We have inherited a lot of accounts from other agencies. The technical work is usually fine. What went wrong was almost always structural — and predictable from the first month.
When a client moves to us after a disappointing engagement, we audit what the previous agency did. The work is usually competent. The failure is almost always somewhere else, and it repeats.
1. Recommendations were never implemented
The most common pattern by a wide margin. A thorough audit was delivered, the fixes required developer time, developer time was allocated to product roadmap, and eighteen months later the same issues are still open. The audit was not wrong; it was just never a real project.
The fix is unglamorous: agree implementation capacity before scoping the audit. We now decline audit-only engagements where nobody can name who will do the work.
2. Success was never defined
If the goal is “improve our SEO”, the engagement cannot succeed, because there is no state in which it is finished. Define the metric, the baseline and the timeframe in writing before month one. If a stakeholder cannot agree to a number, that disagreement will surface later as dissatisfaction.
3. Content was commissioned without distribution
Publishing is not distribution. Content with no internal linking plan, no promotion and no earned links sits in an index nobody queries. Budget for what happens after publish, or publish less and promote it properly.
4. Nobody owned it internally
Engagements with a named internal owner who has authority to unblock work outperform those without, consistently and by a wide margin. An agency cannot substitute for internal ownership. Where there is no owner, the account slowly becomes a monthly report nobody reads.
5. The timeframe was never honest
Someone promised results in three months to win the account. At month four, with the technical foundation only just repaired, the client concludes SEO does not work. It usually did work — it was sold on a timeline nobody could meet.
What we do differently
Every proposal opens with a 90-day plan naming phases, deliverables and the metric each phase moves. We state implementation dependencies before signature. And when we think the honest answer is that a client should fix their product, their pricing or their sales follow-up before spending on search, we say that instead — which loses us work and keeps the clients we do take for years.