SEO only feels confusing when the people running it are incentivized to keep it that way.
We’ve seen the same pattern play out across dozens of companies. Strong pitch up front, confident “strategy” language, clear promises, etc. Then a slow shift into maintenance mode where nothing meaningfully changes, even though the invoices keep coming.
When that happens, it’s not because SEO stopped working. It’s because the agency model rewards consistency of effort, not consistency of outcomes.
If you’re paying monthly and still cannot clearly explain what is being improved or why, the issue is not your SEO, it’s the agency that’s doing it.
How Agency SEO Works
Most SEO agencies are not built to grow your business. They are built to grow their client list. That difference shows up fast once you know what to look for.
Here’s what usually happens:
- Immediately after the contract is signed, the work moves downstream. Junior staff inherit the account, and your “custom strategy” becomes a checklist pulled from the same playbook used for dozens of other clients.
- Keyword research gets done once and rarely revisited. Content calendars are created to justify activity, not demand. Technical work is limited to whatever fits cleanly into a monthly time bucket, and only covers foundational stuff like meta titles and broken links.
The problem is that SEO does not scale cleanly across businesses. Different sites have different problems. Different revenue models require different priorities. When everything is templated, nuance disappears.
Why Results Stall, Even Though Work is Getting Done
A lot of SEO work is designed to look good in a report.
Reports show incremental gains. Tasks are checked off. Updates sound technical enough to reassure stakeholders. But when you audit the site, the same problems are still there. Internal linking hasn’t improved. Page intent is still misaligned. Revenue-driving URLs are no stronger than they were months ago.
That’s not because the fixes are unknown. It’s because addressing them would require larger, coordinated changes that don’t fit neatly into a retainer. In most agencies, those changes get deprioritized. The result is steady effort with diminishing returns.
Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Agency
If you’ve worked with an agency long enough, it’s likely one (or many) of these signs hit home:
1. You ask why a revenue-driving page isn’t ranking or converting and get a vague answer about “ongoing optimization” instead of a clear diagnosis and plan.
2. You ask what actually moved revenue last quarter and the conversation shifts to impressions, keyword movement, or overall traffic.
3. The same technical issues stay “in progress” for months, resurfacing in reports without ever being clearly resolved or retired.
4. Monthly reports list tasks and metrics but never explain what changed on the site or what decision should be made next.
5. Structural fixes like site architecture, internal linking, or index cleanup are acknowledged, then repeatedly pushed out because they don’t fit the retainer.
What Experienced SEO Looks Like
Every business has different constraints, different revenue drivers, and different failure points. Product-led sites, content-heavy platforms, marketplaces, and service businesses all break in different ways. Treating them the same guarantees mediocre results.
Productive SEO relationships act like an extension of the in-house team. Strategy is built around how the business actually makes money, which pages matter most, and where growth is being blocked. Progress is tracked against real outcomes, not generic benchmarks.
From there, the work gets specific and sometimes uncomfortable. Tackling crawl and indexation issues that suppress performance. Reworking content and structure to match real search behavior. Aligning UX, copy, and technical decisions around conversion, not just traffic. Doing what’s necessary to improve both user experience and how bots understand the site, even when it means stepping outside “standard SEO.”
That kind of work doesn’t fit into a tidy monthly package. It requires ownership, flexibility, and a willingness to go deep. That’s why most agencies avoid it.
Dissolving The Relationship
Ending an agency relationship doesn’t need to be a blow-up. Most of the time, it’s just a decision to stop forcing something that isn’t working.
Use the transition as a reset. Revisit how SEO is evaluated internally, what success actually means, and who owns outcomes. The next partner should be able to look at your site and explain its real constraints in plain language early on. If they can’t, that tells you everything you need to know.
Ready For An Honest Conversation?
SEO works when someone actually owns it. Most agencies aren’t set up that way, but we are. If you want to see what it looks like when strategy, execution, and accountability live in the same place, let’s connect.