Questions to ask SEO/Web Design Agencies?

I was entrusted to locate and interview local SEO/Web Design marketing agencies on behalf of my employer. I wanna make sure whomever is hired, is legit and will benefit the company. As this is my first time, what sort of questions should be asked? Any advice will help me, but layman's terms please.

Context: we're an aftermarket automotive headlight company that hasn't done serious updates on our website since covid. It seems the last our site was worked on, XML Sitemaps was turned off ("disallowed"), pre covid we had 12,000 views on our site a month to now only 2,000. We only have 53 keywords on our site throughout, 80 percent of those keywords being our company name... We're not being recommended locally, despite have 3 physcial locations in the area. The 2 companies I have interviewed thus far recommend a 1 time technical fix for these things.