Switching agencies

Before you tell them

The first move isn’t the phone call to your agency.

Lock down what belongs to you first. Change the passwords on anything you can reach. Move what can be moved into accounts in your own name. If you want us to, we’ll clone whatever we can before anybody knows a change is coming.

Start with the map listing, because it’s the one nobody can find. More often than not, nobody still working at the company knows who set it up or which account controls it. We track that down and get it into your hands where we can, and it matters more than the website does, because it’s usually the thing producing most of your calls.

This isn’t us being dramatic. Most of the time an outgoing agency is difficult rather than dangerous, and you get through it. But we have watched an agency delete a client’s digital files after being told they were leaving, and there’s no undoing that once it has happened.

None of this is aggressive, and it isn’t a trick. It’s your website, your ad account, your numbers and your history. Securing your own property before you give notice is what any reasonable person would do with a set of keys, and the only reason it feels underhanded is that nobody tells you to do it.

How the move goes

Usually a month of running both, then a clean stop.

We run alongside whoever you have now before anything gets switched off. Often for a month. Nothing is turned off on a promise, and you aren’t asked to take our word for how it will go while your phone is the thing at risk.

The old work keeps running while the new work comes up next to it. You can see both. When you’re satisfied the new one is producing, the old one stops, and by then stopping it is a formality rather than a leap.

You’ll know how it went the same way you know everything else here: how many calls you got, and how many people got in touch through your website. If those numbers are worse after the move, we haven’t earned the switch and you should say so.

Before you believe any of this

Ask us the same questions you should have asked them.

Everything above is what we say we do. You have heard an agency say reassuring things before, so here is how to check this one.

• Who owns the website when we’re finished? The answer is you, and it should be written down before you pay anything.
• Whose name is on the ad account? Yours. If any agency answers this differently, you have just learned what leaving them will cost.
• What happens if I want to leave in month three? On almost everything you tell us and it stops that month. Search takes sixty days’ written notice, because it’s booked ahead. Either way there’s no term to run out.
• What will you report, and can I check it myself? Calls and contact requests, and yes, on your own phone.

Those are the same four questions on the ranking guarantee page, aimed at us instead. If we ever answer them the way the last agency did, leave, and take everything with you.