Your SEO agency not getting you results? Read this before you fire them

Maybe you've paid an SEO company for a year and still can't say what they did. You signed up for more leads, more traffic and better rankings, and what you got was a monthly report full of green arrows.

Is it your SEO agency, or something else? The short answer

If your SEO agency isn't bringing in leads, check five links in order: search demand, indexing, clicks, your website and your follow-up. SEO only works when all five of these are true: people search for what you sell, Google can find and show your pages, the right people click, your website turns visits into inquiries, and someone follows up and records where each lead came from. The agency has the most say over the first three, and you over the last two. Flat results in the first few months are normal.

Most guides on this topic judge the agency on rankings and clicks, and stop there. That's useful, and I'll cover it, but you didn't hire an SEO agency for clicks. You hired them for leads.

We've seen this from the inside. A client came to us from another SEO provider that was only rewriting headings and updating meta tags, probably 8 to 10 hours a month and nothing else. We went through that work, fixed a lot of it, rewrote a lot of the copy and rebuilt the website. Within two weeks, traffic, queries and rankings were all up. Leads went up too, and AI assistants started citing them for the first time, even though the site had been live for years.

Traffic but no leads?

Start with the symptom you can see. Most of these you can check yourself in Google Search Console and your CRM in an afternoon.

What you're seeing	Likely cause	What to check	Whose job it is
Hardly any impressions for the services you sell	Few people search for it, or the agency is chasing the wrong phrases	The queries report in Search Console, with searches for your company name filtered out. Are those the words your buyers use?	The agency, with your input
Your key service pages don't show up at all	Google can't find or index them	The page indexing report in Search Console	The agency, or your web developer
Impressions are rising but clicks are flat	Weak titles, the wrong searches, or an AI summary answering the question	Clicks against impressions, query by query	Partly the agency, partly Google
Traffic is up but inquiries aren't	The website doesn't turn visits into inquiries	Your service pages, contact page, forms and speed	You, and whoever runs the website
Inquiries come in but don't turn into clients	Slow follow-up, or the wrong kind of inquiry	How fast you reply, and what the inquiries actually ask for	You and your sales process
Nobody can say where new clients came from	Tracking or lead source isn't set up	Key events in Google Analytics, and a source on every deal	You, and whoever set up your analytics
Two months in and nothing has moved	Probably normal timing	Whether the agency has actually changed anything yet	Nobody, yet

What does your SEO agency actually control?

The top half of that table. A good agency should be able to explain, in plain English, what it's doing about each of these.

• What you rank for. Choosing the searches your buyers actually make, not the ones that look good in a report. If your offer is technical, expect them to ask a lot of questions early on.
• Whether Google can find and show your pages. Crawling, indexing, site structure and speed. If your best service page isn't indexed, nothing else on this list matters yet.
• Pages that answer the question. Titles and pages that match what the searcher wants, so the right people click.
• Honest reporting. What changed, what it did, and what didn't work.

Reporting is also where you find out whether they know your business. In Setup's 2025 Marketing Relationship Survey, 44% of clients who ended an agency relationship said the agency didn't understand their business. That covers agencies of all kinds, not just SEO, but if your agency's reports could be about any company, that's worth a conversation.

Fewer clicks isn't always the agency's fault

Some of the drop in clicks is Google's doing. In a Pew Research Center study of how 900 US adults used Google in March 2025, people clicked a normal result in 8% of visits to a Google search page that showed an AI summary, against 15% of visits to pages with none. They clicked a link inside the summary itself in just 1% of visits to pages that had one.

If your impressions are steady and your clicks are sliding, an AI summary may be answering the question before anyone reaches your site. Our free GEO check shows what AI assistants say about your business.

What's in your control, not the agency's?

The bottom half of the table. This is the uncomfortable bit, because the agency can't fix any of it from the outside.

• Your offer. If it's hard to explain, it's hard to rank for and harder to click on. Sometimes the fix is a clearer offer, not more SEO.
• Your website. Traffic only turns into inquiries if the page makes sense. As I wrote in our newsletter, "Your website should explain what you do, who you help, what problems you solve and why you are credible." A slow, out-of-date site with a long contact form will waste good traffic.
• Your follow-up. An inquiry that waits three days for a reply may already have gone to someone who replied sooner. (More on following up on time.)
• Your tracking. If nobody records where leads come from, SEO gets no credit for the clients it did bring in. Put a source on every deal and collect the basic sales and marketing data before you judge anyone.

How long does SEO take to work, and to bring in leads?

Longer than most people hope. Google's own SEO starter guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others could take several months, and that you'll likely want to wait a few weeks before judging whether a change worked.

Leads come after that, because rankings come before clicks and clicks come before inquiries. If you sell something with a long sales cycle, add that on top. So two or three months of flat numbers isn't a reason to fire anyone on its own. Two or three months with no clear explanation of what was done is a different story. Either way, write down where you started before you judge anyone: clicks, inquiries from organic search and clients won the month before the agency began. Without that baseline, every report is a guess.

When is it time to fire your SEO agency?

Some problems are worth leaving over, whatever the timing. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO is a good place to start.

• They guarantee rankings. Google says plainly that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking.
• They're secretive about what they've changed. Google warns against SEOs that are secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do, and suggests asking whether they'll share every change they make to your site.
• They won't give you access to your own accounts. Your Search Console, analytics and website belong to you, not them.
• The reports have no bad news in them. Not every month is a good month. Reports that only show what went up are telling you what you want to hear.
• They can't explain the work in plain English. If you ask what they did last month and get jargon back, ask again. If you still get jargon, that's your answer.

What questions should you ask your SEO agency?

Their answers to these will tell you more than the next report.

• "Which searches are you targeting, and why those?"
• "What did you change on our site last month, and what did it do?"
• "How many inquiries came from organic search this quarter, and how do you know?"
• "What's not working, and what are you doing about it?"
• "What would you need from us to get better results?"

The last question matters most, because the answer may point back at your website, your offer or your follow-up.

What do you need to own before you switch agencies?

Whatever you decide, make sure your business owns these in its own name.

• Google Search Console, with you as the owner.
• Google Analytics, with admin access in your name.
• Your domain, registered to your business.
• Your website and hosting logins.
• Your Google Business Profile, if you have one.

If the agency set any of these up under its own account, ask them to transfer ownership now, while things are friendly. It's much harder to sort out after you've given notice.

Questions people ask about SEO agencies

How do I know if my SEO agency is working?

Ask what they changed on your site last month, then check clicks in Search Console with searches for your company name filtered out. Growth in those non-brand clicks is the clearest sign of the agency's work. Growth in searches for your name may have little to do with SEO.

Why is my SEO traffic up but leads aren't?

Usually because the website isn't turning visits into inquiries, or the traffic is for searches your buyers don't make. Check your service pages and contact page first, then the queries that bring people in.

Should I fire my SEO agency?

Fire them if they guarantee rankings, hide what they've changed or won't give you your own accounts. If the problem is on your side, like the website or the follow-up, a new agency will run into the same wall.

What should my SEO agency show me every month?

What changed on your site, non-brand clicks and impressions for your service pages, how many inquiries came from organic search, and what didn't work. If the report is all rankings and green arrows, ask for the rest.

Will checking all this take an afternoon you'd rather spend on something else? Probably. But it beats paying for another year and still not knowing.