When Should You Fire Your SEO Agency?

We all want our websites to rank better, and to show up on maps. Once you have the budget, it CAN be a good idea to get a marketing agency to handle SEO for you. I made this move 7 months ago and just fired mine and I'll tell you why. 

First and foremost, I don't claim to be an SEO wizard. The Jobber podcast has had some amazing episodes on this over the last year, people giving hints on how to improve your rankings etc. I followed all their advice and was experiencing a steady level of traffic but I was ready to super charge my efforts. I hired a company that had a great reputation in another coaching group, and they seemed pretty legit. The promise - $1500/ month for 3 service pages, 5 back links, and meetings every month to go over progress. I thought it'd especially be important because we had just rebranded and I wanted to make sure our traffic stayed up. This was the result:

From what I can tell, you have to give companies as least a few months to do their magic. Also, google took away the Call button which attributed to less phone calls. But although it made me feel secure to have someone "handling" our SEO, the results spoke for themselves. Much less traffic. From what I can tell, our high review traffic was doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Claude would analyze their work and the impact of the back links didn't seem to be there and we can make our own service pages with actual pictures vs the stock ones they were using. 

So we made the decision to move on and do the work ourselves with Claude. 

What have your experiences been with SEO companies? Have you had success with any? What were they doing?