You have already made the decision. The website is not doing what it should, the person handling social media has left, or the ads have quietly stopped producing enquiries, and you have concluded that this is somebody else's job now. What you probably do not know is what the next three months feel like from the inside.
Most of what goes wrong between a business and its agency happens because nobody set out the shape of the work at the start. So here is the shape. Google publishes its own guidance on hiring an SEO, and it is worth ten minutes before any first meeting: the questions it tells you to ask are close to the ones a serious agency will be asking you.
The first conversation should be an audit, not a pitch
If the first meeting is a deck about the agency, you are being sold to rather than assessed. The useful first conversation runs the other way. It is a set of unglamorous questions about your business: where your enquiries come from now, who actually closes them, what a customer is worth to you, what you have already tried, and what happened when you tried it.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Half the ideas an agency might propose have already been attempted at your company, badly resourced, and abandoned. Knowing that saves a quarter.
Expect to be asked for access before you are asked for a budget. Search Console, the analytics property, the ad accounts, the Google Business Profile, whoever holds the domain. An agency that quotes a monthly figure before it has seen any of that is quoting from a rate card, not from your situation.
What you will be asked to hand over
Access is the part clients underestimate. It is also the part that delays a start by three weeks more often than anything else.
The list is usually the same. Domain registrar login, or at least the person who has it. Hosting. The website admin. Google Analytics and Search Console, with ownership rather than view access. The Google Business Profile, which in a distressing number of cases is still verified to a former employee's personal email. Meta Business Manager. Any email marketing tool. Whatever CRM or spreadsheet the enquiries land in.
If you cannot produce these, say so early. Recovering a Business Profile from a departed employee is a real piece of work with a real timeline. Google runs it as a formal ownership request with a waiting period, so it is better to start it in week one than to discover it in week six when the local listing work is meant to begin.
The first month is mostly listening and fixing
Clients expect campaigns in the first month. What they usually get, if the agency is honest, is repair.
Broken tracking, so that nothing measured before is trustworthy. A contact form going to an inbox nobody reads. Business Profile hours that are wrong on a Saturday. A site that takes six seconds on a mid-range Android phone. Pages competing with each other for the same search. Old ad campaigns still spending on brand terms that would have arrived free.
None of this is exciting and all of it is cheaper than advertising into a broken path. Our SEO work in Kolkata almost always begins here rather than with new content, and our paid campaigns do not start until the destination page and the enquiry route are known to work.
You should expect the first month's output to look more like a list of corrections than a campaign. If it looks like a campaign instead, ask what was checked before it launched.
Who you actually work with
Ask this directly and ask for names. The pattern that damages agency relationships is the senior person who wins the account and then is never seen again.
In practice you should know three things: who writes and builds, who runs the accounts day to day, and who you ring when something is wrong on a Sunday. In a small agency these may be two people rather than five, which is not a weakness as long as it is stated honestly rather than dressed up as a department.
Expect a working rhythm rather than a stream of updates. A fortnightly or monthly review with an agenda, a shared document that both sides actually write in, and one channel for urgent things. Marketing work is slow enough that daily reporting is theatre.
What a monthly report should and should not contain
A report exists to answer one question: what changed, and what are we doing about it.
What belongs in it: what was published or built, what was spent and where, what people searched to reach you, which pages and campaigns produced enquiries, what broke, and what happens next month. Search Console and analytics figures presented as they are, including the flat months.
What does not belong: vanity dashboards, impression counts presented as achievement, and screenshots of engagement on a post. Reach is not revenue, and a report built out of the flattering numbers is a report designed to survive a meeting rather than to run a business.
You should also expect the honest version of a bad month. Seasonality, an algorithm change, a competitor bidding hard, or work of ours that did not land. An agency that has never reported a disappointing month is an agency editing its reports.
Where the relationship usually strains
Three places, and they are predictable.
The first is the gap between spending and results. Search work takes months to show, and the middle of that period feels like paying for nothing. This is the point at which most programmes are cancelled, usually just before the part that was going to work.
The second is content approval. Agencies need input from the person who knows the business, and that person is busy. A draft sitting unapproved for three weeks costs the month. Decide at the start who signs things off and how quickly.
The third is scope. "Can you just do a quick post for this" repeated forty times is a second job nobody costed. Better to define what is included, and to treat anything else as a separate piece of work rather than to let it accumulate as resentment.
Being in Ballygunge changes the working rhythm
There is a practical argument for an agency you can reach in twenty minutes. Not for the meetings, which mostly happen on a call anyway, but for the things that need somebody physically present: photographing your premises for a listing, filming inside a clinic or a showroom, sitting with your sales team for an afternoon to hear how enquiries are actually handled.
South Kolkata has a particular business mix. Family-run practices and firms that have been on the same road for decades, professional practices around Gariahat and Rashbehari, newer brands selling nationally from a small office. The advice differs a great deal between them, and a local agency has usually seen all three.
We work from 17R Dover Terrace, Ballygunge. You can read who we are on our about page, see the range of work on our services, and the rest is a conversation.
What should not be promised to you
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is where most agency pitches fail an honest test.
Nobody can promise a ranking position. Nobody can promise a number of leads before they have seen your market, your margins and your close rate. Guaranteed page one is either a paid placement being sold as organic, or a keyword so obscure that ranking for it means nothing.
The things that can honestly be committed to are inputs and standards: what will be built, what will be published, how quickly things get fixed, what gets reported, and who answers the phone. A full digital marketing programme is scoped that way, and if a sector has its own rules, the scope has to respect them. Healthcare is the clearest case, where medical advertising limits close off the promotional route entirely and change what a campaign can even say. Our healthcare marketing work is built around that constraint rather than around it.
If you are close to a decision, the most useful thing you can bring to a first meeting is not a brief. It is your last six months of enquiries and where they came from. Talk to us once you have that.
Digi Kydo, 17R Dover Terrace, Ballygunge, Kolkata, West Bengal 700019. Call +91 98305 45687 or write to [email protected].
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to see results from a digital marketing agency?
It depends entirely on the channel. Paid search can produce enquiries within days of launch, because you are buying visibility that already exists. Organic search is slower, and a realistic expectation is several months before rankings and traffic move in a way that shows in enquiries, longer if the site has technical problems that must be fixed first. Content and brand work are slower still. A programme that mixes the three should be judged on inputs in the early months and on enquiries later.
What access does a digital marketing agency need from me?
Ownership-level access to Google Analytics and Search Console, the Google Business Profile, any advertising accounts, the website admin, the hosting and domain registrar, and whichever email or CRM tool receives enquiries. Ownership matters rather than viewing rights, because an agency that cannot change a setting cannot fix the thing that is broken. Gathering these before the first month begins is the single easiest way to avoid a delayed start.
Should an agency guarantee a page one ranking?
No, and a guarantee should make you more cautious rather than less. Search rankings are decided by a system neither you nor the agency controls, and the only way to guarantee a position is to choose a keyword nobody searches for. What can reasonably be committed to is the work: what will be built and published, how the site will be fixed, what is reported and how quickly problems are handled.
What does an agency's monthly report need to show?
What was done, what was spent and where, what people searched to find you, which pages and campaigns produced enquiries, what went wrong, and what happens next. It should show the flat months as clearly as the good ones. Impressions and engagement counts presented on their own are the warning sign, because they can rise while enquiries fall.
Is there any advantage to hiring an agency in my own part of Kolkata?
For most of the work, no. Strategy, search, advertising and reporting happen the same way regardless of distance. The advantage is physical: photographing your premises, filming on site, and sitting with the people who answer your phone to hear how an enquiry is actually handled. Those things are far more likely to happen when the agency is a short drive away rather than in another city.