordinated with our developers?

Canonical tags can help indicate which URL should be treated as the preferred version when similar or duplicate pages exist. They are not a universal fix for every duplicate-content or crawl issue. The agency should explain why a canonical recommendation is appropriate for your site, what pages it affects and how the change will be checked.

Ask who writes the implementation brief and who verifies the result after deployment. If your in-house developers or ecommerce platform team make the changes, the agency should be able to provide clear instructions, explain priorities and help confirm that the changes work as intended.

Ask how the team will improve category and product content

Category and product pages need to help shoppers make decisions, not just include target phrases. Ask how the agency will identify the questions buyers have before they choose a product or category. Those questions may concern fit, compatibility, materials, use cases, delivery, care, specifications or differences between options.

Find out whether content recommendations will be based on customer research, search behaviour, product knowledge and input from your merchandising or support teams. An agency should be prepared to work with what your business knows about its customers rather than treating every page as a blank template.

Questions about content responsibilities

Who researches and briefs category and product content?
Who writes, edits and approves it?
How will recommendations reflect our brand voice and product facts?
How will you avoid repeating the same generic copy across many pages?
How will we assess whether the content is useful to shoppers and supports our commercial goals?

Ask for an example of how the team would approach one of your important categories. A useful discussion should cover the shopper’s needs, the role of the page, relevant product information, internal links and how success might be evaluated. Be cautious of a plan based only on publishing a fixed number of pages or words each month.

Discuss site architecture and navigation design

Site architecture affects both how people browse and how search engines discover relationships between pages. On an ecommerce site, category names, subcategories, filters, breadcrumbs and internal links can influence how clearly the catalogue is organised. Changes to this structure can also affect established URLs and customer journeys, so they deserve careful planning.

Ask the agency to explain its approach

How will you assess whether our categories match the way customers search and shop?
How will you decide what belongs in the main navigation versus a deeper level?
How will the proposed structure support both usability and organic discovery?
How will you protect important URLs if navigation or category structures change?
How will you measure whether the new structure helps users find products?

Good architecture work should not be a keyword list pasted into a navigation proposal. It should consider the catalogue, customer language, product relationships, business priorities and practical limits of the site. Ask who will work with your merchandising, UX and development teams, and how disagreements or trade-offs will be resolved.

Check how work gets delivered and reported

Even a thoughtful recommendation has limited value if nobody can implement it. Ask how the agency prioritises work, records decisions and handles dependencies on your team. Find out whether it can support implementation directly or whether your developers, content team or merchandisers will need to complete the work.

Reporting should explain what happened, what the team learned and what comes next. Ask for a sample report or a walk-through of a recent review, with client information removed if needed. You should be able to see how the agency connects activity to agreed measures without presenting ranking changes as the entire story.

Area What to clarify A useful signal Account staffing Named roles, availability and cover Responsibilities and handovers are explained clearly Strategy Who sets priorities and reviews decisions Recommendations connect to commercial goals Technical SEO Who diagnoses, briefs and checks changes Advice reflects ecommerce-specific risks and constraints Content and architecture Who researches, creates and approves the work Pages help shoppers and fit the catalogue structure Measurement Which outcomes are tracked and reviewed Reporting covers business context, not rankings alone

Compare agencies by the quality of their answers

When evaluating providers, judge the clarity and relevance of their answers—not just the seniority of the person in the sales meeting. For example, if you speak with Clickslice (clickslice.co.uk), you can ask the same questions: who will lead the strategy, who will deliver the work, what ecommerce experience the team brings and how success will be measured. Apply that same standard to every agency you consider.

Watch for vague promises such as “a full team of experts” without named responsibilities, or guaranteed rankings that the agency cannot control. Be wary of generic deliverables that could be copied into any proposal. A credible team should be able to explain why its recommended work matters for your business, what it depends on and how you will evaluate it.

A short checklist before you sign

Confirm the commercial goals and the measures you will review.
Get clarity on the account structure, named roles and expected availability.
Understand how the senior strategist works with the delivery team.
Check experience with ecommerce technical SEO, content and site architecture.
Agree who implements recommendations and who checks the results.
Ask how reporting will connect SEO activity to business outcomes.

The best account setup is not necessarily the largest team or the most impressive title. It is the team whose responsibilities are clear, whose experience fits your site and whose work is tied to goals you can how to handle faceted navigation measure. Ask who does the work, how decisions are made and what you will learn from the results. Those answers will tell you much more than a promise to reach Google page one.