Paid an agency $3,000/mo for SEO. 6 months later, our traffic is down.

As a technical founder, I know how to build the product, but I absolutely suck at marketing. So, when we hit a growth plateau, I convinced my co-founder to dip into our savings and hire a specialized SEO agency.

They promised the world: "We'll get you to page one for high-intent keywords. Give us 6 months." We signed a contract for $3,000/month—a massive chunk of our runway.

For the first few months, the reports they sent looked incredible. They were building "high-quality backlinks" and "optimizing our site speed." I felt relieved. I thought I had finally outsourced our growth problem.

I pulled our actual Google Analytics this morning. Over the last 6 months, our organic traffic has dropped by 12%. Our domain rating barely moved. When I dug into the "high-quality backlinks" they built, I found out they were just spamming blog comment sections and low-tier directory sites. They didn't write a single piece of actual content for our blog. They just took our money and sent automated reports.

I feel like an absolute idiot. I just burned $18,000 on a retainer that did nothing but hurt our site's reputation and drain our bank account. We could have hired a full-time junior marketer for that money.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to recover.

For those who have used agencies: What are the red flags you look for before signing a contract, and how do you structure the deal to protect yourself?

Do you require a performance-based contract (like revenue share)? Do you demand access to their actual workflow and tools? I need to figure out how to hold people accountable before I ever spend money on marketing again.