We wrote 70 comparisons. Some of them recommend the other agency.

Service lists are almost useless for this - every agency on this page offers SEO, paid search, and web design. What separates them is how they bill, who owns the accounts, who does the work, and what they're measured on. Ask the six questions above, get the answers in writing, and compare those. Two agencies with identical service pages can be completely different businesses underneath.

It varies enormously by category and scope, so treat any single number with suspicion - but you should always be told a floor before a discovery call. Ours is $5,000 per month, media and management combined, and we say that publicly because sending someone through three calls before revealing they can't afford you wastes everyone's time. In competitive categories like legal or insurance, where clicks can exceed $50, budgets below a few thousand a month simply can't buy enough conversions for automated bidding to work with.

Some do. An agency can buy media and resell it to you at a spread, which is legal but means you never see the real cost per click. Others bill management as a percentage of spend, which doesn't mark up the media but does mean the agency earns more when you spend more. Neither is inherently dishonest, but you should know which model you're in. The quickest test: ask whether the ad account is in your name. If it is, you can see the true numbers yourself.

If you're in a regulated category — legal, healthcare, financial services - specialism matters more than it does elsewhere, because the constraints are real. Bar association advertising rules, HIPAA considerations around remarketing audiences, and FTC or FINRA requirements on financial claims aren't things a generalist picks up mid-engagement. Sixteen of the agencies on this page are legal specialists for exactly that reason. Outside regulated categories, the fundamentals transfer more readily and process usually matters more than vertical experience.

Rarely, and for a different reason than people expect. What actually matters is whether the agency understands your market - how buyers in your city search, what the local competitive set looks like, what clicks cost there. That's a research question, not a geography question. Where local genuinely helps is if you want in-person meetings, or if your business depends on relationships an agency in your city already has. Otherwise, time zone alignment matters more than a shared postcode.

It depends entirely on whose name is on the accounts, which is why it's question three on the list above. If your Google Ads, Meta, analytics, and Google Business Profile are in your name, switching costs you nothing structural the new agency inherits your conversion history and completed learning periods and can be productive in week one. If they sit in the outgoing agency's manager account, you're starting from zero, and the new agency's first two months will be spent rebuilding what you already paid for.

Different by channel, and any agency giving one number for both is overselling. Paid search produces traffic on day one but reliable performance typically takes 60 - 90 days, because automated bidding needs conversion volume before it optimises well. SEO generally takes six months or more to move competitive terms, and anyone promising faster is either working in an easy niche or describing something that won't last. What you should see quickly is diagnosis - within the first month you should know what's broken and what it will take to fix.

Because people compare regardless, and the pages they find are usually written by whoever paid for them. We'd rather the comparison exist and be accurate. Several agencies on this page are genuinely better than us for specific situations - larger teams, narrower services, lower budgets and each comparison says so. We don't have affiliate or referral arrangements with any agency listed here.