Ask who actually does the work
The most common bait and switch in agency land: you're pitched by the founder, then handed to whoever joined last month. Ask directly who will be in your account each week. If the answer is vague, the answer is juniors.
At a good Manchester agency or studio, the person selling the work should be close enough to it to answer specifics on the spot. What would you do with our search terms report? Which of our pages would you rewrite first? Fluency is hard to fake.
Judge them on questions, not promises
A serious agency interrogates your margins, your repeat rate, your best customers and your capacity before quoting. An unserious one promises you a number one ranking or a 10x ROAS in the first call. Nobody honest promises outcomes they haven't seen your data for.
The pitch deck matters less than the questions they ask you. If you leave the call knowing more about your own business, that's the one.
Red flags worth walking away from
Twelve-month lock-ins before any work has been done. Reports full of impressions and clicks with no mention of revenue. 'Proprietary AI technology' doing unspecified magic. Ownership of your own ad accounts held by the agency. That last one should be a dealbreaker: if you leave, your account history leaves with them.
What fair looks like
Fair is transparent pricing, your name on every account, notice periods measured in weeks not years, and reporting that leads with the numbers you'd tell your accountant. Manchester is full of good operators who work this way. The lock-in merchants rely on you not knowing that.