Pune, 3rd August 2026: By the third agency pitch, they all start to sound the same.

Every deck has case studies with impressive graphs. Every team promises a dedicated pod. Every founder assures you they “don’t work like other agencies.” If you are a marketing head or CMO sitting through these meetings in Pune this quarter, you already know the problem: Every pitch is good in the same way, so comparing them tells you very little.

The way through is to stop listening to what agencies volunteer and start controlling what they must answer. The eleven questions below are designed for exactly that. For each one, you will find what a strong answer sounds like and, more usefully, the answer that should worry you. Agencies rehearse their strengths. Nobody rehearses these.

A note before you start: this is not about catching agencies lying. Most are not. It is about separating the SEO agency in Pune with a real system from the ones with a real sales team. In Pune, that difference is worth the entire budget, because the categories here are unusually concentrated. A handful of hospital chains, listed developers, insurers, brokers and education groups are bidding for the same page one, and most of them are national advertisers rather than local ones. An agency that opens with Google Business Profile optimisation for a listed developer has already told you something.

How to Choose an SEO Agency in Pune: Run the Questions as a Process

Before the questions themselves, three rules that make them work:

• Ask all eleven, to every shortlisted agency, in the same order. Start with a shortlist of SEO agencies and run the same 11 questions past each one. The value is in comparing answers side by side. A single agency’s answer always sounds reasonable in isolation.
• Ask them in the second meeting, not the first. Let the first meeting be their pitch. The second meeting is yours. An agency that resists a second, harder conversation before contracting has answered your real question already.
• Write the answers down. Memory flattens everything into ‘they seemed good.’ A written scorecard, and there is one at the end of this article, does not.

The Eleven Questions to Ask an SEO Agency

1. Before we discuss your process, what did you notice about our website?

Credible: Quotes your actual site. Crawl or indexing issues they spotted, content gaps against competitors they name, queries in your category where you are invisible. It does not need to be a full audit. It needs to prove they looked.

Generic: When the answer is a smooth pivot back to the deck. If the presentation would work equally well with any client’s logo on slide one, you are watching a template.

Why it matters: Preparation before a pitch is the cheapest signal you will ever get of how an agency behaves after the retainer starts. A team that did not open your website to win your business will not study it to keep your business.

2. Who else do you work with in our category and how do you handle the conflict?

Credible: When an Agency is transparent. They name the category overlap (or confirm there is none) and explain how teams and keyword targets are separated. In genuinely direct conflicts, they decline one of the two accounts.

Generic: Agency that says “we can rank everyone.” In a defined category, two competing clients cannot both hold the same page-one positions. One of them is subsidising the other’s learning.

Why it matters: Pune’s high-value categories run through a small number of large advertisers. In private healthcare, residential real estate and general insurance, the credible national players number in the dozens, not the hundreds. There is a real chance your direct rival is already on your shortlisted agency’s roster. Better to find out now than in month six.

3. Show us links you built last quarter, we want to see the actual URLs.

Credible: Opens a sheet of real, recent placements, some strong, some modest, and explains how each was earned. Digital PR, data studies, expert commentary. Honest agencies are comfortable showing ordinary work alongside the wins.

Generic: Hides behind confidentiality for every single link, or — worse — promises a fixed number of “high-DA backlinks” per month. Link-building does not run on a monthly quota, link farms do.

Why it matters: Link quality is where enterprise SEO budgets quietly die. Guest-post networks and paid placements can look active in a monthly report for a year while adding risk instead of authority. The URLs settle the question in five minutes.

4. What will you need from us in the first 90 days?

Credible: Comes with a demand list: developer bandwidth for technical fixes, brand and compliance sign-off timelines, access to GA4 and Search Console, subject-matter experts for content, a named decision-maker on your side. It comes with a warning about what stalls if these are missing.

Generic: Stated as “nothing, we handle everything end to end.” That is an agency planning to work around your organisation instead of through it, which at enterprise scale means recommendations that never ship.

Why it matters: More enterprise SEO programmes fail on the client’s side of the fence because of some blocked dev queues or unanswered approvals. And if you are in BFSI or pharma, your compliance cycle is the real project timeline. An agency that budgets for your internal friction and asks about your approval chain has run engagements like yours before. One that promises frictionless delivery has not.

5. Who writes our content, and how much of it is AI-generated?

Credible: Describes the actual workflow: where a model is used and where it is not, who edits, who fact-checks, who signs off on regulated claims, and how subject-matter input reaches the writer. Most good agencies now use AI somewhere in production and say so plainly.

Generic: This answer comes in two shapes. One is “everything is written by humans,” said quickly and without detail, which is either untrue or expensive in a way they have not explained. The other is enthusiasm about volume with no description of the review layer.

Why it matters: almost every agency now uses AI somewhere in production, and the ones that deny it flatly are usually the ones who have not thought about it. What separates them is what happens after the draft. With a review layer, AI raises throughput. Without one, an invented figure reads exactly like a checked one, and nothing catches it before your logo goes on.

6. Who exactly will run our account, and how many other accounts do they carry?

Credible: Gives names, seniority, and account loads, and offers to have the actual delivery team present the 90-day plan before you sign. Key-person continuity goes into the contract.

Generic: Offers “a dedicated team of experts” with no names attached. If they cannot name the team in the sales cycle, the honest translation is: whoever has capacity when you sign.

Why it matters: At enterprise retainers, the pitch-team-to-junior-pod handover is the single most common cause of disappointment in this industry. Meeting your pod before signature is not rude. It is the diligence a retainer of this size deserves.

7. If we part ways in a year, what exactly do we keep?

Credible: An immediate and specific answer. Analytics, Search Console, dashboards and content all sit in accounts you own from day one. Backlink and keyword data is exportable. Handover is a defined deliverable rather than a favour.

Generic: Involves agency-owned reporting logins, content that is “licensed” rather than transferred, or vagueness about admin access. That is not infrastructure. That is a hostage situation with a monthly invoice.

Why it matters: How an agency structures your exit tells you how it plans to retain you: through results, or through switching costs. You want a partner whose clients stay because leaving is unnecessary and not because it’s expensive.

8. What should we NOT expect from this engagement?

Credible: Names real limits without flinching. Things like little visible movement before month three or four, certain head terms not worth chasing against entrenched aggregators, AI Overviews shrinking clicks on some informational queries regardless of rankings.

Generic: Statement like, that everything is achievable with the right budget. An agency that concedes nothing in the sales meeting will concede nothing in the quarterly review either, right up until the engagement quietly fails.

Why it matters: This is the fastest honesty test in the set. You are not buying the ceiling of what SEO might deliver; you are buying a partner who will tell you the truth when a quarter goes sideways. The answer to this question is a preview of every future report.

9. How will you connect this work to revenue, not rankings?

Credible: Talks about organic’s contribution to the pipeline: qualified leads, calls, admissions, transactions; integration with your CRM where possible. It is also honest that attribution has limits, especially as AI answers absorb early research.

Generic: Leads with ranking counts and traffic curves and stops there. Rankings are an input. If nobody in the room asks what those keywords are worth to your business, you are looking at a reporting factory.

Why it matters: Someone in your leadership will eventually ask what the retainer returned. An agency that cannot arm you for that conversation costs you political capital on top of the fee. Budgets that cannot be defended get cut, even when the work is good.

10. What is AI search doing to our category, and what is your plan for it?

Credible: Answer that is specific to you: which of your category’s queries now trigger AI Overviews, how buyers are using ChatGPT and similar tools for research. They can name what the agency is doing about it: structured data, entity authority, citation-worthy content. They can share how they measure AI visibility and admit the discipline is still maturing.

Generic: Answer that is either a blank pause or the word “AI” sprinkled over last year’s deck. No category examples, no measurement, no experiments they can describe.

Why it matters: In insurance, property, healthcare, and education, which are Pune’s biggest search categories, there’s a growing share of high-value research starting inside an AI answer instead of ten blue links. By 2026, this is a board-level visibility question, and if they have not checked, they are not watching their own industry.

11. Why did your last three clients leave you?

Credible: An answer that is candid: a budget cut, an acquisition, and from the confident ones, an engagement that underperformed with what they changed afterwards. Best of all, they offer references you can actually call, including a former client if you ask.

Generic: An answer that is “clients never really leave us,” or a list in which every departure was the client’s fault. Every agency old enough to be credible has lost accounts. Only the insecure ones pretend otherwise.

Why it matters: Nobody’s case-study page contains this information, which is exactly why the question works. The way an agency talks about clients who left is the way it will one day talk about you.

The SEO Agency Selection Checklist

Use this as a scorecard in the room. Score every answer 0 (worrying), 1 (acceptable) or 2 (strong):

Reading the score: 16–20 — proceed to reference calls. 11–15 — a second conversation on the weak answers before any contract. 10 or below — pass, whatever the logo wall looks like. And if two agencies score close, weight questions 5, 6 and 7 — team, ownership and honesty are the three that predict how the relationship feels in month nine.

Three answers are gates, not points. A zero on question 2, 7 or 11 is a walk-away regardless of the total. An agency that will not disclose a conflict, will not hand back your own analytics, or cannot name a client who left has told you how the relationship ends. No score elsewhere compensates for that.

The Bottom Line

Choosing an SEO agency is not about finding the most impressive pitch. And if SEO is one part of a broader mandate, the same scrutiny should apply when evaluating a full-service digital marketing partner. It is about finding the team whose answers stay specific under pressure: about your website, their conflicts, their links, their losses. Weak agencies sell certainty and speak in generalities. Strong ones offer evidence and admit limits.

Ask all eleven questions. Score every answer. Trust the specificity, not the confidence. In a market as contested as Pune, the hour you spend running this checklist will outperform any hour the agency spends pitching you.