Nine Questions to Ask Before You Sign With a Visibility Agency
Before you sign with a visibility agency, get nine answers in writing: what exactly gets delivered and how it is measured, whose name the accounts are in, how hours and scope are reported, who does the work day to day, the contract term and how you exit, how many revisions you get, how long the price holds, what you will see in the first 90 days, and what stays with you if you leave. Every one of those has a factual answer. If a proposal cannot fit nine short answers onto one page, the gap is not your budget.
Look, I have sat on both sides of that table since 2013. The relationships that go wrong in 2026 almost never go wrong because the work was bad. They go wrong because the proposal was vague in exactly these nine places, and nobody wanted to be the person who asked. Say you run a stainless-steel kitchen equipment workshop in Konya and three agencies have sent you decks. Ask all three the same nine questions and the decks will sort themselves out in an afternoon.
What exactly gets delivered, and how is it measured?
BU BÖLÜMÜN ÖZETİ
- Put the unit next to every line
- Name the source, not just the metric
- Agree now what a bad month looks like
Ask for every deliverable with a unit and a frequency attached. “Social media management” is not a deliverable. “Twelve posts a month, three of them video, published Monday, Wednesday and Friday” is. Then ask which number proves the work landed, and where that number is read from. A line without a unit cannot be checked, and a result without a named source cannot be discussed calmly six months later.
Put the unit next to every line
Count, length, format, language, publish day. Six articles of 1,200 words is a different purchase from six articles of 400 words, and both get sold as “content”. The unit is what lets you compare two proposals without trusting either one.
Name the source, not just the metric
“Impressions” means nothing until someone writes “Search Console, Performance report, 28-day window”. Google documents how that report is built in its own Search Console performance report help, and that document, not a slide, is the referee. The full measurement set is laid out under visibility kpi.
Agree now what a bad month looks like
Decide together which reading, dropping for two periods in a row, triggers a conversation instead of a louder report. Writing that down in week one is the cheapest thing you will do all year.
Whose name are the accounts in?
BU BÖLÜMÜN ÖZETİ
- The accounts that must carry your name
- Access is a permission, not a possession
- I do this cleanup myself
Yours. All of them. The website hosting, the domain, Google Search Console, the Google Business Profile, the ad accounts, the analytics property, the social logins. The agency gets access as a user, with a permission level you can remove in thirty seconds. If any of those sit under an agency email, you are renting your own history, and the rent comes due on the day you leave.
The accounts that must carry your name
Domain registration and hosting first, because everything else can be rebuilt and those two cannot. Then the Google properties, then the ad accounts, then the social handles. Six items, one afternoon, one shared document with the login owner written beside each.
Access is a permission, not a possession
Every serious platform separates owner from user for exactly this reason. Ask your agency to be a user everywhere and an owner nowhere. A good one will be relieved you asked.
I do this cleanup myself
I still open old projects where the analytics property sits under a login I created years ago, and I sit down and hand it back. I keep doing that because I set it up wrong the first time, on dozens of accounts, and nobody told me it mattered. So when we open a file now, the ownership column is filled in before the first piece of work is scheduled.
How are hours and scope reported?
BU BÖLÜMÜN ÖZETİ
- A unit you can both count
- What happens when the month runs over
- Where the report goes before it reaches you
Ask what the unit of work is, how many units you are buying, and what happens when a month runs over. Scope creep is not dishonesty. It is what happens when neither side agreed what a unit was. A monthly line showing where the time went turns an awkward conversation into arithmetic, and arithmetic is much easier to settle.
A unit you can both count
Our own unit is VERNIS: one VERNIS is 4,000 TL of focused net working time, and a package is sold as a number of them. The AINEO packages run Core at 120,000 TL for 30 VERNIS, Pro at 240,000 TL for 60, and Max at 360,000 TL for 90, all plus VAT. You do not have to use our unit. You do have to have one.
What happens when the month runs over
Three options exist: the overflow is absorbed, it rolls to next month, or it is invoiced after written approval. Pick one in the contract. The version where nobody picked is the version that ends badly.
Where the report goes before it reaches you
Ask whether the time log is written as the work happens or reconstructed at month end. Reconstructed logs are tidy and useless. The method for reading what arrives is covered under how to read seo report.
Who actually does the work?
BU BÖLÜMÜN ÖZETİ
- Three names, three roles
- What happens when that person is away
- The size question, answered plainly
Ask for names and roles, not headcount. Then ask one more thing: which of these people will I email on a Tuesday afternoon when something breaks. The person in the proposal meeting is frequently not the person who writes your articles. That is fine, as long as you know it before you sign rather than in month three.
Three names, three roles
Who plans, who produces, who reviews. If one name fills all three slots, you are buying a freelancer with a company logo, which is a legitimate purchase at a different price. The three shapes of that market are compared under marketing packages compared.
What happens when that person is away
Ask who covers, and ask where the work is documented so that covering is possible. A team that cannot cover for one person is a team of one person with extra invoices.
The size question, answered plainly
Adapte Dijital has run this work for 13+ years across 500+ completed projects with a team of 7 to 13 people, and we say the number out loud because the number is the answer to the Tuesday-afternoon question.
What is the contract term, and how do I get out?
Two numbers settle this: the minimum period and the written notice you must give. Visibility work does not pay back in six weeks, so a short term is not automatically in your favor. An unbreakable term is not either. What you want is a period long enough for the work to compound and an exit that does not require a lawyer.
Why the period is long on purpose
Search and AI answers move on a slow clock. Our management periods run nine months or longer for that reason, and our contracts carry a written notice period of 45 days. The honest timeline for first movement is set out under how long does seo take.
Read the ending before the beginning
Find the clause that describes the last day: notice, final invoice, handover, what happens to work in progress. If that clause is one sentence long, ask for three.
How many revisions do I get, and on what?
Ask for a number and a window. Two revision rounds per deliverable, inside five working days of delivery, is a clear rule. “Unlimited revisions” sounds generous and is the single fastest way to stall a production line, because nothing is ever finished and nobody is ever wrong.
Revision is not rewriting the brief
Fixing a claim, a tone, a heading, a price in a graphic: revision. Changing the audience, the offer or the language after delivery: a new piece of work. Write that sentence into the contract and you will never argue about it.
Who holds the approval pen
One named approver on your side. Three approvers with three opinions is not thoroughness, it is a queue. If three people must see it, they see it together, once, on an agreed day.
How long is the price fixed?
Ask for the window in months and the notice before a change. In an economy where input costs move quarterly, “we will let you know” is not a price. Our package prices are fixed for six months, and any change is announced at least a month before it applies, so a budget approved in March is still a real number in August.
What a fixed window protects
Your planning, mostly. A fixed price lets you commit a budget line for a quarter and defend it internally without reopening the file. The logic behind setup and monthly figures is broken down under digital marketing pricing.
What is outside the fixed price
Ad spend, licenses, stock media, translation, hosting. Ask for that list in writing. A fixed service price with an open pass-through list is only half a price.
What will I see in the first 90 days?
BU BÖLÜMÜN ÖZETİ
- What a sane first quarter contains
- What nobody can promise
- A founder’s view of the same 90 days
Ask for the 90-day shape before you ask for the 12-month promise. The first period of visibility work is mostly repair and foundation: access, measurement, fixing what is broken, publishing the first real set. Ranking movement is a month-four conversation. An agency that promises revenue in week six has not looked at your site.
What a sane first quarter contains
A diagnosis with numbers, a prioritized gap list, the first production batch live, and a baseline report you can compare against later. The measurement method we use first is described under visibility audit.
What nobody can promise
A position. Google states in its own guidance on working with an SEO that no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and a guarantee offered anyway tells you what else will be offered later.
A founder’s view of the same 90 days
What it actually feels like from your chair, week by week, is written up under working with an agency experience.
Common mistake: Choosing the proposal with the longest deliverable list. A long list is easy to write and hard to deliver, and it is usually the sign of an agency that has not decided what matters for your business yet. Six lines with units beat twenty lines with adjectives.
What stays with me if I leave?
BU BÖLÜMÜN ÖZETİ
- The handover list, written in advance
- Rights, in one line
- Why this question also protects the agency
Everything you paid to have made, plus the accounts, plus the raw material. Articles, graphics, video source files, keyword research, the content plan, the reporting history. Ask for the handover to be described as a list of files and access transfers with a deadline in days, not as a sentence about good faith.
The handover list, written in advance
Source files, account ownership confirmations, the published inventory, the measurement history, any custom code or plugin configuration. Five items. Agree them on day one, because on the last day nobody is in the mood.
Rights, in one line
Work produced for you and paid for is yours to keep, republish and edit. If a proposal is silent on this, make it loud before signing.
Why this question also protects the agency
A clean exit is the best reference an agency can earn. We treat the handover as a deliverable with its own checklist, which is why the delivery standard is published rather than described on a call: see visibility service deliverables.
The question almost nobody asks at proposal stage
BU BÖLÜMÜN ÖZETİ
- Why the stop list matters more than the start list
- A rule written once beats a reminder sent monthly
- And one more about timing
Here is the one I almost never hear, across thirteen years of first meetings: what are you going to ask me to stop doing? Everyone asks what will be added. Nobody asks what will be removed. And removal is usually where the first real gain sits, because most businesses are paying for three channels that cancel each other out.
Why the stop list matters more than the start list
If an agency cannot name one thing you should stop, it either has not read your accounts or it does not want to lose the line item. A plan that only adds work is a plan that will run out of your attention before it runs out of tasks.
A rule written once beats a reminder sent monthly
This is the systems part. We keep a partnership guide of 24 rules that is annexed to every contract: who approves, how fast, where files live, which day reports land, what counts as urgent. It is boring and it is the reason the work does not stall. If you have ever spent on visibility and seen nothing back, the cause is usually in those 24 lines rather than in the strategy, which is the pattern described under digital marketing not working.
And one more about timing
If your answer to several of these nine questions is “we are not ready to decide that yet”, you are not ready to sign yet either, and that is a perfectly good finding. Timing is dealt with under when to start digital marketing.
| Question | What you should hold in writing |
|---|---|
| What is delivered | Deliverable list with unit, format and publish frequency |
| How it is measured | Named report, named metric, named time window |
| Account ownership | Table of accounts with the owner email beside each |
| Hours and scope | Unit of work, units purchased, overflow rule |
| Who does the work | Three names with roles and a cover arrangement |
| Term and exit | Minimum period and written notice in days |
| Revisions | Rounds per deliverable and the response window |
| Price window | Months the price is fixed and the notice before a change |
| Exit inventory | Handover list of files and access transfers with a deadline |
Copy the nine questions into one email and send the same email to every agency on your shortlist. Compare the replies side by side, not the decks. If you would rather start from the answers, ours are published as part of our visibility service, and the way the work is organized is described under visibility services.
Frequently Asked Questions
Quick Summary
- Nine questions, nine written answers, one page each.
- Every deliverable needs a unit, a frequency and a measurement source.
- Domain, hosting, Google and ad accounts stay in your name.
- Agree the unit of work, the overflow rule and the price window.
- Ask for three names, a cover arrangement and an exit list.
- Then ask the rare one: what should I stop doing.
Short Glossary
- Deliverable unit
- Deliverable unit is the countable description of a piece of work, such as one 1,200-word article or one 45-second video.
- VERNIS
- VERNIS is the internal unit we price work in, where one VERNIS equals 4,000 TL of focused net working time.
- Partnership guide
- Partnership guide is the 24-rule annex attached to every contract that sets approval, file and reporting procedure.
Next Step
Pick the two questions you cannot currently answer about your own setup, and answer those first. Nine times out of ten they are account ownership and the measurement source, and both are afternoon jobs. When you are ready to compare that against running the work with your own people, the six criteria are set out under agency vs in house marketing.
Updated: October 2026
Author: Gürbüz Özdem · Founder, Adapte Dijital & AINEO · Builds audiences, then runs them.
Sık Sorulan Sorular
Account ownership, because it is the only one that cannot be fixed later without cost. If the domain, hosting, Search Console and ad accounts are in your name, a bad relationship becomes a bad quarter. If they are not, it becomes a rebuild. Settle this before you discuss deliverables.
No. Visibility work compounds, so a nine-month or twelve-month management period is normal and often in your interest. What matters is the exit beside it: a written notice period in days, a defined handover, and no penalty for leaving once that notice is given.
You should treat one as a warning. Google states plainly that no one can guarantee a first position, so a guarantee is either meaningless or a sign of tactics you would not approve. Ask for a committed production volume and a measurement method instead.
Reduce both to units: how many articles, posts, videos and working hours, at what length and frequency. Then divide the price by the units. The cheaper proposal is often the same price per unit with fewer units, which is a scope decision rather than a value decision.
Two per deliverable, requested inside about five working days of delivery, works for most production lines. Unlimited revisions sound better and function worse, because nothing closes and the production calendar slips a week at a time.
Yes, and that is the usual path. A smaller package buys fewer units of the same work, not a lesser method. Agree in advance how you move up a step and when that change takes effect, so growth is a scheduling conversation rather than a renegotiation.
A diagnosis with numbers and sources, a prioritized gap list, the first production batch published, and a baseline report you can compare against the next quarter. Position changes usually belong to month four onward, and any report that claims them earlier deserves a close reading.
You should, with the agency added as a manager. Social platforms separate owner from manager precisely so that access can be withdrawn without losing the audience. An account created under an agency email is an audience you do not control.
The working rules around the work: who approves and within how long, where files live, which day reports arrive, how urgent requests are handled, how overflow hours are treated. It is annexed to every contract so that both sides are reading the same procedure instead of remembering a call.