What attracted you to the agency at that price?
The agency promised monthly reporting, keyword tracking, and two blog posts per month for $299. For a small business watching every dollar, that seemed like a structured solution at an accessible price.
What did the reporting actually show?
Vanity metrics. Rankings for branded terms I already dominated, traffic graphs without segmentation, and no mention of conversion behaviour. The blog posts were 400 words each with no internal linking strategy.
When did you realize the arrangement was not working?
After nine months. Organic traffic had remained flat. I ran a site crawl using Screaming Frog and found 140 pages with missing meta descriptions and 23 broken internal links, none of which the agency had flagged or addressed.
What was the actual financial damage?
$2,691 paid over nine months, plus $600 to a consultant who spent two days correcting the technical issues. A mid-range agency at $800 per month with a proper onboarding audit would likely have produced measurable results within the same timeframe.
One question to ask any agency before signing
Request a sample technical audit from a previous client engagement. If they do not conduct technical audits as part of onboarding, their process is unlikely to address the issues that actually affect rankings.
Search rankings are not a destination. They shift with every algorithm update, every competitor's action, and every change in how people actually phrase their queries. Treating SEO as an ongoing discipline — not a completed task — is what separates sites that hold their ground from those that disappear from page one within a year.