When Should You Consider Changing Your SEO Agency?
If you are reading this you are probably unhappy with somebody. We are an agency and would happily be considered, which is exactly why this page sets out the reasons that do not justify leaving, sends you back to your current firm first and ends with what to do if you stay.
Do Not Leave Before You Know Why
Changing agency without diagnosing the problem frequently reproduces it. A business that could not say precisely what went wrong will select a replacement against the same unclear standard that produced the first choice.
Why the diagnosis matters more than the decision. Some causes travel.
If the difficulty is a brief that never happened, a website nobody will let anybody change or a market harder than expected, none of that is left behind when you change supplier. It arrives with you.
The question to answer first. What specifically is wrong.
Not that you are dissatisfied. Whether work is not being produced, whether it is the wrong work, whether the reporting is unusable or whether the results are disappointing despite everything being done properly. Those are four different problems with four different responses.
Where to do that. A separate exercise.
How to measure whether your SEO agency is delivering separates judging the campaign from judging the agency, which is the distinction most of these decisions turn on.
What this page assumes. That you have done that.
Everything below is written for somebody who knows what is wrong and is deciding what to do about it.
Reasons That Are Not Good Enough On Their Own
Four reasons businesses leave which do not justify it by themselves. Each may point at a real problem. None of them is the problem.
Results slower than hoped. Against what expectation.
If nobody stated what should happen by when, disappointment is measured against a standard that was never agreed. Establish what was actually promised before treating the gap as failure, because frequently no promise existed.
A single bad month. Ordinary variation.
Every campaign has months where things go backwards, caused by seasonality, competitors or nothing identifiable. One poor month is data rather than a verdict. A pattern across a quarter is a different matter.
A change of account manager. Unsettling rather than damaging.
People leave firms. The new person will take time to learn your account, which is a temporary cost rather than a decline in the arrangement. Judge it after they have had a chance.
A general feeling. The commonest of all.
A sense that things are not right, without anything specific attached. That feeling is usually correct about something. Until you identify what, you cannot tell whether changing supplier addresses it.
What to do with any of these. Convert it into a specific.
Each is a prompt to investigate rather than a conclusion. Work out what sits underneath, then check it against block four.
Have The Conversation First
A great many agency relationships end without the client ever saying they were unhappy. Firms frequently do not know. Problems that would have been fixed in a fortnight run for a year instead.
Why clients do not raise it. Several reasons, all understandable.
Uncertainty about whether the complaint is fair, not wanting an awkward exchange, else assuming a firm that needed telling is not worth keeping. The consequence is the same in each case.
Why agencies do not notice. Silence reads as satisfaction.
A client who pays on time and says little looks like a content client. Nothing in an ordinary month surfaces dissatisfaction. The first signal is usually the notice.
What the conversation should cover. Three things.
What specifically concerns you, what you expected instead, then what would need to change for you to be satisfied. That last one turns a complaint into something actionable.
What a good response looks like. Specific and prompt.
Acknowledgement, an explanation where there is one, plus a stated change with a timeframe. A firm that responds that way has told you something useful about staying.
What a poor response looks like. Reassurance without change.
Being told it is all in hand, else that these things take time, with nothing different happening afterwards. If the next two months look identical, you have your answer and you obtained it properly.
Reasons That Genuinely Justify Leaving
Six situations where changing is the right decision. Each concerns conduct rather than results, which is why the argument that this work takes time does not answer any of them.
No work being produced. The plainest.
Months passing with nothing written, fixed or changed. Slow results explain slow outcomes and do not explain absent activity.
No reporting, else reporting you cannot verify. No visibility.
Nothing arriving, else documents you cannot connect to any actual work. Either way you have no way of knowing what you are buying.
Practices that concern you. Trust your judgement.
Something described that sounds wrong, else activity you did not authorise. Red flags when hiring an SEO agency sets out which are serious and which are untidy.
An unwillingness to explain. After asking twice.
Persistent inability or reluctance to describe the work in terms you follow. That removes your only means of assessing anything.
A business that changed and an agency that did not. Drift.
You now sell different things, serve a different area or have different capacity. The work still reflects the original brief despite you raising it.
A relationship where you cannot ask questions. The subtle one.
Where raising anything produces defensiveness or condescension, you have lost the ability to manage the arrangement at all, whatever the work is like.
The Ownership Problem
Some businesses discover at exactly this point that they do not own their own website, domain or accounts. It is the single biggest barrier to leaving and it is found at the worst possible moment.
What people find. Three variants.
A domain registered to the agency, a website built on a platform they own or control, else analytics and profile accounts in their name with you granted access rather than the reverse.
Why it is discovered now. It never mattered before.
Ownership has no bearing on a functioning relationship. It becomes the entire question the moment you want to end one, which is precisely why nobody checks at the start.
What it means practically. Leaving costs more.
Depending on what is held, you may face rebuilding a site, losing years of accumulated data or negotiating for something you thought was yours. None of that is impossible and all of it is expensive.
Whether it is deliberate. Usually not.
Most of these arrangements arose from convenience at the start rather than intent. That is worth remembering when you raise it, since an accusatory approach makes cooperation less likely.
What to do about it. Establish it before anything else.
Find out what you actually hold before you give notice, which is block six. The contract page covers how ownership should be written down next time.
What To Secure Before You Give Notice
Four categories of thing to confirm you hold before starting the conversation. Not because anybody is likely to behave badly. It is because goodwill and attention both decline once notice is given.
Account access. Confirm rather than assume.
Your analytics, search reporting, business profile and any advertising accounts. Check that you can reach each one independently rather than through somebody else, which takes a few minutes.
Domain and hosting control. Where the site actually lives.
Who the domain is registered to and who controls where the website is hosted. These are the two that determine whether leaving is straightforward or difficult.
Copies of what was produced. The work itself.
Content, images and anything else made for you. This is yours and it is far easier to obtain while the relationship is functioning.
The record of what was done. The history.
Reports, notes on what has been tried and anything documenting the current position. A new firm arriving without this repeats work rather than continuing it.
Why we publish this. It applies to us too.
A client leaving us should do exactly this. Any agency objecting to a client holding their own assets has explained something about the arrangement. Publishing it costs us nothing we should have had.
What A Handover Should Include
A departing agency should provide four things. Whether they do depends largely on whether the agreement said so, which is why a handover clause matters more than it appears when signing.
Transfer of everything in your name. Access confirmed.
Ownership moved where it should sit and any of their access removed. Straightforward when accounts were set up correctly and the main task when they were not.
Copies of all work produced. Deliverables.
Everything made for you during the engagement, in a usable form rather than as links to somewhere you will lose access to.
A record of what was done. The account history.
What has been tried, what worked and what did not. This is the item most often omitted and the most valuable to whoever comes next.
Anything in progress. Work part-finished.
Drafts, plans and pending changes. Without this a new firm either repeats it or abandons work you already paid for.
Why goodwill is not enough. Attention moves on.
At the end of a relationship nobody is obstructing and nobody is prioritising either. Requests drift to the bottom of a list, which a written obligation prevents and hope does not.
Expect A Dip
Changing agency usually costs some momentum while the new firm learns the account. That is normal, it should be weighed against your reason for leaving. Knowing it in advance prevents a second bad decision.
Why it happens. Learning takes time.
A new firm has to understand your business, examine the site and work out what has already been tried before it can add anything. That period produces less than a settled arrangement would.
What makes it worse. A poor handover.
Where the record of previous work is missing, the new agency repeats research and rediscovers problems already solved. Block six and block seven are how you shorten this.
What it is not. A reason to stay.
A transition cost is a one-off against a recurring problem. If the reasons in block four apply, the dip is worth paying and staying is the more expensive option.
How to reduce it. Overlap if you can.
Where notice periods allow, having the new firm start before the old one finishes removes most of the gap. Not always possible and worth asking about.
What we will not tell you. How long.
No period appears here, because it depends on the handover, the site and the new firm. Any figure would be invented to reassure you.
Do Not Let Them Rebuild The Site Immediately
A new agency proposing an immediate rebuild is proposing a migration, which is the highest risk event in this entire subject. Doing it in the first weeks of a relationship compounds the risk considerably.
Why it gets proposed. Frequently in good faith.
A new firm inherits a site built to somebody else's preferences and would rather work on their own. There is often a genuine case. The timing is what makes it dangerous.
What a rebuild actually involves. Changing everything at once.
Pages, their addresses and the connections between them, frequently simultaneously. Anything that becomes unreachable stops counting. The accumulated value of previous work sits in exactly those things.
Why the timing compounds it. Nobody has a baseline.
A new firm that rebuilds before establishing where you stood cannot tell afterwards whether a decline came from the rebuild or from something else. You lose the ability to hold anybody to anything.
What to ask for instead. Sequence.
Ask them to work with the existing site first, establish the position and propose a rebuild later if it is still warranted. A firm confident in the case will accept that readily.
Where this is covered properly. Its own subject.
Our site migrations material covers what a rebuild involves and how to do one without losing what you have.
If You Are Staying
A considerable number of readers who reach this page should stay and fix the relationship rather than replace it. Here is what that involves, which is more than deciding not to leave.
Say what you concluded. Explicitly.
Tell them you considered changing and why you decided against it. That conversation changes an arrangement more than any complaint does, because it establishes that the alternative was real.
Agree what changes. Specifically.
Name what will be different, by when, then how you will both know. A reset with nothing concrete attached is a conversation rather than a change.
Fix the ownership. While things are good.
If block five applied to you, move the accounts and the domain into your name now. It is straightforward while the relationship works and difficult once it does not.
Sort out your own side. The part you control.
A single point of contact, quicker answers and telling them what is happening in the business. Several arrangements described as failing are arrangements that have been waiting on the client.
Set a point to review it. A date rather than a feeling.
Decide when you will look at this again and what you expect to see. That converts an open-ended hope into something you can assess.
Why we would rather you did this. It is usually right.
A working relationship repaired beats a transition and a learning period. A business that leaves without diagnosing will very likely be reading this page again in two years. The full series is on the hiring an SEO agency guide.
Staying is
frequently the
better answer.
If you have not yet told your current agency you are unhappy, do that first. Where you have and nothing changed, we will look at what is actually wrong before suggesting we replace anybody, including telling you when the problem is one a new firm would inherit.
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.
