You know what you don’t know, and you don’t know what you don’t know about SEO, and programmatic SEO especially! 

All agencies use asymmetric information to their advantage to hide things from clients, including measuring inputs and outputs, or to put it in plain words: giving you the sh** sandwich to eat.

The nature of SEO marketing is that it takes a minimum of 4+ months from the date of a solid SEO deployment campaign, before you see any results. Most often it’s 6 months. That’s a long feedback loop. And the smaller you are, the less you spend, the weaker your brand - the more likely you are to get crap service from them.

Many agencies use this as an advantage to skim your money over this time while delivering little or nothing, and since it’s hard for you to track outputs (but you might see some inputs), it’s a risk you’re taking on.

SEO is a zero-sum game—an *existing demand capture GTM play* rather than generating new demand—there’s conflicts of interest in servicing customers from the same market vertical. While markets and the search economy are huge, there’s inherent tension if you’re servicing eg. two Canadian corporate law firms at the same time.

Many SEO agencies looking for business take on customers without end, often from the same industry, which creates poor incentives and misalignment between the agency and customers.