When you get media SEO companies in a room, skip the generic questions. You need to verify they can handle the heat. Ask them these ten specific questions:
1. 'How do you manage the crawl budget for a site with 500,000+ pages?'
Why: If they don't have a plan for pruning and prioritizing, they will crash your server.
2. 'What is your protocol for a Core Update recovery?'
Why: Volatility is guaranteed. You need to know their exact steps for diagnosing and fixing a traffic tank.
3. 'How are you building a content creation strategy that balances Evergreen vs. Trending topics?'
Why: You need sustainable traffic (evergreen) to buffer the volatility of news cycles.
4. 'Can you audit our paywall schema for potential cloaking penalties?'
Why: Incorrect schema here can get your entire site banned from the index.
5. 'What tools do you use to predict trends before they peak?'
Why: Speed is everything. Reactive SEO is dead; predictive SEO is the standard.
6. 'How do you integrate AI in marketing workflows to speed up distribution?'
Why: Automation is key to scaling. If they are doing everything manually, they are too slow.
7. 'How do you handle duplicate content from wire feeds (AP/Reuters)?'
Why: Canonicalization strategies must be airtight to avoid diluting your authority.
8. 'How do you optimize for Author E-E-A-T?'
Why: Google needs to trust your journalists. The agency must know how to optimize author bios and knowledge graphs.
9. 'Do you have experience with 'Live Blog' schema?'
Why: This is critical for covering elections, sports, or unfolding disasters.
10. 'How do you measure engagement beyond just pageviews?'
Why: They should care about time-on-page and bounce rate, which directly impact ad revenue.
