Case studies lie. Not outright, usually, but by omission — they show you the win, never the six months of dead ends that preceded it. A phone call is harder to fake.
This isn't a dig at case studies as a concept. We publish them ourselves. But I'd be lying if I said they tell you the whole truth, and I think most people in this industry know that and don't say it out loud often enough.
I used to think this was just a cynical observation about marketing in general. The more calls I sit in on, the more I think it's something sharper: a phone call forces real-time thinking, and real-time thinking is much harder to fake convincingly than a document someone had three weeks to polish.
Why Written Case Studies Mislead
Every agency picks its best examples to publish. That's not dishonest, it's just marketing. But it means you're never seeing the average outcome, only the ceiling. A Thurrock logistics company reading a case study about a 300% traffic increase has no way of knowing whether that's typical or a one-off fluke that happened to coincide with a lucky algorithm update.
Worse, case studies are often written months after the fact, polished by a copywriter who wasn't even involved in the work, trimmed to fit a template. The messy reality — three strategy pivots, a client who ignored half the recommendations, a competitor who suddenly went quiet for unrelated reasons — gets smoothed out entirely.
None of that makes case studies fraudulent. It just makes them a curated highlight reel, and highlight reels are a poor basis for a decision involving months of your budget.
There's also a selection bias worth naming directly: the businesses willing to be featured in a case study are often the ones who had the easiest, cleanest wins. The genuinely hard client — the one with a messy legacy site, internal politics slowing down approvals, a niche with almost no search volume to work with — rarely becomes glossy marketing material, even when the agency did excellent work for them under difficult conditions.
What a Phone Call Reveals Instead
Ask an agency owner a direct question on the phone and watch how they answer. Do they understand your business after five minutes, or are they reading from a script built for any business? Do they ask good questions back, or just wait for a pause to pitch?
We've had calls with prospective clients where we spent most of the ten minutes asking them questions, not the other way round. That's deliberate. If we don't understand your actual problem, any advice we give afterwards is guesswork dressed up as expertise.
You can also hear things on a call that would never make it into a written proposal — a slight pause before answering a tricky question, genuine enthusiasm (or the lack of it) about your specific sector, the difference between a rehearsed answer and a thought happening in real time.
A Colchester vet practice told us the thing that sold them on their current agency wasn't anything strategic at all. It was that the person on the call actually laughed, genuinely, at a slightly self-deprecating joke about their old website. Small thing. But it told them they were talking to a human, not a script.
Listen for Specifics, Not Confidence
Confidence is cheap on a sales call. Specificity isn't. If someone tells you "we'll get you ranking number one," that's confidence without substance — nobody can honestly promise a specific ranking position, full stop. If someone instead says "based on what you've described, here's what I'd check first, and here's roughly what timeline to expect," that's a different quality of answer entirely.
Questions Worth Asking on the Call
- What would you actually do in my first month?
- What's the single biggest issue you can already guess at, just from my website?
- What results have you seen go wrong before, and why?
That last question is the one that trips people up. An agency that's never had anything go wrong is either brand new or not being straight with you.
We usually answer that one honestly with a story about a client's e-commerce migration a few years back where we underestimated how long a redirect mapping exercise would take, and traffic dipped harder than we'd warned them to expect for about three weeks. It recovered. But pretending that never happened would be a worse answer than admitting it did.
The Tone Matters More Than People Admit
Pay attention to how you feel after the call, not just what was said. Did they talk at you or with you? Did the conversation feel like a two-way assessment of fit, or a one-way sales pitch with a countdown timer attached? A Braintree logistics firm we spoke with last year told us they'd walked away from three other pitches purely because every single call felt rushed, like they were one of forty identical appointments that day.
That might sound like a soft, unmeasurable thing to base a business decision on. It isn't. The way a company treats a sales call is a reasonably honest preview of how they'll treat the actual account afterwards.
What We Listen For From Our Side of the Call
It cuts both ways, worth saying. We're listening too, during that first call. Does the person asking understand roughly what they want, or are they hoping we'll decide for them entirely? Are they open about budget, or cagey in a way that'll make scoping difficult later? A mismatch here isn't anyone's fault, but spotting it early on a call saves both sides a few wasted weeks further down the line.
Case Studies Still Have a Place
None of this means ignore case studies entirely. They're useful for checking an agency has actually worked in your sector or with businesses your size before. Just treat them as a filter to decide who's worth calling, not as the final evidence you need to sign.
Once you're on the call, ask them to walk through a case study in detail, live, rather than just reading the summary. What they add verbally — the caveats, the near-misses, the honest bits that didn't make the final write-up — is where the real information lives.
Ask specifically what they'd do differently if they ran that same project again today. A genuine answer to that question tells you more about an agency's self-awareness than the headline result ever will, because it shows whether they're still learning or just repeating the same playbook regardless of outcome.
What We'd Recommend Doing Before You Commit
Book calls with at least two or three agencies before deciding, even if the first one feels promising. Comparison sharpens your judgement in ways a single conversation can't. When you're ready to talk through what an SEO approach would look like for your business specifically, ten honest minutes will tell you more than any polished write-up could.
And if a call ever feels rushed, generic, or like you're being talked at rather than with, that's useful data too. You're allowed to simply not book the follow-up. Nobody owes an agency a second conversation just because the first one happened.
A Word on Video Calls Versus Phone
If you have the choice, take the call on video rather than audio only, at least for the first conversation. You pick up more from someone's face and body language than their voice alone gives away, and it's harder for a scripted pitch to feel natural when a camera's on. Not everyone's comfortable with video, and that's fine, but when it's offered, we'd take it.
The Bottom Line
A case study shows you the best version of a story someone else chose to tell. A phone call shows you how a company actually thinks, under slightly less controlled conditions. Both have their place, but if you only have time for one before deciding, make it a direct conversation about SEO rather than another polished write-up.
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