Measuring and managing
When to fire your SEO agency
Published 26 August 2026 · Updated 26 August 2026 · 6 min read
SEO is slow, which makes it easy to tolerate an agency for a year longer than you should. These are the tests that separate patience from denial.
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Leaving too early wastes what you have already spent. Staying too long wastes another year. This is how to tell which situation you are in.
Reasons that are not, on their own, enough
- Three months without results. Normal, as the realistic timeline explains.
- A ranking drop after a Google update, if it is being explained and addressed.
- Slower progress than a competitor who is spending three times as much.
- A quiet month where the agency was waiting on you for approvals.
Reasons that are enough
- Six months with no movement in leading indicators. Not enquiries, indicators: impressions, pages ranking, indexed pages.
- No evidence of work. You cannot point at anything on your site that changed.
- Reporting that will not reconcile with your own data. Check it yourself using Search Console.
- Access withheld. Your data, your accounts, no legitimate reason.
- Work you did not approve appearing in your name, particularly in a regulated sector.
- Nobody senior will engage with the commercial question of what this is producing.
The conversation to have first
Ask for a meeting with whoever owns the relationship, not the account executive, and put three things in writing beforehand: what you expected by now, what you can see, and what you need to see in the next sixty days. Reasonable agencies respond to this properly, and a meaningful minority of engagements are rescued by it, usually because the brief or the budget was wrong rather than the team.
If you decide to leave
Do the administrative work before giving notice: reclaim owner level access to every account, export your data, and request the documentation you are entitled to. How to switch SEO agencies is the full checklist, and following it is the difference between a clean move and a lost quarter.
Do not conclude that SEO does not work
One poor engagement proves very little. Before deciding the channel is wrong for you, buy an independent audit to find out whether the strategy was wrong, the budget was too thin or the execution was poor. What an SEO audit should include covers what to expect, and how to choose an SEO agency covers doing the selection better next time.
When you are ready, compare SEO agencies in Bristol by rating and specialism, or request quotes and interview three properly.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
How long should I give a new agency before deciding?
Six months to judge leading indicators and activity, twelve to judge commercial return. If activity and evidence are absent at month three, do not wait for month six.
Can I ask for a refund?
Rarely successful unless the contract specified deliverables that were not delivered, which is one reason to insist on named deliverables at the start. A negotiated reduction in the final notice period is more achievable.
Should I tell them why?
Yes, factually and in writing. It makes the handover smoother and occasionally produces a genuine offer to fix things that is worth considering.
Will leaving damage my rankings?
Not if you keep access, keep the content and avoid a long gap. Damage comes from accounts being lost, work stopping for months, or a new agency rebuilding everything in week one.
Written by the CompareSEO Bristol editorial team. We are an independent directory and we do not sell SEO services, so nothing here is written to win your business. Read our methodology for how we compile and check what we publish.
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