You know your marketing agency isn’t working. Maybe you read our post on 5 signs your marketing company is wasting your money and recognized every one. But you haven’t pulled the trigger because of one fear: what if my rankings drop when I switch?

That fear keeps business owners paying agencies they don’t trust for months longer than they should. I’ve walked a dozen businesses through this transition in San Antonio alone, and the pattern is always the same. The switch goes fine, as long as you handle three things before you pull the plug.

Step 1: Secure everything you own before you say a word

Before you call your agency, before you send the cancellation email, lock down your assets. This is the step people skip, and it’s the one that causes the most damage.

Google Business Profile ownership. Log into business.google.com and check the Users section. You should be listed as Primary Owner, not Manager. If your agency is the Primary Owner, request a transfer before you tell them you’re leaving. Once you tell them, your bargaining position disappears. Google’s ownership transfer process takes 7 days if the current owner doesn’t respond, but it can take 3 weeks if they contest it.

Domain and hosting credentials. Your website domain should be registered in your name. Check your registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, wherever it is). If the domain is registered under your agency’s account, you need it transferred to your own account before you part ways. Same with hosting. You should have your own login to your own hosting account.

Website admin access. If your site runs on WordPress, you should have an Administrator-level login. Not Editor. Not Contributor. Administrator. If you don’t, create one now.

Analytics and Search Console. Log into Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Make sure your personal Google account has Owner-level access to both. If your agency set these up under their account and never shared access, that’s data you’ll lose.

Directory listings. Ask your agency for a complete list of every directory they submitted your business to. Yelp, BBB, Angi, Thumbtack, industry directories, data aggregators. You need this list so your next agency (or you) can maintain those listings. If citations go stale with wrong phone numbers, your rankings will suffer.

I’ve had business owners switch agencies and lose access to their own Google profile because they didn’t check ownership first. That’s a preventable disaster. Check everything before you have the conversation.

Step 2: Get a baseline of where you actually stand

You need a snapshot of your current performance before the switch so you can tell whether things got better, worse, or stayed the same under new management.

Here’s what to capture:

This takes about 30 minutes and it’s the most important 30 minutes of the whole transition. Without this data, you can’t hold your next agency accountable and you can’t tell whether the switch helped or hurt.

Step 3: Understand what your agency actually did (and didn’t do)

Not everything your old agency did was bad. Even underperforming agencies sometimes get a few things right. Before you cut ties, figure out what they were actually doing so you don’t accidentally stop something that was working.

Pull their last three monthly reports. Look for specific actions, not vague language. Did they publish blog posts? Are those posts actually indexed and ranking for anything? Check Search Console. Did they build citations? Which ones? Did they post to your Google Business Profile? How often?

The common scenario I see: an agency was doing one useful thing (maybe maintaining directory listings) and five useless things (generic blog posts, meaningless social media posts, monthly reports full of vanity metrics). You want to keep the useful thing and drop everything else.

If your agency did nothing useful, which happens more often than you’d think, the transition is actually simpler. There’s nothing to preserve.

The transition itself

Once your assets are secured and your baseline is documented, the actual switch is anticlimactic.

Give proper notice. Check your contract terms. Most contracts require 30 days written notice. Even if you’re angry, be professional. Send a written cancellation and keep a copy. Don’t ghost them. You might need their cooperation on the asset transfer.

Overlap if possible. The ideal scenario is a two-week overlap where your new agency starts while the old one is still technically engaged. This lets the new team audit what exists, identify anything that shouldn’t be interrupted, and ask questions while the old team is still responsive.

Don’t change everything at once. Your new agency will want to make changes. That’s fine. But don’t redesign your website, change all your content, update your GBP description, and switch hosting all in the same week. Make changes one at a time so you can trace any ranking movement back to the specific change that caused it.

Watch for the dip. There’s often a small ranking fluctuation in the first 2-4 weeks after a transition. This is normal. Google notices when update patterns change, like a profile that was getting weekly posts suddenly stopping while the new team ramps up. The fluctuation usually corrects itself within 30 days as long as your new team is active.

What about the contract?

Some agencies lock you into 12-month contracts with early termination penalties. This is one of the warning signs we wrote about. If you’re in one, you have a few options.

First, read the actual contract language. Some say you can cancel with 60 days notice after the initial term. Others auto-renew annually. Know what yours says.

Second, if the agency isn’t delivering what was promised in the contract, you may have grounds to terminate for cause. “Ongoing SEO services” is vague enough that it’s hard to enforce, but if the contract specifies deliverables (like monthly reports or a minimum number of blog posts) and they’re not providing them, document the gap.

Third, sometimes the cost of breaking the contract is less than the cost of staying. If you’re paying $800/month for nothing, and the early termination fee is $1,600, paying the penalty and switching to an agency that actually performs is the better financial decision.

The ranking question

Will your rankings drop when you switch? In my experience, no, as long as you don’t break anything during the transition.

Rankings drop when you lose access to your Google Business Profile, when your website goes down during a hosting migration, when citations get disconnected, or when your new agency makes aggressive changes before understanding what was already working.

Rankings don’t drop because you changed who manages your account. Google doesn’t know or care who’s logging into your profile. It cares about the signals: reviews, relevance, proximity, website quality, citation consistency.

If your old agency was underperforming, switching to someone who actually does the work usually improves your rankings within 60-90 days. The biggest risk isn’t switching. It’s staying with someone who isn’t doing anything and watching your competitors pass you while you wait.

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