How to Manage Your SEO Agency Effectively
The client side of an arrangement affects the outcome more than most businesses realise. None of this is about working harder. It is about getting more from an arrangement you are already paying for, largely by removing things that quietly slow it down.
You Can Get More From What You Already Pay For
The same fee, with the same agency, produces noticeably different results depending on how the relationship is run from your side. That is worth knowing precisely because nobody tells clients it.
Why nobody says it. It sounds like blame.
An agency raising this appears to be preparing an excuse, so most stay silent and absorb the friction. The result is that a fixable problem persists in a great many arrangements.
What is actually being described. Removing drag.
Almost everything below is about not slowing things down rather than doing extra work. Faster decisions, one point of contact, a warning before you change the site.
Where the burden still sits. With the agency.
Nothing here shifts responsibility for the work. A firm producing nothing is failing regardless of how well you manage them. This page assumes the arrangement is otherwise sound.
What it is worth. More than it sounds.
An agency spending less time chasing you spends that time on the work instead. The gain is real and it costs you almost nothing to capture.
How Often You Should Hear From Them
You should always know when you will next hear from somebody. The specific interval matters considerably less than whether one exists at all.
Why the interval matters less. Businesses differ.
A large account needs more contact than a small one. Some clients want frequent updates while others find them intrusive. There is no correct number to publish.
Why having one matters. It removes the wondering.
Without a stated cadence, contact happens when somebody remembers, which means quiet periods feel like neglect whether or not they are. Knowing the next date removes that entirely.
What we do. An example rather than a recommendation.
We commit to an update every three weeks. The number itself is not the point. Having committed to something specific is, because it means a client never has to wonder whether they have been forgotten.
Contact and reporting are different. Worth separating.
A monthly report looks backwards. Contact is where questions get asked and decisions get made. Our reporting page covers that distinction in full.
What to agree at the start. Both, separately.
How often you will receive a report, then how often you will actually speak to somebody. Agreeing them together at the outset prevents most later dissatisfaction.
One Person Should Own It
An agency dealing with three people who want different things produces work that satisfies none of them. A single point of contact on your side is worth more than any amount of process.
What goes wrong without one. Contradiction.
One person wants more enquiries, another wants the brand protected and a third has opinions about the wording. The agency averages them. Averaged work aims at nobody.
The subtler failure. Nobody decides.
Where no individual owns it, approvals wait for a meeting that keeps not happening. The agency is not being ignored deliberately and the effect is the same.
What the owner needs. Authority rather than expertise.
They do not need to understand search. They need to be able to make a decision without convening anybody, which is the actual bottleneck.
Who it should be. Whoever knows the customers.
Somebody close to how the business actually sells, because the questions an agency asks are commercial rather than technical.
What to do with other opinions. Gather them internally.
Colleagues can have views. Those views should reach the agency through one person as a single position rather than as competing instructions.
Answer Their Questions Quickly
Work stalls waiting for a decision, an approval or an access permission far more often than anybody realises. The waiting is invisible to you and it is being paid for.
Why it is invisible. Reports show output.
A month where an agency waited two weeks on you looks like a quiet month rather than a blocked one. Nothing in a report distinguishes those. Few firms make a point of raising it.
Why they stop chasing. It feels like nagging.
An agency will follow up once or twice and then move to another client's work. That is a reasonable response to silence and it means the delay compounds quietly.
What actually gets stuck. Small things.
Approval on a page, confirmation of a service description, a permission nobody granted. Individually trivial and collectively responsible for a great deal of lost time.
What to do about it. Answer imperfectly.
A quick approximate answer beats a considered one that arrives in three weeks. If something needs thought, say when you will respond rather than leaving it open.
The version that costs most. Content approval.
Pages written and waiting for approval produce nothing while they sit. If approval is your bottleneck, agree in advance what can be published without it.
Do Not Change The Site Without Telling Them
A redesign, a page removal or a platform change made without warning can undo months of work. This is the single most expensive thing a client can do unintentionally.
Why it does so much damage. The value sits in the pages.
Much of what an agency builds exists as pages, their addresses and the connections between them. Rebuilding a site frequently changes all three at once. Anything that becomes unreachable stops counting.
What counts as a change. More than you think.
A redesign, moving to a different platform, removing pages that looked unused, restructuring the menu or changing web addresses. Each can affect the work and none feels like an SEO decision at the time.
Why it happens. Different departments.
The person commissioning a redesign is rarely the person managing the agency. The two conversations happen months apart. Nobody is careless, the information simply does not travel.
What telling them achieves. Nearly everything.
Most of the damage is preventable if an agency knows in advance, because the work can be planned around it. The cost comes from discovery after the event.
Where this is covered properly. Elsewhere.
A rebuild is a migration, which is the highest risk event in this subject. Our site migrations material covers it in full.
Tell Them What Is Happening In The Business
Businesses forget that an agency has no window into the company. Changes that feel entirely internal frequently alter what the work should be aiming at.
A new service. The obvious one.
Anything you have started offering should be reaching people searching for it. Nothing happens until somebody mentions it.
A service you have dropped. Less obvious.
Work still being aimed at something you no longer sell is effort spent producing unwanted enquiries.
A price change. Affects the target.
Moving upmarket or downmarket changes which customers are worth attracting. The searches worth pursuing shift with it.
A new location. A geography change.
New premises or a widened service area needs work aimed at it. This is one of the commonest omissions and one of the easiest to act on.
A capacity problem. The one most worth raising.
If you have filled up, the objective should shift from more work to better work. An agency told this changes the aim. One that is not keeps generating enquiries you cannot serve.
When to mention them. At the next contact.
None of these needs a special conversation. How to brief an SEO agency covers what the original brief should contain.
Push Back Properly
You are entitled to challenge work you do not understand or do not agree with. A good agency welcomes it. How you raise it decides whether the exchange is useful.
What to ask. Why this.
Ask why a particular piece of work was chosen and what it is meant to achieve. That is an ordinary question about something you are paying for and it needs no justification.
What a good response sounds like. A reason connected to you.
An explanation referring to your objective, your customers or something found in the audit. Somebody who decided can supply it immediately.
How to raise a disagreement. As a concern rather than an instruction.
Saying that something does not seem right invites an explanation. Saying to do something different instead skips the part where you find out whether you were right.
What welcoming it looks like. No defensiveness.
A firm confident in its reasoning explains without irritation. Impatience at being questioned is a signal about the relationship rather than about the question.
What to do if the answer does not satisfy you. Say so.
Persistent inability to explain the work is covered in how to measure whether your SEO agency is delivering.
Do Not Micromanage The Method
Specifying tactics to a specialist you hired for their judgement wastes what you are paying for. Your job is the objective. Their job is how to reach it.
Where the line sits. What against how.
Deciding you want more enquiries for a particular service is yours. Deciding which pages to write, in what order, is theirs. Crossing that line converts a specialist into a pair of hands.
What micromanaging looks like. Three versions.
Supplying a list of keywords and requiring they be used, insisting on a technique read about somewhere, else requesting particular activity without reference to any objective.
Why it costs you. You are paying for judgement.
A firm following instructions cannot apply expertise. It also cannot be held responsible for the outcome, because the decisions were not theirs. You lose the capability and the accountability together.
How this fits with pushing back. Question, then let them decide.
Asking why something was chosen is right. Overruling the answer with your own preference is not, unless the objection is commercial rather than technical.
Where you should always intervene. Facts about your business.
If content describes your services incorrectly or uses terminology your customers do not, correct it. That is your area rather than theirs. It is not micromanagement. The full series is on the hiring an SEO agency guide.
Tell us before
you redesign
the site.
It is the single most expensive thing a client can do unintentionally. Nearly all of the damage is preventable if we know in advance. The same applies to a new service, a price change or filling up on capacity, none of which reaches us automatically.
What we commit to in writing:
Local £350 a month fixed. National £1,550 a month. Published rather than quoted on request.
Every guide.
One practice.
What an agency is, whether to buy at all, which model suits you, how to vet one, what things cost, what should be in a contract and how to work with them afterwards.
