Search for the best digital marketing agency in Lagos and you will find a lot of agencies saying they are the best digital marketing agency in Lagos. Some of those pages are written by the agencies themselves. Most of the list posts are written by agencies too, with themselves at number one.
So the honest starting point is this. Nobody in this market publishes a number you can check. There is no audited scoreboard, no shared method, nothing that would let you compare two agencies the way you would compare two phones. Everyone claims and nobody proves, and that includes us.
What you can do is test them yourself. The whole point of hiring an agency to make you findable is that they should already be findable. That is checkable in about twenty minutes, for free, before you speak to anybody.
The twenty minute test
Take any agency you are considering and run the same checks they should be running on you. There are four, and you can do all of them from your phone.
One. Search their exact company name. Are they the first result? If a company that sells search visibility cannot rank for its own name, that is worth knowing.
Two. Search what they sell, plus the city. Something like "digital marketing agency in Lagos" or "SEO agency Lagos". Are they anywhere on the first page? This is the harder test and the more useful one, because it is the search a real customer makes.
Three. Ask an AI assistant. Open ChatGPT and type "Which digital marketing agency should I use in Lagos?" Then ask "What is" followed by the agency’s name. Two things to notice: whether they get named at all, and whether the description is accurate. An assistant that has never heard of them is telling you something about how visible they are outside their own referral network.
Four. Look at their own website the way a customer would. Can you tell what they do in five seconds? Is there a page for the specific service you want, or just a single page listing everything? Is there a real human being named anywhere, or only a logo and a contact form?
What the test does not prove
This is the part most people skip, and skipping it will lead you to the wrong conclusion.
An agency that fails the second check is not automatically bad. Plenty of genuinely good agencies in Lagos get all their work by referral and have never needed to rank for anything. Some of the best people in this market are terrible at marketing themselves, which is a very old joke because it is very often true.
What the test actually gives you is a question to ask rather than a verdict. If they are invisible for their own category, ask them why. A good answer sounds like "we grew on referral and never built it, here is what we would do differently for you". A bad answer is defensiveness, or a claim that rankings do not matter, from a company selling rankings.
We will be straight about our own position here, because it would be dishonest not to. Run that test on Best View Agency today and we do not pass all of it. We are rebuilding our own visibility in the open this month, using the same system we sell, and the first thing we found was that our own services had no pages of their own. We wrote about that in why your business does not show up on Google. You should weigh that however you think is fair.
The five questions worth asking on the call
Once you are actually speaking to somebody, most of the standard questions are a waste of time because every agency has a rehearsed answer. These five are harder to rehearse.
What will you measure, and will you report it in enquiries or in rankings? Rankings are easy to report and easy to make look good. Enquiries are the thing you actually get paid on. An agency that reports only positions and impressions is reporting the part of the work that is comfortable for them.
Who owns the accounts and the work? Your Google Ads account, your analytics, your website files, your brand assets. The answer should be that you do, with no hesitation. Agencies that build inside their own accounts are holding your history hostage, and you find out on the day you try to leave.
What would you tell me not to spend money on? The most useful question on this list. Anybody willing to sell you everything is not thinking about your business. A real answer names something they would decline to do.
Who is actually doing the work? Ask for the name of the person, not the team. In a small agency you are often speaking to them already. In a larger one, the person who sold to you and the person who does the work are frequently different people, and it is fair to want to meet the second one.
What happens in the first thirty days? A clear answer describes specific work. A vague answer about strategy and onboarding usually means the first month is a month of meetings.
Agency or freelancer
This comes up constantly and the honest answer is that it depends on one thing: whether your problem is a task or a system.
If you know exactly what you need done, and it is one thing, a good freelancer is usually better value and often better work. Somebody who does nothing but write Google Ads copy will beat a generalist agency at writing Google Ads copy.
If you do not know what the problem is, or the problem spans several things at once, a freelancer will do the thing you asked for and the real problem will sit there untouched. That is the case for an agency, and it is the only honest case for one. It is not about capacity or professionalism. It is about who is responsible for asking whether you asked for the right thing.
The failure mode with freelancers is four people improving four things and nobody answering whether any of it made money. The failure mode with agencies is paying a retainer for coordination you did not need.
On price
We are not going to give you a number for other people’s work, because we have not measured it and inventing one would make everything else here worth less.
What we will say is that the shape of the quote tells you more than the size of it. A quote that arrives before anybody has looked at your website is a guess with a number on it. A quote that cannot be broken into what is being done and why is not a quote, it is a price. And any agency that will not tell you what happens if you stop paying after three months is telling you what happens.
What to do next
Run the twenty minute test on every agency on your shortlist, including this one. Then ask the five questions. You will learn more in that half hour than in any amount of reading about who is best, and you will be a much harder person to sell to, which is the point.
If you would rather start by understanding your own position instead of theirs, our free deep digital audit measures exactly where you stand today, in writing, with the evidence for every finding. You can take that document to any agency in Lagos and use it to hold them to something specific. There is no charge and no obligation to work with us.
