Most business owners I talk to have been burned by an agency at least once. Usually not by anything dramatic. No one ran off with the money. They just paid a monthly fee for a year, could never quite explain what they got for it, and left with less than they started with.
The frustrating part is that it is almost always avoidable. The warning signs are there in the sales conversation, before anything is signed. You just have to know what you are listening for.
Here are the seven I would walk away from.
Worth saying up front: I am a
digital marketing freelancer, so I have an obvious interest in you being sceptical of agencies. Read it with that in mind. The points still stand.
1. A long lock-in contract
Six months. Twelve months. Sometimes longer.
The pitch is always that
SEO takes time to work, which is true. But needing time to show results and needing you legally bound for a year are different things, and only one of them benefits you.
A month to month arrangement means they have to earn the next invoice every month. That is exactly the pressure you want on the person doing your marketing.
If there is a contract, read the exit clause before you read anything else. How much notice do you have to give? What happens to the work if you leave? Can you leave at all?
Some genuine exceptions exist. A big website build with a payment plan is reasonably locked in, because the work is locked in. Ongoing monthly marketing is not the same thing.
2. Guaranteed rankings or guaranteed results
Nobody controls Google. Not me, not the biggest agency in Melbourne. Anyone guaranteeing a position in the search results is either being loose with the truth or planning something you would not want done to your business.
The usual method behind a ranking guarantee is click manipulation. Bots or paid clickers sent to your listing to fake engagement. It sometimes moves things briefly. It does not last, and it can get your Google Business Profile suspended, which is a genuinely bad day for a local business.
The other version is quieter. They guarantee rankings for terms nobody searches for. Rank number one for "emergency plumber Mornington 24 hour weekend" and you have technically been delivered a guarantee. You just will not get any calls from it.
Google, Meta, Pinterest and other Paid advertising is a bit different, because you can buy your way to the top of the page. Even then, nobody can guarantee what those clicks cost or whether they convert.
What you should expect instead is a forecast with reasoning behind it. Here is where you sit, here is what the competition looks like, here is what I think is achievable and roughly when. That is a professional opinion. A guarantee is a sales tactic.
3. You do not actually own your website
This one catches people out constantly.
Some agencies build on a proprietary platform, meaning a system they own and you rent. It works fine while you are a client. The day you leave, the site does not come with you. You do not get the files, you cannot move it to another host, and your only real option is paying someone to rebuild it from scratch.
Ask directly: if I leave in twelve months, what happens to my website?
The answer you want is that it is built on a platform you can take over, and the account is in your name. WordPress, Shopify, Duda, Squarespace, Wix. All of these can sit in your account with the agency given access, rather than the other way around.
If you paid for it, you should own it. That is not an unreasonable position to hold.
4. No lead tracking, only traffic reports
If the monthly report is rankings and traffic, you are being shown activity, not results.
Traffic is not the point. Enquiries are the point. Rankings went up is only good news if the phone rang more, and the two do not always move together.
A decent setup tracks what actually happened. Form submissions, phone calls, whether the enquiry came from search, ads or the Google Business Profile. Call tracking numbers are common for businesses where most enquiries come by phone, and they are worth it if that is you.
Without that, nobody can tell you which half of the budget is working. Including the agency.
Ask what they will be tracking and what the report will show you. If the answer is vague, that is the answer.
5. You cannot tell what they did last month
Marketing is easy to fake, because most clients cannot audit it. That is exactly why transparency matters more here than in most things you buy.
You should be able to open the monthly report and see specifics. What pages were changed. What content was written and where it went live. What was adjusted in the ad account and why. What is planned next month.
"We optimised your site" is not a deliverable. It is a sentence.
You should also know who is doing the work. Plenty of agencies sell you the senior person and hand the account to a junior, or offshore it entirely. Not automatically a problem, but you should be told, and you should know who to call when something breaks.
6. Their SEO is just blog posts
This is the most common one right now and it is getting worse.
An agency signs you up for SEO and delivers ten or twenty blog posts a month. No technical work, no service page improvements, no local optimisation, no links. Just volume, increasingly written by AI tools with barely a human near it.
That is not a strategy, and it is not harmless. Publishing piles of thin, overlapping content can cannibalise the pages that actually make you money. Your service pages end up competing with your own blog posts for the same searches, and Google gets less sure which one to show. You can genuinely go backwards.
Content has a place. It supports the money pages, answers real customer questions, and builds authority on the topics you want to be known for. But it works alongside technical fixes, well built service pages, a properly optimised Google Business Profile and links from places that matter.
If the whole plan is a content calendar, ask what else is happening. If there is no answer, there is no strategy.
7. The agency owns your accounts
Your domain name. Your Google Business Profile. Your Google Ads account. Your analytics. Your ad pixels. Your hosting.
All of it should be in accounts you own, with the agency added as a user. Not the reverse.
The Google Ads one hurts the most. I have seen a business leave an agency and lose the ad account entirely, because it was created under the agency's manager account. Starting fresh means starting with no conversion history, so the campaigns go back into a learning period and costs go up while Google works out what a good lead looks like all over again. Months of data, gone, and you paid for every click that generated it.
The domain is worse in a different way, because it can be used as leverage. If you cannot log in and see who your domain is registered to, sort that out this week regardless of who does your marketing.
What to ask before you sign
Six questions. They take about ten minutes and they will tell you most of what you need to know.
1. What is the notice period, and what happens to the work if I leave?
2. Whose name are the website, domain, ad account and Google Business Profile in?
3. What will you be tracking, and what will the monthly report actually show me?
4. Who is doing the work day to day, and who do I contact when something is wrong?
5. Beyond content, what does the plan involve?
6. What do you think is realistic in six months, and why?
Watch how they handle the questions as much as the answers. Someone confident in their work will not mind being asked. Someone who gets defensive about ownership and reporting is telling you something useful.
The short version
Own your assets. Avoid lock-in. Be suspicious of guarantees. Insist on knowing what was done and what it produced.
None of this makes an agency good. Plenty of businesses tick every box and still deliver very little. But every one of these red flags has cost someone I have spoken to real money, and they are all visible before you sign anything.
If you are weighing up a proposal and something about it feels off, I am happy to look over it and give you a straight opinion. I work with businesses around Melbourne and the Mornington Peninsula, month to month, and you deal with me directly.
Get in touch.
Frequently asked questions
Q.
What are the biggest red flags when hiring a digital marketing agency?
Long lock-in contracts, guaranteed rankings, websites built on platforms you cannot take with you, no lead tracking, vague monthly reporting, an SEO plan that is only blog posts, and any accounts or assets held in the agency's name rather than yours.
Q. Should I sign a 12 month contract with a marketing agency?
You do not need to. Month to month is common and it keeps the pressure where it belongs. If a contract is unavoidable, read the notice period and exit terms first, and check what happens to the work if you leave.
Q. Can an SEO agency guarantee first page rankings?
No. Nobody controls Google's results. Guarantees are usually either based on keywords nobody searches for, or backed by click manipulation that can get your Google Business Profile suspended. Expect a reasoned forecast instead.
Q. Who should own my website, domain and Google Business Profile?
You should. Every account should be registered in your business name with the agency added as a user. If you paid for it, you should be able to take it with you when you leave.
Q. Is publishing blog posts every month the same as SEO?
No. Content supports SEO but it is not the whole of it. A real plan also covers technical fixes, service pages, local optimisation and links. High volume AI content can cannibalise your service pages and cost you rankings.
