You have been paying for a while. Nothing obvious has changed. Every month a report arrives full of green arrows, and every month you have the same quiet thought: is this doing anything?
That thought is usually right, and it is usually late. Here are nine signs, in the order you can check them, and the questions that get you a real answer.
Start with the honest caveat: SEO is slow. Three months of nothing is normal. Six months of nothing needs an explanation. Twelve months of nothing is an answer.
The twenty-minute check, in your own Search Console
Do this before the nine signs, because it settles most of the argument on its own. Every other article on this subject asks you to judge a feeling. This is evidence your agency cannot edit, because it comes from Google rather than their dashboard.
- Open Google Search Console and select your property. If you cannot get in, stop — that is sign zero, and it is covered below.
- Go to Performance → Search results. Google’s own troubleshooting guide tells you to “choose the Date filter on top of the chart and select Last 16 months” — the full history the tool retains.
- Look at Total clicks, not impressions. Clicks are people arriving. Impressions are people scrolling past.
- Mark on that line the month you started paying. Everything to the right is what you bought.
- Switch to the Pages tab and sort by clicks. Are the pages they created in there at all? Ten new articles that have never received a click in six months is not a slow start. It is a result.
- Switch to Queries. Are these terms a customer would type before buying, or are they your own business name and a tail of oddities?
A flat click line with a rising impression line is the single most common picture in a failing retainer, and it is also the picture that looks best in a monthly report. Now you know which one you are looking at.
1. No movement after six months, and no explanation offered
If that clicks line is flat or down after six months of paid work, something is wrong.
The sign is not the flat line. The sign is that they have not raised it with you. A good agency brings you a bad six-month chart before you find it, with a diagnosis attached. An agency that sends the same cheerful report over a flat line is either not looking or hoping you are not.
2. The report is all vanity metrics — or the traffic went up and the phone did not
Count what is actually in the monthly report. If it is impressions, keyword rankings, domain authority, “tasks completed” and hours spent, you are looking at RF-06 — reporting that cannot fail.
Impressions do not pay wages. Domain authority is a third-party vendor score that Google does not use. And rankings can be reported against keywords chosen after the fact — “37 keywords improved” does not tell you whether those 37 are keywords a customer would ever type.
Watch for the version that is harder to spot: traffic genuinely rises and nothing else does. That usually means the content is aimed at people researching rather than people buying, and it happens most often when nobody ever asked you what a lead is worth or where your customers actually come from.
Whatever the report says, check its claims against your own Search Console rather than the portal they give you. A report built inside the agency’s platform is a document they control.
What should be there: organic sessions, then conversions — calls, forms, bookings, sales — then leads or revenue where trackable, plus a list of the work actually done that month. If it is not in the report, ask for it in writing. The response tells you a lot.
3. Nobody can tell you what was done last month
Ask this exact question by email: “Please list the specific work completed in the last 30 days, with the URLs affected and the dates.”
A working agency answers in a day with a list: these three pages rewritten, this template fixed, these two articles published, this link placed. A bad one answers with a category — “ongoing optimization and content work” — which is RF-02 in action. If the deliverables were never quantified in the proposal, they cannot be counted now, and that was the point.
Vague scope is also how a retainer quietly shrinks. Month one gets real attention; by month six the work has decayed to a login, a plugin update, and a report generated by a tool.
4. The links are from sites you would be embarrassed by
Ask for the last 20 links they built, as a list of URLs. Then open ten of them.
You do not need to be an expert to judge this. Does the site look like a real publication someone reads? Is your article surrounded by unrelated posts about casinos, crypto, CBD and payday loans? Is there an author with a name? Was your link dropped into a paragraph that has nothing to do with your business?
If it is the second picture, you bought RF-03 — links from sites that exist to sell links. Google treats that as link spam, and the cost is not just the wasted fee. It can be a penalty or a quiet site-wide devaluation that you then pay somebody else to clean up.
Watch the vocabulary too: “DA 50+”, “authority stacking”, “link package”, “guest post network”, “100 links per month”. Those are the words of the thing you do not want.
5. The content is something you would never put your name on
Read the last three articles they published for you, all the way through.
The test is simple: would you send this to a customer? Does it say anything a person in your industry could not have written in ten seconds? Does it mention your actual services, your actual city, your actual prices? Does it contradict how your business works?
Volume is the tell. Twenty articles a month from a team of three is RF-16 — bulk generated content sold at bespoke prices. For most small businesses, two to six genuinely useful pages a month is a realistic output. Mass unhelpful content is also one of the few things that can actively suppress the pages on your site that already work.
Ask: “Who wrote this article, and who edited it?” A name is a good answer. “Our content team” is not.
6. You do not have admin access to your own accounts
Check, right now, that you are the owner — not a user, the owner — of every item on this list. Most people check three of them and miss the two that matter.
- Your domain, in your own registrar account, with you as registrant
- DNS control, which is sometimes held separately from the domain
- Hosting, and the ability to export a full backup
- The CMS — an admin login that is not theirs
- Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Tag Manager
- Google Search Console
- Your Google Business Profile
- Any ad accounts, as an admin, not a linked user
If any of those sit under the agency’s account, you are in RF-09 or RF-14 territory, and this is the most expensive problem on the page. It determines what leaving costs you. Reviews on a Business Profile you do not own are years of work you cannot take with you. A domain held by an unwilling party is a business that can be switched off.
Fix this while the relationship is still cordial. Asking for ownership transfer is a normal request during a good month and a fight during a bad one.
7. The invoice has fees that do not map to work
Look for a platform fee, a dashboard access fee, a software licence, a “management fee” on top of the retainer. That is RF-10. Internal tooling is their cost of doing business, not a line on your invoice, and when your content and reporting live inside their platform, cancelling means losing them.
Also check the reverse: a setup fee you paid at the start that produced no artefact you can point to (RF-11). You should be able to name the thing you received — the technical audit document, the keyword plan, the tracking setup — and you should still have it.
8. The account keeps changing hands, and nobody is named
If you cannot name the person doing your work this month, and could not name them last month either, you are dealing with RF-15 — undisclosed subcontracting or an anonymous pool.
Subcontracting is not the problem. Hidden subcontracting is, because the quality standard, the data handling and the accountable person are then all different from what you were sold.
Ask: “Who is the individual responsible for day-to-day management of my account, and is any of the work subcontracted?”
9. Every conversation ends in an upsell
Six months of no results, and the recommendation is a bigger package. More links, more articles, a second location, a premium tier. The diagnosis is always “we need more budget” and never “here is what did not work and why”.
Pair that with RF-12 pressure language — “this upgrade price is valid until Friday” — and the relationship has stopped being a service.
How to ask for proof without starting a fight
Send one email. Keep it factual and give a deadline:
Before our next renewal I would like to review performance properly. Could you send, by [date]:
- The specific work completed over the last 90 days, with URLs and dates.
- A list of every link built for us, as URLs.
- Organic sessions and conversions for the last 12 months, month by month.
- Confirmation that we are the owner of our domain, DNS, hosting, CMS, Analytics, Search Console, Google Business Profile and ad accounts.
- The name of the person managing our account day to day.
Every one of those is a reasonable request from a paying client, and none is hostile. What comes back is the audit.
A good agency sends it within days, including the parts that look bad. A struggling-but-honest one sends it late with an apology and a plan — often worth staying for. A bad one answers with a call invitation instead of documents, explains why the data is complicated, or gets offended. That answer is your answer.
When it is not underperformance — it is fraud
Some of this crosses from disappointing into deceptive. Google’s guidance on hiring an SEO names the markers: be wary of anyone who “claim[s] to guarantee rankings, allege[s] a ‘special relationship’ with Google, or advertise[s] a ‘priority submit’ to Google”, and “be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.” If your provider found you through a cold call claiming to be from Google, you are in that territory.
Google’s page also gives the route almost nobody mentions: “In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices.” File at reportfraud.ftc.gov or call 1-877-FTC-HELP; for a provider outside the US, econsumer.gov. Those complaints are how cases get built — FTC v. Pointbreak Media (2018) was exactly this pattern: cold calls claiming to represent Google, listing “verification” fees, and “guaranteed” first-page placement sold at $949.99 up front plus $99.99–$169.99 a month.
Before you cancel, check what leaving costs
Do not send the cancellation email until you have read the agreement. Specifically: the notice period, whether an auto-renewal date is coming (RF-05), whether there is an early termination fee, and who owns the content and the accounts (RF-09).
The order matters. Get ownership transferred, export your data, then give notice. Doing it the other way round is how people lose two years of content and a Google Business Profile in the same week.
If you want a second opinion on what you are actually paying for — the proposal, the agreement, or the last three monthly reports — that is what the audit is for. One document set, read line by line, with a written verdict in plain English.
Sources
- Google Search Console Help / Search Central, Debugging drops in Google Search traffic — the 16-month date range in the Performance report.
- Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO? — last updated 5 June 2026, CC BY 4.0. Source of the quotes on guarantees, “special relationship” claims, secrecy and the FTC route.
- FTC, FTC Action Halts Deceptive Robocalls Aimed at Small Business Owners (May 2018) — FTC v. Pointbreak Media, LLC, including the fee figures quoted above.
- reportfraud.ftc.gov and econsumer.gov — where to file, in the US and cross-border.
- The RF-01 to RF-17 identifiers are our own audit rubric, not an industry standard.