Either trust your SEO or fire them

You hired an SEO expert because you don’t know how to do SEO properly. So why are you spending half your day checking up on them, questioning their every move, and basically acting like you know better than the person you’re paying to have the expertise you lack?

If you want to second-guess every recommendation they make and treat your SEO like a junior employee who needs constant supervision, save yourself the money and fire them. Then do it yourself.

I’m serious.

Because right now, you’re paying expert rates for someone whose hands you’ve tied behind their back. And then wondering why you’re not getting the results you were promised.

You’re sabotaging your own SEO results

Look, I get it. SEO feels mysterious. You can’t see what’s happening day-to-day like you can with your website designer who shows you mock-ups, or your accountant who produces neat spreadsheets. SEO results take time, and in that waiting period, your brain starts playing tricks on you.

“What if they’re not doing anything? What if I’m being ripped off? What if that article I read on LinkedIn about buying backlinks is more important than what my SEO is telling me?”

So you start checking their work. Logging into your website admin to see what they’ve changed. Sending urgent emails about things that caught your attention. Questioning their priorities. Restricting their access because you’re worried they might “break something.”

But every minute you spend managing your SEO expert is a minute they’re not spending on your SEO. And every time you override their decisions based on something you’ve read on LinkedIn, you’re basically paying someone to watch you undo their work.

Two businesses, two very different outcomes

Let me tell you about two clients I worked with a few years back. Both B2B service businesses, both struggling with organic traffic, both paying the same monthly retainer.

The marketing agency that got it right

A Nottingham-based marketing agency hired me to improve their organic visibility (yes, even marketing agencies need SEO help sometimes). From day one, they gave me full admin access to their website, responded to my emails within 48 hours, and attended our monthly strategy calls.

When I recommended restructuring their service pages because they were targeting the wrong keywords, they didn’t question it – they just asked when I needed the new content and got it to me on time. When I suggested removing their blog because it was thin, outdated content that was hurting their authority, they trusted my judgment even though it felt counterintuitive.

They never once logged into their website admin to check what I’d been doing. They never sent me urgent emails about things they’d read in some marketing newsletter. They just let me do the job they’d hired me to do.

Three months later, their organic traffic had doubled. 5 months later, they were ranking on page one for their main commercial terms and generating qualified leads through search every week.

The SaaS company that made everything harder

Then there was the SaaS company.

They hired me because their organic traffic was basically non-existent. Great, I thought, lots of opportunity. But from the first week, they made my job nearly impossible.

They gave me limited WordPress access, so I couldn’t implement basic technical fixes without booking a time in advance. They ignored my weekly reports (I know because they never answered one question I put in there and I had to chase up constantly). They skipped our strategy calls, then sent panicked emails asking why things weren’t improving fast enough.

When I recommended fixing their site structure and internal linking, they ignored it and asked me to focus on disavowing random backlinks instead. When I explained this wasn’t a priority, they questioned my expertise and sent me articles they’d found from 2018.

But the worst thing they did, the thing that had me tearing my hair out and screaming into the void, was they would change the on-page things I’d done to help their rankings, without telling me. I’d optimise their page titles, and they’d “improve” them the next week because they preferred how the old ones sounded. I’d fix their internal linking, and they’d undo it because it “they didn’t like how it looked” .

I spent more time chasing them for responses, explaining why their random requests weren’t helping, and re-doing work they’d undone than I did working on their site. After five months of this, their traffic had barely moved, they blamed me for the lack of results, and I fired them.

Last I checked, their organic traffic is still terrible.

Maybe you should just do SEO yourself

If you can’t trust an SEO expert to do their job without constant oversight, maybe you should skip hiring one altogether.

I’ve got the non-wanky SEO course – it’s £750. That’s probably less than you’d pay for two months of professional SEO help. It’s got 8 modules, 92 lessons, and everything you need to understand SEO properly. The non-wanky on-page SEO Toolkit is even less, at £200.

Sure, you’ll have to figure it out through trial and error. Yes, you’ll make mistakes that a professional wouldn’t. And you’ll spend months learning what an experienced SEO already knows.

But at least you won’t waste money paying someone you don’t trust to do work you won’t let them do properly.

Think about it: if you’re going to second-guess every recommendation anyway, if you’re going to restrict access and change things back to how you prefer them, if you’re going to ignore their advice and follow random LinkedIn posts instead – what exactly are you paying them for?

You might as well save the monthly retainer and invest that time in learning to do it yourself. At least then when you make mistakes, you’re only wasting your own time, not someone else’s expertise.

There’s no middle ground

Either you trust the person you’ve hired to know more about SEO than you do, or you don’t.

If you don’t trust them, sack them and find someone you do trust. Or better yet, do it yourself.

But don’t keep paying someone whilst simultaneously undermining everything they’re trying to achieve. It’s expensive, frustrating for everyone involved, and guaranteed to deliver poor results.

Stop treating your SEO expert like an intern who needs constant supervision. They’re not your employee – they’re a specialist you’ve hired to solve a problem you can’t solve yourself.

Let them solve it, or find someone else who can.