SEO is unusually easy to fake. The work is invisible to most clients, the results take months, and by the time it is obvious that nothing is happening you have spent a year of budget. These are the signs that show up before the year is out.
Reporting warning signs
1. Impressions are the headline metric. Impressions measure how often you appeared, not how often anyone cared. An agency leading with impressions growth while clicks stay flat is choosing the number that looks best rather than the one that matters.
2. Rankings are reported for keywords nobody searches. Ask for the monthly search volume next to every ranking they report. If the terms winning are your brand name and phrases with fewer than ten searches a month, you are being shown a scoreboard for a game nobody is playing.
3. The report never contains bad news. Every real SEO engagement has months where something regressed. A report that is uniformly positive for twelve months is a marketing document.
4. You cannot tell what they did last month. “Ongoing optimisation” and “content updates” are not deliverables. You should be able to name specific artefacts — pages published, issues fixed, links earned — with dates.
Link building warning signs
5. Links appear on domains unrelated to your industry. A plumbing business earning links from a general “business tips” blog with 400 outbound links per month is buying placements from a farm.
6. The same domains show up for their other clients. If you can find two of the agency’s other clients and all three of you have links from the same twenty sites, that is a private network rather than outreach.
7. Links disappear when you stop paying. Rented links are not an asset. Ask directly: if we end the contract, do the links remain? An honest agency will tell you which are permanent and which are not.
Link buying at scale is also how sites end up with an unnatural-links manual action. If your traffic has already collapsed, check Search Console for a notice before assuming it was an algorithm — the two need completely different responses.
Our guide to what link building actually is covers how to evaluate a placement on its merits.
Content warning signs
8. Volume with no ranking. Forty articles published, none in the top fifty. That is not a patience problem, it is a targeting problem — nobody checked whether those keywords were winnable before commissioning the work.
9. Content nobody at your company reviewed. If articles publish under your brand without a subject-matter review, sooner or later something factually wrong or legally risky goes out with your name on it.
10. The same article, five times. Cannibalisation from an agency being paid per article rather than per outcome. Five posts on the same topic compete with each other and none of them wins.
Structural warning signs
11. They hold your accounts. Search Console, analytics, Google Business Profile — or, worst case, the domain — registered under the agency’s ownership rather than yours. This is sometimes carelessness and sometimes leverage. Either way, fix it now rather than during a contract dispute.
12. The person who pitched you disappeared after signature. You were sold by a senior strategist and are serviced by a junior with four other accounts. The work is not necessarily bad, but you are paying senior rates for junior hours.
Before you fire them
Not every underperforming engagement is a bad agency. Ask these four questions first, and ask for written answers:
- What specifically did you deliver in each of the last three months?
- Which keywords were we targeting, what was their volume, and where do we rank now?
- What is the single biggest thing blocking results, and is it something on your side or ours?
- If we ended the contract tomorrow, what would we keep?
Sometimes the honest answer is that the agency has been asking for a technical fix for six months and your development team has not scheduled it. That is a management problem wearing an agency problem’s clothes, and switching suppliers will not touch it.
If the answers do not hold up
Get an independent read before you sign with someone new. A cleanup review will tell you what was actually done, what needs reversing, and what you should have been charged — which also tells you what to budget next time.
It is also worth knowing the market rates before you take another meeting, so that the next proposal gets read against a benchmark rather than against hope. Our pricing benchmarks and the side-by-side model comparison are a reasonable place to calibrate.
