-
Is this normal for a SEO agency? 10 months, 30 hrs./week, and these basics are still not done.
Posted by on February 17, 2026 at 4:56 amHey everyone,
Looking for a sanity check here. I own a printing company in a major US city. I hired a SEO agency about 10 months ago and they work 30 hours a week on my account.
To be fair, I did a lot of the GBP work myself. I filled out all the categories, wrote all the service descriptions, and put together a Google Posts plan on my own. But here s the thing, I did all of that 6 months after the agency started because they never touched the GBP. They listed GBP optimization in their reports as something that should be completed, but they never made it clear that they expected me to do it. I finally got fed up and just did it all myself.
But I recently got an audit done and found a bunch of stuff that I feel like should have been handled by now. After 10 months and 30 hrs/week, these are still not done:
· Local Landing Pages: I have 10+ service areas defined in my GBP but only 3 location pages on my website.
· Schema Markup: No Local Business, no FAQ schema, no Return Policy schema. My site is an ecommerce store and none of this has been set up.
· FAQ Schema: I have FAQ content on my site but there's no FAQ schema markup so none of it shows up as rich results in Google. I have shared 500+ FAQs about my business but they did not post them.
· Return Policy Schema: We have a return policy page but no schema for it. Google can show return info directly in search results and shopping tabs, especially for ecommerce.
· Review Rich Snippets: My product and item reviews are not showing up in Google search results. No review schema or structured data to make that happen.
· Google Store Ratings Not Showing in Search: My store has plenty of reviews but Google Store Ratings are not showing up in search results. No schema or structured data has been set up to make that happen.
· Blog Posting is All Over the Place: There's no consistent publishing schedule. They go 2 months with zero blog posts, then suddenly drop 5 in one week. Thats not a content strategy, thats just catching up when someone notices. They posted 50+ blog posts but nobody is checking which ones are losing traffic or need a refresh.
For an agency working 30 hours a week for 10 months, is it normal for these items to still be sitting on the back burner? It feels like these are foundational local SEO tasks that should have been knocked out in the first 3 to 6 months.
Am I being unreasonable here or is this a sign that the agency is just coasting?
Appreciate any input.
-
1 Reply
-
You’re not wrong those are core SEO basics.
After 10 months at 30 hrs/week, they should already be done.
-
[removed]
-
Jesus christ, 80% of those can be done in seconds with IDE AI, that’s crazy business by this SEO Agency after 10 months. I really feel like you’re being scammed.
**Local Landing Pages -** Couple prompts to claude to understand your current landing pages to make the rest.
**Schema Markup -** One prompt to claude “Can you add schema to all my pages for local business, ratings/reviews/FAQ/returns”
**Blog Posting is All Over the Place** – Sounds like they slack off for a month and realize, Oh shit we haven’t wrote any blogs recently, quickly write 5 shitty ones to make it look like were doing something”
And for all the people who HATE the mention of AI. All of this can be done by one human within one work week easily, they have had **43 WEEKS.**
-
How much are you paying out of curiosity and did the package you paid for include GBP optimization? It sounds bad on the surface (30 hrs a week over 10 months, these should have been done), but I suppose that would give a bit of context.
-
Are you sure you have paid enough for them to allocate 30 hours/week? That would be a very expensive SEO campaign, if you’re using a provider in the USA – north of 12k/mth. If you’re not paying that much, then I wouldn’t be surprised that a lot of these things aren’t done…
-
[deleted]
-
Drop them immediately. Ask for an itemized list of the work they’ve completed. Was a contract signed? I would normally never advise this, but it their “work” warrants a small claims threat unless they can prove they’ve abided by the contract. Not worth following through, but press hard for a significant refund. I’ve worked at agencies and hated the couple times clients did this, as it was always unwarranted… But that doesn’t seem to be the case here
-
FAQ schema is only for health or government websites.
-
Did they advertise to you or did you find them?
-
30 hours a week of SEO is a huge amount. Double check your contact to see what they promised and double check the time expectation. Regardless, the basics you pointed out are not unreasonable to expect and it sounds like they’re not a quality agency.
-
[removed]
-
30 hours a week for 10 months? that’s an absurd amount of time to work on one small website. everything under the sun should be done and even then they would have nothing to do months into this. sound like they may hove done 4 hours a week of work
-
Previously worked at an agency here-
I’d say no this is not normal, and a lot of low hanging fruit like this (especially local business schema, landing pages, GBP optimization, etc.) I would have knocked out relatively quickly since it moves the needle.
What’s your monthly spend here? 30 hours a week would have been at the ~8k-10k+ USD range, probably more depending on website complexity, and I’d be working pretty closely with the stakeholders to customize a technical and content plan to maximize ROI for all involved
-
Why did you pay 30 hours per week? That is insane for an agency.
-
Sadly you got ripped off.
Log in to reply.