Hiring SEO Again: What Went Wrong Last Time and What to Demand Now

The contract ended, or it is about to renew. There were months of reports, with a chart going up and a list of keywords on page one. The phone rang just as often as it did before.

Now a new proposal has arrived. At home, someone asks the question you had already been asking yourself: again?

It weighs on you because the first decision was yours. An ad that fails to sell ends up as that month’s expense. Consulting that fails to deliver ends up as a choice made twice, by the same person.

There is a narrower question, and it settles the decision. What exactly went wrong last time? Once you answer it, you can decide whether to hire again, what to demand, and from whom.

Nothing in this piece blames whoever worked on your site before. Google itself says so in writing: “Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners.” ¹ The target here is five design flaws. They happen to honest people on both sides of the table.

Five ways an SEO contract goes wrong

Think of the car that came back from the shop making the same noise. Before you take it somewhere else, you want to know what happened. Did they replace the wrong part? Did anyone look under the hood before replacing it? Was the noise even coming from the engine?

Skip that conversation and you drive to a second shop, paying twice for the same guesswork. SEO works the same way.

The site was never in the game

Before it competes for a position, a page has to be found by Google’s crawler and stored in the index. The Search Console help is direct about it: “all of your important pages should be indexed.” ²

If the pages that sell were left out, the content and the keywords were working for a store with its door locked. A year of reports may have measured a site Google could barely see. The four doors a page passes through are laid out in how to get your site on Google. That piece also has the exercise that shows where your site stopped.

The work started without a diagnosis

Google’s advice here starts with one line: “See if the SEO is interested in you and your business.” That person should ask what makes your business unique, who your competitors are, and how your customers find you. ¹

When those questions get pushed to later, the plan is born inside a keyword volume tool. In come articles about what lots of people search for and few people buy. In the book, I argue for the reverse order. The map comes from what the company delivers and charges for, and the tool comes in later, to size it. ³

The articles already published are still yours. Some of them may be bringing in exactly the right customer, and the next section shows how to check.

The deadline came before the diagnosis

A round date for results, given in the first meeting, was given before anyone looked at the site. Google publishes a more modest yardstick: “Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months.” ⁴

There is also an order that repeats. In the case I measured for the book, impressions rose first and clicks arrived two months later. Anyone promising clicks in four weeks is promising the part that shows up last. ³ In that contract, expectations broke before the work even began.

The report measured whatever goes up

Picture a small counter above a store’s door that clicks once for every person who walks in. The door counter tallies who came in. If the monthly report calls every tick of that counter a sale, the number goes up and the register stays flat.

The number of ranking keywords, the positions of a hand-picked list, the total of articles published. These numbers go up with real work. They also go up without a single new customer. This is called a vanity metric.

Google’s guide to traffic drops advises against focusing too much on absolute position. In its words, “Impressions and clicks are ultimately the measure of success for your site.” ⁵ Even that yardstick stops at the click. The ringing phone never shows up in Search Console, and the phone is what pays the bills.

The yardstick measured something else

Here the report did ask about customers, and the yardstick gave the wrong answer. Three flaws come up often.

Start with the conversion event. I have opened reports showing a 100% conversion rate. The event being counted was a page view, and every visit includes a page. ⁶

Next comes your company’s name, mixed in with everything else. Whoever types your name already knew you, from your storefront, a referral, or Instagram. The book puts it in one line: searches for your name are typed by other people, and your part is to prompt them. ³ Added to the other clicks, that search credits SEO with a customer who came in through another door.

Last, the starting date. Growth measured from before the contract credits the work with what was already happening. ³ The rule also runs the other way, and it protects whoever worked on the site before: a drop that started earlier is not their fault either.

Checking the measurement setup comes before any number. That check is the first step of our SEO audit piece, which calls it the baseline exam.

What Search Console tells you about the previous work

Search Console is free, and it keeps your site’s history. In one afternoon, it answers a good part of the question. Grab a sheet of paper and write today’s date at the top.

The date the work began

Think of the pencil marks on a door frame, with a child’s height and the date next to each one. Without the first mark, nobody knows how much the child has grown. This is called a baseline.

In Search Console, open Settings, then Users and permissions, then Ownership history. That page lists owners added and removed, along with verification attempts. ⁷ If the previous team was added as an owner, Google itself recorded the date they came in. If no date shows up, the date of the first invoice will do.

Everything before that date is your baseline. Everything after it is the contract period.

Sixteen months, month by month

In the Performance report, choose the last 16 months. To keep more than that, Google points to the Search Analytics API or bulk data exports. ⁵ The 16 months let you check whether the movement repeats every year, because of a holiday or a trend. ⁵

Switch the granularity to Monthly, which neutralizes the day-of-the-week effect. ⁸ Then compare the contract months with the same months of the previous year. If the contract started more than 16 months ago, the before has dropped off the screen. Write that on the sheet as something you cannot know.

Your name, separated from everything else

The Performance report has a filter for branded and non-branded queries. It separates searches that include your brand name from the rest. ⁹ Google states the limits. The filter is unavailable for sites with few impressions, and some queries may land in the wrong group. ⁹

Without that filter, use “Queries not containing” with your company’s name. ⁸ One caution comes with it. With a query filter applied, anonymized queries drop out of the totals. ⁹ And on the sites I measured, the queries list covered only between a quarter and two-fifths of actual clicks. ⁶ Compare this line with itself over time, never with the site’s total.

What matters is the line without your name, month by month, before and after the start date. That is where the SEO work shows up. The line with your name tells another, slower story. Read it as an absolute number, because its percentage falls whenever the rest grows. ³

The pages the previous work created

On the same screen, filter pages by the blog’s address, or by the part of the site published during the contract. ⁸ Note the clicks on each one and answer the book’s question: does this page talk about what the company sells? ³

This is where the value that stayed behind shows up. A page that gets clicks from people looking for your service is an asset of yours. It stays live after the contract ends.

The pages that sell, inside the index

Last, take the ten pages that carry your revenue and check them one by one in the URL Inspection tool. ² If any has been out of the index for months, you found the first mistake on the list. The next conversation starts at the front door.

One rule covers all five checks: no diagnosis from a single source. ⁶ If traffic dropped during the contract, check the measurement, seasonality, and demand first. That reading has a piece of its own, on why your organic traffic dropped.

What to demand from whoever comes next

With the sheet filled in, the next meeting changes tone. You already know which of the five mistakes happened, and you can ask about it directly.

Google’s page for people about to hire an SEO lists questions few people bring to that meeting. ¹ Three of them fit someone who has already been through a contract.

“Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?” Google suggests asking exactly that. ¹ A year from now, that record lets you separate what worked from the rest.

“What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?” This one comes from Google too. ¹ A good answer talks about a baseline, about clicks without your brand name, and about customer contact.

Can I talk to some of your past clients? Google calls this checking business references. It suggests asking whether the SEO “provided useful service, was easy to work with, and produced positive results.” ¹

Two access rules complete the list. Keep yourself, or someone at the company, as a verified owner in Search Console. Every property needs at least one, and without one nobody has access. ⁷ When someone new runs an audit, Google’s advice is to “only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don’t grant them write access).” ¹

Be wary of one sentence in particular: everything done before was wrong, because the game has changed. That line has a commercial use, and I wrote about it in the book. Declaring SEO dead wipes out the client’s history and lets someone resell the same work under a new name and price. ¹⁰ Google itself lists “Optimizing for generative AI” among the useful services an SEO can offer. It also tells you to ask whether that advice is “aligned with Google Search’s official guidance on optimizing for generative AI features.” ¹

Whoever starts by reading the previous work, with the numbers on your sheet, respects the money you have already spent. The book’s calm question works here: can you explain that without the acronym? ¹⁰

The decision, with our stake disclosed

Hire again when you can name what failed, and when the new proposal answers that failure. If the site was missing from the index, the first job may belong to whoever works on the code. For a small local business, Google writes that “you can probably do much of the work yourself.” ¹ What fits on your calendar is in SEO for small businesses.

Now our stake, right at the point of recommendation. SEO Genome sells SEO consulting, and some of the people who reach out to us have hired SEO before. The service page lists five questions to ask any consulting firm, ours included. They add to Google’s three. The order we follow, diagnosis before execution, is published on our methodology page. This piece rests on Google and on the book, and it applies to any provider. Who you hire to do the work is your call.

From today on, when you see a chart going up, you will ask what date it starts from. And whether your name is inside it.

Open Search Console this week and find Ownership history. Write the start date at the top of the sheet. Below it, list the five mistakes, with a yes or a no next to each one. Take that sheet to your first meeting with whoever comes next.