Published 
Updated
Every business needs online marketing, and with a good agency you grow faster. Choose well and you flourish. Choose badly and you waste time, budget and results. These points make choosing a marketing agency a lot easier.
If you want your roof repaired, you call a roofer, never a floor fitter. It is just as simple here. An agency with experience in your own industry already knows the pitfalls and the opportunities. One without that background starts from scratch, at your expense.
Always ask for references. If they are missing, that often says enough. If you do get them, give them a quick call. Sometimes you reach a client who was a little less satisfied, and that very conversation saves you a lot of headaches later.
I am Dominic Pietersz of zoekmachinespecialist.com. I have been working for SMEs for more than nine years. Even so, you are better off hiring my agency for the team than for me alone. So pay attention to the people who actually work on your project. If an agency puts the wrong people on it, top results stay out of reach. If experienced specialists are on it, you see it in the figures. You never hire a logo, you hire people.
If an agency has been around for years and grows steadily, that is a good sign. If it stays small after a long time, something is often not right. Most agencies grow through word of mouth, so a lack of growth says enough. Go for a company that has been running for at least three to four years and is still moving forward.
Many agencies do not assign you to anyone in particular, while you want exactly one dedicated point of contact, someone who knows your situation inside out. With a smaller budget, that account manager shares their attention with more clients, and it still pays off. Someone who fights for your results internally ultimately delivers more for you.
Online marketing is about an omnichannel approach, think of Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, SEO, content marketing and email. A single channel on its own rarely gets you where you want to be, especially with algorithms that keep shifting. Spread your efforts, so you stay independent of any single channel.
When I wrote this article, Google was really the only one that counted. Now your customer asks ChatGPT their question just as often, or reads the AI Overview that Google has also shown in the Netherlands since October 2025. By the end of 2025, more than 800 million people were already using ChatGPT every week. An agency without an answer to that is still working in the previous era.
So ask an agency specifically how it makes you visible in those answer engines. Strong candidates talk about brand mentions, authority and demonstrable expertise, because that is exactly what an AI picks up on to recommend you. The same insight showed up in an Ahrefs analysis of 75,000 brands (May 2025). There, brand mentions correlated much more strongly with visibility in AI Overviews (0.664) than backlinks did (0.218).
Three questions a strong agency easily answers in 2026:
The next step
Discover your biggest growth opportunities with a free opportunity analysis (worth β¬416) β a tailor-made report, free of charge and with no obligation.
About the author
Dominic Pietersz
Your dedicated point of contact
Dominic helps SMEs grow through Google and other channels. With his international experience, he turns challenges into concrete growth.
Follow Dominic on LinkedInInspiration Β· After a client got their fingers burnt with the wrong agency, I started thinking out loud. That is how these six points for choosing well came about.
