I have inherited a lot of client sites from other agencies. Some of them were simply underperforming — wrong strategy, not enough effort, mediocre output. Some of them had active problems: link schemes, keyword-stuffed content, technical shortcuts that looked fine until Google updated its spam filters. The distinction matters enormously, because the path forward is completely different.

Before you fire your SEO, I think it is worth being honest about a few things. SEO is slow, and impatience is responsible for a meaningful percentage of provider switches that did not need to happen. But real underperformance exists, and so does genuinely bad work that you need to identify and stop. Here is how I think about the difference.

Signs Your SEO Is Actually Underperforming

The clearest signal is stagnation without explanation. SEO should produce movement — not necessarily dramatic ranking jumps every month, but measurable progress over a 6 to 12 month window: more indexed pages, growing impressions, gradual position improvements on target keywords, and eventually traffic and conversion attribution. If you are 12 months in and none of those metrics have moved, something is wrong with the work being done.

Lack of transparency is a separate and more immediate concern. If you cannot get a clear answer about what work was done in a given month — what content was created, what links were built or earned, what technical issues were identified and addressed — that is a process failure regardless of results. You are paying for work, and you should be able to see what work was done.

Vague or vanity reporting is a close cousin of that problem. If your monthly report shows keyword rankings but no traffic data, or shows traffic without tying it to goal completions or revenue, or if every metric is going up but you cannot see conversion impact, your provider may be selecting metrics that look good rather than reporting on what matters. I have a longer look at this in the SEO reporting post if you want a framework for what a real report should cover.

Signs Your SEO Has Done Something Harmful

This category is more urgent. Links from private blog networks, paid link placements on irrelevant sites, spun or AI-generated content published at scale without editorial judgment, cloaking, or aggressive redirects — these are all tactics that can produce short-term rankings and long-term penalties.

Warning signs: sudden traffic spikes followed by sudden drops, a link profile that shows hundreds of new referring domains appearing in a two-week window, content on your site that you did not approve or review, Google Search Console showing a manual action, or pages ranking for unrelated queries (often a sign of hacked content or cloaking).

If you suspect harmful tactics, pull your link profile in Ahrefs or Semrush and look at the velocity and quality of new links. Look at your Google Search Console for manual actions, security issues, and any unusual crawl anomalies. Check your own content — read recent posts or pages and ask whether they would pass your own quality bar. If any of this turns up real problems, the relationship needs to end now, not after another month.

The Fair Evaluation Before You Cut

I think it is worth being honest: SEO relationships often end because of expectation mismatches that both parties contributed to. If the timeline and success metrics were never defined clearly at the start of the engagement, you may be measuring your provider against a standard they were never given.

Before you decide, look at what was promised versus what was delivered — in writing. If there were no clear deliverables in the contract, that is a problem with how the engagement was set up, and you may need to have a direct conversation about expectations before you can evaluate outcomes fairly. Check the actual work product: are the pieces of content high quality? Is the technical SEO work documented and sound? Is the link profile improving in ways that look sustainable?

Seasonality and algorithm volatility can also affect results in ways that are not the provider’s fault. If your traffic dropped during a Google core update and most sites in your vertical dropped too, that is not necessarily a provider failure — it may be an industry-level recalibration that requires a strategy adjustment rather than a provider change. The guide on algorithm updates covers how to read those situations more accurately.

How to Have the Ending Conversation

If you have done the evaluation and you are sure you are ending the relationship, be direct and be specific. You do not owe a lengthy justification, but giving your provider a clear reason is professional and occasionally produces useful information — sometimes they have context on a situation you do not.

Do not ghost. Ending a contract by simply stopping payment and not responding causes contractual headaches and burns a bridge you may need. If there are outstanding deliverables you need — login credentials, documented access to tools, content assets, backlink documentation — get those commitments in writing before the formal termination.

How to Transition Without Losing Ground

The period between providers is one of the highest-risk windows for SEO. If work stops entirely for two to three months, you will see ranking softening on terms that were being maintained. Here is how to minimize that.

First, document everything before the current provider loses access motivation. Export Google Search Console data, Google Analytics data, keyword ranking snapshots, and any campaign documentation they have. If they were managing your Google Business Profile, ad accounts, or social accounts, change the ownership or admin access before you terminate — recovering those accounts after a difficult separation is an unnecessary headache.

Second, do not let the site go dark on content. Even a minimal publishing cadence — one or two posts per month — keeps crawl frequency up and signals ongoing activity to Google. If you cannot maintain that between providers, consider briefing a writer directly to keep the content engine running.

Third, brief the new provider with a full history: what was tried, what worked, what the link profile looks like, and what technical issues are open. Starting from scratch on an audit wastes time and money you have already spent. If the outgoing provider left behind problematic links, the incoming team needs to know that before they build their strategy.

What to Look For in the Next Provider

The main thing I would look for is transparency before you sign anything. A provider who will walk you through how they think, what they will actually do each month, and what a realistic outcome looks like in your specific competitive context — that is a better signal than case studies about someone else’s site.

If you want a direct conversation about what the right next step looks like for your site, the SEO consulting page explains how I work. The how to hire an SEO consultant post covers what to look for in that process specifically.