How to tell your SEO agency isn’t working
The invoice arrives every month. So does the report. And yet, when you ask yourself what you’ve got for the last six months, you can’t answer in a single sentence. This is the most common shape of a bad arrangement — not fraud that empties your account, but a quiet retainer that nobody can explain.
That kind of arrangement survives for a long time for three reasons. Search results genuinely do build slowly, so “it just needs more time” sounds credible. Some of the work isn’t visible at a glance, so it’s hard to check. And the report looks professional — the graphs move, the numbers change colour, they just don’t lead to any decision.
There’s one distinction that untangles it: results need time, work does not. It’s normal for a new article to take months to gain ground in search. It is not normal to pay for six months and find not a single traceable change on your site. Time is an argument for patience with results — not an excuse for work that never happened.
Seven signs you’re paying for nothing
1. The report talks about rankings and impressions, never about enquiries. Nobody can seriously promise you a number of enquiries. But a supplier who takes no interest in them at all — who never asks how many came in, where from, and whether they were worth having — isn’t working on the thing you’re paying for. What measurement that reaches all the way to a job looks like is covered in how to tell whether content is paying off.
2. The work can’t be traced on the site. Open your own site with a customer’s eyes: the latest article is a year old, the service pages look exactly as they did when you signed, nothing new anywhere. Ask for a list of changes over the last three months with specific page addresses. An honest supplier will send it within days, because they already have it — it’s their own record of their work.
3. The report is the same every month. Same sentences, same charts, different numbers. No “this month we did X because of Y, and that’s why we’re proposing Z for next month”. That isn’t a report on work, it’s an automated export from a tool with your logo on the cover.
4. Nobody asks you anything. Good work on a website can’t be done without you: the supplier needs to know which services you want to sell, what counts as a good job for you, what changes with the season, what customers ask on the phone. When an agency needs nothing from you for a year, it’s producing generic content that any firm in the industry could have — and content like that won’t convince a customer.
5. “What did you do last month?” gets you fog. “Ongoing optimisation, technical fixes, link building.” Pick one item and ask to see it: which page, what change, why that one, and what it’s meant to achieve. Real work can be shown, technical work included. Work that can’t be shown is negligible at best and non-existent at worst.
6. The growth is mostly on your own brand name. Split the queries in your data into those containing your company name and those without, and it may turn out the entire growth is driven by people who already know you — from a referral, from your van, from an invoice. That’s down to your sales and your reputation, not a monthly retainer. What counts for the agency is growth on the queries used by people who don’t know you yet.
7. The promises keep moving. Every quarter, the breakthrough is “next quarter”: right now the audit is being finished, then it’s waiting on indexing, then on an algorithm update. Taken one at a time, each reason sounds sensible. Lined up in a row they form a pattern — the horizon for results moves exactly as fast as you approach it.
One sign on its own isn’t grounds for termination. Three or more at once mean it’s time for a serious conversation.
Questions to ask before you give notice
Don’t terminate from your desk. Put four questions in writing and set a reasonable deadline of a few days — the response itself is the diagnosis.
| Question | A fair answer | An answer not worth waiting on |
|---|---|---|
| What specifically changed on the site in the last three months? | A list of pages and edits, with links | A tally of hours or “work in the background” |
| Which queries bring us customers today, and how is that trending? | Specific queries tied to your services | Average position and an overall traffic chart |
| How many of those turned into enquiries, and what kind? | An honest “we know this, we don’t know that” plus a proposal for better measurement | ”There’s no way to find that out” |
| What do you propose for the next three months, and why? | A plan with priorities tied to actual jobs | ”Continue with the agreed strategy” |
A supplier with real work behind them will answer gladly — they finally get to show it. A supplier who starts hedging, taking offence or sending another automated report has just saved you a year of retainers.
How much more time to give
There’s no universal deadline, but there is a decision rule.
When the work can’t be traced, don’t wait for results — there won’t be any. Results don’t appear without work. In that situation there’s no point granting “another six months”; there is a point in setting a deadline for the answers in the table above and one month for a recovery plan with specific deliverables. Then review and decide.
When the work is visible but the results aren’t yet, look at the trend, not the target. Open the performance report in Search Console and follow the queries that match what you sell: are there more of them? Are your pages showing higher for them, and are people clicking more often? Growing relevant visibility means the wait is justified — results follow work with a delay, and on a younger site or in a competitive field that delay is longer.
And there’s a third possibility, easily forgotten when you’re angry at the agency: the work may be done properly and the problem is somewhere else. When people who genuinely are looking for your service reach the site and still don’t get in touch, the snag is usually in the service page, the prices or the form — which is what why your site isn’t bringing in enquiries is about. Firing the agency in that situation means replacing the one link in the chain that was working.
Check it yourself in one evening
You don’t have to trust the report, or this article — most of the checking you can do with your own hands.
- Search Console: go through the queries from the last few months and separate those containing your company name from the rest. Then look at the pages: are the ones the agency created or edited pulling their weight, or is it still just the homepage?
- Your site: compare the date of the last change on the blog and the service pages with the date of the first invoice. The gap speaks for itself.
- Your own records: put the invoices you’ve paid next to the enquiries from the same period. This isn’t precise maths, it’s about the order of magnitude.
- Links: ask for a list of the links the agency built in your name. Bought links go against Google’s policies and the risk falls on your site — long after the agency is gone.
If you don’t have access to Search Console, ask for ownership of the account today. It’s your site’s data and you’ll need it for any next step, with the agency or without it.
A second opinion is cheaper than another year of retainers
The decision to “terminate, reset or continue” is hard to make when your only source of information is the party you’re paying. An independent initial analysis goes through the site, the Search Console data and your actual enquiries, and tells you straight what the arrangement so far has delivered — including the verdict “the work is done well, just ask for a different report”. Not every such review ends in termination; but it does end in a decision based on data rather than a feeling from the last meeting.
How to leave without losing your data and accounts
The most expensive mistake when leaving isn’t bad timing, it’s leaving without your property. Before you send notice, get five things in order:
- Accounts. Search Console, Analytics, the Google business profile and any ad accounts must be owned by your company; the agency should have access as a user. If they’re the sole owner, do the transfer before you give notice — cooperation tends to get worse afterwards.
- Site, hosting, domain. Find out whose name the hosting and domain are in, and who has access to the site’s admin. A site running on the agency’s account is a site they can switch off.
- Deliverables. The copy, analyses and materials you paid for are yours — ask for them including work in progress, ideally with the contract to back you up.
- Data. Export the history from every tool where the agency only gave you view access, and have the record of changes and links handed over.
- Handover. Send notice in writing within the contractual notice period, agree a handover record, and change passwords only after the handover. Right to the end you’re dealing with someone whose cooperation you need — courtesy here isn’t politeness, it’s insurance.
Making sure it doesn’t happen again
A bad experience tempts you into “never again, with anyone”. But a website left unattended won’t start bringing in enquiries — the only difference is that even the useless agency has stopped looking after it. The lesson lies elsewhere: next time, don’t buy a year of “comprehensive optimisation”, buy a smaller package with itemised deliverables, a short notice period and accounts registered to your company. What to ask and who to rule out immediately is summed up in how to choose an SEO agency; what an itemised quote you can check to the last koruna should look like is shown in SEO pricing for a small business. And if you want to see the scope of work with prices on the table straight away, ours is public in our pricing.
A retainer where you can’t say what you’re getting isn’t an investment in the future. It’s a subscription to feeling good — and that won’t bring you any work.
