The ones who sound most impressive are often the worst bet
There is an inverse relationship in this business between how technical someone sounds and how much they are actually doing. Complexity is the easiest place to hide.
If someone cannot explain what they will do for your store in language you would use with a customer, one of two things is true: they do not understand it well enough to simplify it, or they would rather you did not follow closely.
You run a dealership. You do not need to learn their vocabulary. They need to explain their work in yours.
Do they diagnose before they pitch
The single clearest signal. Did they look at your store before proposing anything, and did they say something specific about it that a generic deck would not contain?
A real diagnosis sounds like: your service pages are not indexed, your hours disagree across three listings, you are competing with your own filter pages. Specific, checkable, about you.
A pitch sounds like: we do technical SEO, content and local. That describes every company in this business and tells you nothing about your store.
What are you actually buying each month
Get it in writing, as a list of things that will happen, not categories of effort. Four pages written. Listings audited and corrected. Redirect map produced.
Vague scopes are how retainers survive without output. Ongoing optimization is not a deliverable. Monthly reporting is not a deliverable — reporting on what?
Also ask what happens in month four. Plenty of engagements front-load real work and then coast on the same report for a year. It is a fair question and the answer is revealing.
Who writes the content, and would anyone read it
Ask directly: who writes it, do they know anything about the car business, and can I see three examples for other dealers.
Read those examples as a customer, not as a buyer. Would you finish it? Does it say anything a person at your store could not have said better in a paragraph? Does it read like it was assembled to hit a word count?
Most dealer content is generic filler that nobody reads and that does not help you rank, because a thousand versions of it already exist. If the samples are that, you are buying volume, not visibility.
Reporting you can make a decision from
The test of a report is whether it tells you what to do next. Most tell you what happened, arranged to look favorable.
You want to see: what changed on the site, what it was intended to do, and whether business outcomes moved — service bookings, real leads, people searching your store by name.
Be wary of rankings as the headline. They move constantly, vary by searcher and location, and are the easiest number to select favorably. A number one ranking for a phrase nobody searches is not an achievement.
Own your own accounts
Your website, domain, Google Business Profile, analytics and Search Console should be in accounts your store owns, with the vendor given access — not the other way round.
This is the one that costs stores dearly, and always at the worst moment. Leaving a vendor who owns your accounts can mean losing your reviews history, your analytics and sometimes control of your domain.
Ask before signing: are these in our name, and what exactly do we keep if we leave? Hesitation on that question is the answer.
Questions that end a bad sales call fast
What specifically changed on your last client website in the past month? A real answer is a list. A deflection is a chart.
What would you fix on our site first, and why that one? Tests whether they looked at all.
What will you not do, or what is not worth doing for a store like ours? Anyone who says everything is worth doing is selling everything.
Who owns the accounts, and what do we keep if we leave? And finally: can you explain what you do to my service manager in two sentences? If they cannot, that is your answer.