Here is a strange thing about my industry. Marketing agencies spend all day making other businesses look good, and a lot of them never bother to do it for themselves.
That is actually great news for you, because it means there is an easy way to tell the real ones from the talkers. You do not need to understand SEO. You do not need to read a proposal. You just need to look at the agency’s own work, and their own website is the biggest piece of work they have.
Here is how I would vet any marketing agency in Queen Creek before handing them a dollar, including mine.
The 5-second test: check their own website speed
This is the one nobody expects, and it is the most telling.
Go to Google’s free tool at pagespeed.web.dev. Type in the marketing agency’s own website address. Click Analyze. Look at the Performance score on the Mobile tab.
That score is out of 100, and it comes straight from Google. It measures how fast the site loads and how stable it is on a phone, which is where most people will find you. Google calls these Core Web Vitals, and they are a real ranking factor. A slow site quietly holds itself back in search no matter how good everything else is.
So think about what it means when a company that sells you rankings and speed has a website that scores in the 50s and takes ten or more seconds to load on a phone. I have run this test on agencies around here that call themselves the best in the area, and that is exactly what I found. Would you hire a personal trainer who is out of shape?
Run the test on us while you are at it. This site scores 100 out of 100 and loads in about a second. Our old site scored a 56 and took over 12 seconds, so I know exactly what the slow side looks like. We rebuilt it because we were not going to sell speed and skip it ourselves.
Do their reviews look real, and are they recent?
Reviews are the second tell. Two things matter more than the raw number.
First, are they real and specific? A wall of five-star reviews that all say “great service” and landed in the same week is a red flag. Real reviews name a person, a project, a result.
Second, are they recent? An agency with 200 reviews where the newest one is from two years ago has coasted. An agency adding reviews every month is still doing the work. Recency tells you what is happening now, not what happened once.
Do they show numbers, or just adjectives?
Anyone can say “we get results.” Ask to see them.
Real case studies have specifics. A client who went from page three of Google to the first page. A campaign that filled an event on a small budget. A site that went from slow to fast with the before and after scores. If every case study is a vague paragraph about “driving growth” with no numbers in it, they are hoping you do not ask.
We put ours right on the site with the actual numbers, because proof beats promises and it is easy to check.
Do they show up for their own searches?
This one is quietly brutal. If an agency claims to be the best at getting you found in Queen Creek, search for what they do and see if you can find them.
Search their service plus your town. Then take it a step further and ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI “who is the best marketing agency in Queen Creek” and see who gets named. If they cannot get their own name to show up in search and in AI answers, ask yourself how they plan to do it for you. Getting found is the whole job.
Do they teach, or only sell?
The last tell is the softest and it still matters. Does the agency explain things, or does every conversation feel like a closing pitch?
Businesses that teach tend to think long term. They are comfortable showing you how it works because they are not worried about you finding out there is nothing behind the curtain. The ones who keep everything a mystery and rush you to sign are usually protecting the fact that the mystery is the product.
Put it all together
None of these tests need an expert. In ten minutes you can check any agency’s site speed, read their reviews, look for real numbers, search for their name, and get a feel for whether they teach or just sell. Do that for two or three agencies and the real one usually stands out fast.
I am confident telling you to run every one of these on us, because I built this business to pass them. That is the whole point of doing your own marketing well. It is the resume.
If you want, start by testing your own website the same way. Our free audit runs your site through the same speed and SEO tests Google and AI use, checks your Google Business Profile, and sends you the three fixes that matter most in plain English. No obligation, and you will learn something about your site either way.
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