If you’re choosing a digital marketing agency in Perth, you’re hiring someone whose work is hard to judge until months after you’ve signed. This guide is about making that call with less guesswork.
We’re an agency, so read it knowing we have a view. What follows are the criteria we’d use if we were hiring one ourselves, the trade-offs of each type of agency, and the questions worth asking before you sign. They apply to us as much as anyone.
We regularly speak with businesses looking for a new partner after a bad run with a previous agency. The same stories come up: promises that weren’t met, reports nobody could explain, and contracts that were hard to leave. A few reasons it keeps happening:
Everyone is an ‘expert’
The industry has been flooded with hot start ups and fresh freelancers all looking to make their mark. With no regulations or licences required to promote yourself as a digital marketing specialist, it can be difficult to identify who are the amateurs versus who’s the real deal.
It’s all relative
When engaging someone to help your business, there’s usually some form of physical exchange where you’ll either receive a product or a service that provides a tangible result. In digital marketing, it’s not so black and white. While there’s a reliance on data and statistics to demonstrate performance, it’s the interpretation of the numbers and the context in which these are framed where the waters start to get a little murky.
What is good digital marketing?
Without having a deep understanding of digital marketing, it can be hard to gauge the quality of work being completed for your business. The catch-22 is, if you have the skills to know good digital marketing when you see it, you probably don’t need to engage an agency in the first place.
We understand that the process of finding the right digital marketing agency can be a bit like navigating a minefield. To help make your journey a little bit easier, we’ve put together our top tips on what to look for in a potential digital partner.
Types of digital marketing agencies
When reviewing the Google search results for ‘digital marketing agency’, you’ll quickly discover that most companies out there fall into one of three categories. There are offshore providers, local agencies that use offshore resources and local agencies that complete all of their digital marketing activities in-house.
Offshore providers
You’ve probably received multiple communications from overseas SEOs promising page 1 rankings or pay nothing. For as little as $50 per month, you may experience a spike in rankings in the short term.
At face value, it may seem like a deal worth considering, but it’s important to not be lured in by the cheap prices. From our experience, these companies aren’t interested in delivering lasting results or following best practice. Instead, they tend to use tactics such as low-quality backlinks and blog articles that may cause more harm than good. While their costs may be low, the price your business ultimately pays could be much higher. Here’s what SEO costs in Australia when it’s done properly.
Local agencies, offshore labour
On paper, this model makes a lot of sense. You’ll have a local contact that you can speak with who uses low priced overseas labour to complete a higher volume of work at a lower cost.
In reality, it very rarely works out how you would expect. Even though you have a middleman to advocate for you and communicate with the offshore team, we’ve seen too many examples where the work lacks the level of attention to detail and dedication that local specialists can provide.
Local agencies, local work
There are a handful of digital marketing agencies in Perth who are able to manage all of their own work using in-house staff. While there are always exceptions, locally trained specialists are more likely to follow agency processes, delivering greater quality control and ultimately better results for your business.
Of course, quality digital marketing does come with a price tag, and local agencies that locally produce their work will inevitably have higher labour costs. Using a local agency is no guarantee of return on investment, but it’s more likely they will have a team who will understand your business and deliver a meaningful impact.
Avoid agency pitfalls
On top of weighing up cost versus quality, there are a few red flags you can watch out for when deciding which agency will be the right fit for your business. Here are our top 6 pitfalls to avoid.
Lock-In contracts
One of the biggest regrets we hear from potential clients is becoming locked into a contract. Many digital marketing agencies will ask you to sign a 12 or even 24-month contract to engage in their services. Imagine being several months or even a year into a digital marketing contract with no clarity on what’s being done for your business. During that time, the relationship could deteriorate, and you could end up stuck with an agency that’s providing you with a low standard of work. No matter which agency you choose, make sure you’re able to walk away should things not work out.
Narrow skillset
Many agencies started out doing one thing, usually SEO or social media, and added the rest later. That matters because each channel leans on the others. Rankings depend on the website, ads depend on the landing page, and both depend on a clear brand.
Good SEO goes hand in hand with web development, hosting, copywriting and design. If your SEO agency can’t make changes to your website, every fix waits on someone else, and some never get done.
When we took over Timpano Legal’s SEO, Google Ads and website launch in July 2023, the firm had come from an agency trying to cover several channels with a small team. Our first job was remapping the planned site structure to match what people were searching for, before the new site went live. Non-branded organic traffic rose 211% and monthly leads rose 85% (Timpano Legal case study).
The trade-off: a full-service agency can be a weaker specialist in any one channel than a boutique that does nothing else. Ask who on the team does each part of the work, and how long they’ve been doing it.
Digital marketing packages
It’s very common for SEO to be sold as a package that includes a certain number of keywords, blog articles, backlinks, reports and more. While it may all seem above board, fulfilling set quotas isn’t necessarily the most effective way to approach digital marketing. For instance, you could purchase 50 backlinks for $1 or have 5 blog articles written for $10, but these activities won’t achieve meaningful results.
As SEO cannot be reduced to a simple formula, there is little to be gained from packaging it as a templated checklist of tasks. Search engine optimisation is a complex process that must be tailored to suit the unique needs of your website. If you are going to get maximum value from your agency, you need a service that is designed to fulfil your specific objectives.
No track-record
It has never been easier to start a digital marketing business, so check the record before you sign. Google’s own advice on hiring an SEO makes a good starting list: ask for examples of past work, what results to expect and in what timeframe, how success is measured, and whether they’ll share every change they make to your site. It also says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google (Google Search Central, 2026).
Good evidence has dates and a named result. When we ran Stinson Air & Solar’s SEO, their position for “air conditioning perth” moved from 20 in August 2021 to 8 in August 2022 and 3 in August 2023 (Stinson Air & Solar case study). That’s the shape to look for: a real search term, a timeline measured in years, and a business you can look up. Read the agency’s Google reviews too, and ask to speak with a current client.
No strategy
Keyword ranking is not a strategy. By ranking well in Google, you are not automatically guaranteed to generate enquiries, leads or revenue. To be successful in digital marketing, it’s important to define your objectives and develop a logical plan that will determine the steps you need to take to achieve your goals. Before you commit to any form of SEO, be clear on your end goal and ensure your agency has a strategy in place to help you get there.
More traffic isn’t the goal either. When we rebuilt Timpano Legal’s Google Ads around its high-value case types, clicks fell 21% in the following quarter while conversions rose 73% and cost per conversion dropped 36%. A report showing only clicks and rankings would have made that look like a step backwards.
Industry-specific agencies
Industry experience helps, especially where advertising is regulated, as it is for lawyers and health practitioners, or where buyers are hard to reach. Google includes “What’s your experience in my industry?” in its questions to ask an SEO. The trade-off is that an agency working in only one industry may also be working for your competitors, and limiting yourself to specialists shrinks your shortlist a long way.
A fair middle ground is to ask for work with a similar kind of business, such as another service business with a long sales cycle, rather than your exact niche. Our industries page shows the sectors we work in and the work we’ve done in them.
Questions to ask a digital marketing agency before you sign
Take these into every pitch meeting. A good agency will answer each one plainly.
- Who will do the work? Names and roles, and whether any of it goes to freelancers or an offshore team.
- What’s the minimum term and notice period? Get it in writing before you sign.
- Who owns the accounts? Your Google Ads, Meta, analytics and website logins should sit in your business’s name.
- How will you measure success? Leads, sales or bookings, agreed up front, not only traffic and rankings.
- What results should I expect, and by when? Be wary of any guarantee of a #1 ranking.
- Can I see work for a business like mine, and speak to that client?
- How do you use AI, and who checks its work? Ask what a person reviews before anything goes to your website or ad accounts.
Where to from here?
If you’d like to put these questions to us, come in for a chat at our Jolimont studio and meet the team. Our SEO and Google Ads work runs without lock-in contracts. We’re a Google Partner, Meta Business Partner and Spotify Advertising partner, with 25+ years in the industry and a 5/5 rating from 72 Google reviews.
You can check our results on our case studies page, and read how we use AI on client work, including what a person signs off before anything goes live. If you’re comparing agencies, here’s the question to ask any AI marketing agency.
Ryan Wilson
Marketing Team Lead
