article · WHY MY SEO AGENCY IS NOT WORKING
The Work Outgrew TheStaffing Model.
Your agency is probably not lazy and probably not lying to you. The number of surfaces a business has to hold in search roughly quadrupled and the way agencies are staffed did not change, so the account you are on is doing the 2019 version of the job at 2026 prices.
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01 · is my seo agency doing anything
Whether your SEO agency is working.
Something is being done. Whether it is the right something, and whether you could tell either way, are different questions. The second one is the actual complaint.
This is the most common thing owners say to me, and it is almost never about the money. The invoice is real, the report arrives on time, and nothing in it can be traced to a new client.
02 · what changed in seo
What changed in SEO.
Four surfaces now decide whether a practice gets found, and holding one of them well is no longer enough.
Organic results
The original job, and now the one with the fewest clicks attached to it. Still necessary, no longer sufficient.
The local results and the profile
For most professional practices the decision is made here, before anybody reaches the website. It is a different discipline from ranking a page.
AI answers
ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's own answer layer now name businesses. That requires being fetchable and quotable, which nobody was checking two years ago.
Reviews and reputation
The tie breaker in every one of the other three. It behaves like a ranking input and gets treated like an afterthought.
03 · why agencies fall behind
Why agencies fall behind.
None of this is a character flaw. It is arithmetic.
An agency sells hours it does not have, so accounts get pooled and the senior person from the pitch is on the next pitch. Yours goes to whoever has capacity, usually the most junior person, following a process written for a client fifty times your size.
The reporting follows the same logic. A fresh document each month, formatted well, with no link to the previous one. A record is something you can open in month three to see what happened in month two, and most agency reporting cannot be that.
04 · how to tell if my seo agency is working
Five checks on your agency.
05 · what to ask your seo agency
What to ask your SEO agency.
| what you are told | What it usually means | What to ask for instead |
|---|---|---|
| We are seeing strong momentum | Impressions moved on terms nobody buys from | Which terms, at which positions, and what did they do last month |
| We published four blog posts | Volume was the deliverable | Which of those pages is meant to earn which search, and is it |
| Rankings are improving | Something moved from 47 to 31 | Show me anything that reached the first page or the local results |
| We are optimising the profile | Nobody has logged in | Show me the last thirty days of activity on the profile |
| AI search is on our roadmap | It has not been checked | Can the AI crawlers fetch my site today, yes or no |
| Your account manager will follow up | The senior person has moved on | Who does the work, and can I talk to them |
06 · should i fire my seo agency
Whether to fire your SEO agency.
Four, and one of them is stay. If you can already trace a new client back to something your current vendor did, keep them. That is rarer than the industry admits.
| option | What it costs | What goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Stay and demand the record | What you already pay | Often the fastest fix. Sometimes the request itself tells you everything |
| Hire in-house | A salary, plus tools and the time to manage the role | Works if you can hire senior. A junior with no oversight reproduces the same problem with a different org chart |
| A larger agency | More than you pay now | A process built for a client fifty times your size, and a junior on the account. The reporting gets better looking, not more checkable |
| mineOne senior person on it, monthly | $1,000 a month, three months, then month to month | You are one person's priority list. If you need a department, this is not that |
07 · seo that you can check
How I run the SEO line.
One person does the work, and it is the person you talked to. All four surfaces are one line rather than four upsells, because ranking organically while absent from the local results is not being helped.
AI is the engine underneath. It crawls every page, checks every term and catches regressions a person would find only by accident, which is why one marketer covers ground an agency staffs with four. What to do next is still my call and my name is on it.
$1,000 a month for the whole SEO line. No setup fee, three months, then month to month with thirty days notice, and you own the site, the analytics, the Search Console property and the profile, so leaving means leaving with all of it. I will not promise a position, and Google itself warns against anyone who does.
08 · seo agency questions
SEO agency questions.
How long should I give an SEO agency before judging it?
Is SEO dead in 2026?
Can an SEO company guarantee rankings?
What does it cost to switch?
Will I lose rankings if I change vendors?
09 · seo services las vegas
Where SEO sits in the work.
SEO
All four surfaces, one line, one person.
The written audit
Published at a URL you can open yourself.
Local SEO
The profile and the local results, where most of the decision happens.
AI search visibility
Whether the answer engines can read you and cite you.