Switching without losing a season
The switch itself is rarely what costs people. It is the four weeks where nobody owns the work, and a site rebuild with no redirects mapped.
Do these in order. The single most expensive mistake is giving notice first and then working out what you were supposed to secure.
Before you give notice
-
Check the renewal window.
A term with automatic renewal and a thirty-day window can turn a late decision into another full year. Find the date before anything else.
-
Take ownership of your accounts.
Business Profile, analytics, Search Console, the registrar, the host, the call tracking numbers. Primary ownership, not manager access. This is much easier to arrange while the relationship is still friendly.
-
Export your own baseline.
Rankings, traffic, calls and form fills for the full engagement, into a file you keep. If the reporting runs on the agency’s own platform, this is the moment.
-
Appoint the next agency.
Overlapping by three or four weeks costs one extra invoice and removes the gap entirely.
What to extract on the way out
-
The site files and anything written but not yet published.
Work in progress is frequently abandoned on the notice date. Ask for it.
-
The citation and directory list.
Years of listings carry your name, address and number. Without the list the next agency rebuilds what already exists and misses the ones that need updating.
-
Historical reporting in a standard format.
Not a login to a dashboard you will lose access to.
The three things that break
-
Redirects.
Any change to the page structure needs the old paths mapped to the new ones. This is the most common way a switch costs rankings and it is entirely preventable.
-
Tracking numbers on physical assets.
If the number changes and your vans, yard signs and three hundred citations still carry the old one, consistency breaks and local visibility follows it down.
-
The rebuild reflex.
An incoming agency that wants to replace the site in month one, before it has a baseline, is planning to lose your history. Ask what it will not change in the first quarter.
Switch in late autumn if your book is cooling-heavy. The new agency gets the quiet quarter to audit, plan and build, and the first real test arrives when the asset is ready for it.
Then keep your own copy of the baseline. It is the only version of your history that the next agency cannot retire.