When Should You Fire Your SEO Agency?

Question

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?

acarrr728 · Answer

One thing I'd want to understand is what the agency actually investigated and corrected, beyond producing service pages and backlinks.

You mentioned rebranding, which adds another variable. Did they document whether your business name, services, locations, and contact information were accurately represented across Google, your website, and other important listings?

I'd also want to compare the baseline before the rebrand with what happened afterward before assigning responsibility for the traffic decline.

I'm curious whether they ever showed you specific problems they'd discovered and verified were fixed, rather than simply reporting the work they'd completed.

homeownership · Answer

Seven months at $1,500 a month is a significant investment. I would expect an SEO agency to have a clear strategy for improving visibility and attracting paying customers.

Beyond cleaning up the website and creating service pages, did they explore ways to build quality backlinks through local newspapers or community organizations? Getting your business featured on credible local websites could help with visibility and bring potential customers directly to your site.

Another thought is capturing some of that traffic. A simple email subscription pop-up offering seasonal maintenance tips could help build a list of potential customers. You could follow up with quarterly newsletters to stay connected.

Claude can review your website and identify areas that need improvement. It can also help create content and recommend changes. But giving your website an SEO grade doesn't improve its ranking. Someone still needs to implement those changes and track the results.

For $10,500 over seven months, I would want to see more than completed tasks. I would want to know how the agency's work translated into actual customer inquiries and sales.

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When Should You Fire Your SEO Agency?

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