The Problem with SaaS SEO Agencies (2025)

Here’s the truth: hiring a SaaS SEO agency may not be the best use of your time or money. Caveat, we’re a SaaS SEO agency so that sounds like it has a lot of irony, right? It does. However, it really boils down to ethics and the challenges in the space of SEO in 2025 and continuing into the future.

If you’re a CMO, VP, or just generally on the marketing side, you’ll notice: there’s a lot of pessimism in SEO. It’s sourced from a lack of talent, a lack of finding the right agency partners, and the lack of seeing results. Mix that with all the changes we’re seeing in SERPs (search engine results pages) like AI Overviews and AI Mode (March of 2025), there’s this feeling of, “Forget about it, let’s move to something else.”

So why is this such a big problem? And why does this create an environment where it feels like whiplash is occurring and everyone is dissatisfied?

Key Takeaways

• The Traditional SaaS SEO Agency Model is Broken: Most agencies operate on thin margins and overloaded teams, leading to poor outcomes for clients. With junior talent following SOPs and limited strategic oversight, agencies struggle to deliver performance, creating frustration and churn on both sides.
• High Costs of Getting SEO Wrong: Testing an agency often means a 3–6 month ramp-up with $84K+ in spend, not including opportunity costs like lost market share, valuation dips, or delayed business outcomes. The stakes are high, and wrong moves can have compounding consequences.
• Future-Proof SEO Requires Senior Talent and Quality Focus: Success in modern SEO means hiring experienced strategists and subject matter expert writers, aligning with Google’s push for high-quality, expert content. Agencies and in-house teams alike must shift toward fewer clients, more focus, and leadership-level oversight to drive real business impact.

The Problem with SEO Agencies (SaaS or Not)

The main problem with SEO agencies is the way they’re structured. Generally, in order to make the $7,000 a month average retainer size be profitable, the agency has to give you a couple of key resources:

• An account manager
• An SEO strategist
• Sometimes an SEO analyst
• A copywriter

When you average out their salaries, even with more junior employees, the profit margins just aren’t there. And the budgets, coming from the buying side, also isn’t there. The net result and response from agencies was, “Well, in order to survive, we just have to do more work.” 

Related: SEO for Startups (Guide)

Resulting in the following:

• Agencies setting up teams to work on 8-15 clients in one month
• Agencies lacking domain expertise
• Agencies lacking the ability to look at performance

For you, the client, you’re most likely getting into this place where you see deliverables, question them, say okay sometimes, then wonder where the performance is going to come from. Both sides (the buy and sell side) create a barrier for themselves, usually in the form of the SOW (Statement of Work). The agency may sometimes break this, giving you what you need, thinking that’s the solution. Or you the client are stuck with a scenario where you feel like you need more but aren’t getting it.

In short, the model that this operates within is a major part of the problem. A major reason for why both sides are usually unhappy. However, in reality, both sides want to get results. Though feel inhibited to do so.

We typically see a lot of the following:

• Agency churn: The thinking that it’s the agency and not anything else that’s the problem. Meaning that the buy side chooses another partner. However, only to be left with very similar scenarios playing out as the previous agency.
• CMO frustration: Due to what CMO’s have to report on to board members, they’re often left with a lot of open ended questions. Primarily, “Is this channel working to drive conversions or leads for us?” And, “Is this channel even working?” Larger attribution issues add to the mix and create more issues.
• Company fallback: As other companies may advance in specific marketing channels (like SEO), competition rises and as companies fall further behind, they’re left with more to fix.

When combined, all three of these friction points create major burnout and lack of market advancement.

Related: SaaS SEO Guide (2025)

Costs Associated with Being Wrong

The compounding costs associated with being wrong can be extremely costly for these teams. Whether in-house or through an agency partner, it generally shares the same costs. There is the intrinsic cost associated and the opportunity cost associated with being wrong. They can be:

• Intrinsic cost: The $7,000/m to hire an agency partner, usually lasting 3-6 months for a ramp up and performance evaluation period. And the implied time spent from marketing teams to manage these agency partners. In short, a 3-6 month window to “test” turns out to be an $84,000 literal cost on the business.
• Opportunity cost: While competitors advance and whiplash occurs in this chamber, the opportunity cost is greater. SaaS companies lose market share, they lose valuation, and the implied opportunity cost can be far worse. Potentially resulting in down-rounds of funding or layoffs.

This is just the basic math. However, it’s clear that the costs associated with being wrong are fairly substantial and not as simple as suggesting “it’s a simple test.”

Related: Top SaaS SEO Agencies (2025)

Mix Talent Problems In There

Talent problems can get mixed in there. As SaaS SEO agencies are then forced to have to hire more junior SEO strategists, they’re almost immediately setting themselves up for failure. A lot of the implied workflow is to “follow SOPs” to help junior SEO people execute.

However, SEO has become far more complicated than in the past. There’s just simply more dynamics and questions to consider. For example, some of the questions we see are:

• How to appear on AI Overviews: Strategies and tactics to appear in AI Overviews and regain lost clicks or impression share where AI Overviews took over.
• How to appear on LLM-based search engines: Tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity are the latest to garnish attention on where clicks may come from.
• How to actually ensure the channel produces business outcomes: Rather than just traffic and ranking, is there connective tissue between the SEO work and the outcome the business is seeing?

As you can see from the questions above, those are not that well suited for junior talent. In fact, they require someone with a much longer and deeper expertise and understanding of search. The result? Usually, in-house hires where the buying side tries to control talent.

In summary, the agency is really stuck having to give you a fairly poor experience. The result is something like this:

• Lack of focus.
• Lack of talent.
• Lack of results.

However, keep in mind, it’s not necessarily the agency's fault. Higher budget engagements usually fix this, as long as the agency has the talent to deploy on the project.

Related: B2B SaaS SEO Guide (2025)

Google Shows Us the Way

Interestingly enough, Google doesn’t hide how to win in search. In fact, they’ve been on a three year long campaign telling us to focus on “expert” and “authoritative” websites and content. Meaning, stunts like mass-producing AI-content to try and get ahead probably isn’t the move.

Instead, even Google recognizes this model needs to change (whether with an agency partner or even within in-house SaaS SEO teams). The goal: produce less and produce higher-quality output.

Whenever I say that, I’m met with a lot of skepticism in today’s market. That’s because there is so much chatter (whether it’s YouTube or Twitter/X) saying the opposite. However, we’ve seen very few results from those stunts ourselves. And they’ve usually resulted in website penalties or simply moving on from the channel entirely.

Modeling a SaaS SEO Agency Around Google Ranking Factors

The real goal then becomes, model an agency after how Google wants us to produce material for the internet. And it’s fairly basic, but costs associated with them is and are going to need to shift in order to make it work.

The model for success should be something like the following:

• Focus on quality over quantity: Hire high-quality writers with expertise in the space that you’re in. If you’re in the medical space, you’re going to need someone with at least some medical background. Don’t just rely on AI. That’s not going to “beat the LLM.”
• Focus on hiring senior SEO talent: This talent will be able to address broader attribution questions that report directly up to board members or investors. Not only does this save a significant amount of time. It also keeps the acquisition channel on track or gets it from “off-track” to “on-track.”
• Stick to the basics: Stop trying to cheat the system. Users still want authentic connection with the internet. And in the age of AI, while it all seems highly appealing, it lacks authenticity that drives real results. SEO and this philosophy somewhat go hand-in-hand. SEO is your first chance to soft-sell your visitors and get them interested in your brand or offering.

Now you’re going to have some questions on cost. Let’s also state: the best out there, in terms of those brands getting results, are following this model above. The first requirement is a bit of “blind trust” that the channel still works. And assembling the “right people in the right seats.”

Once that’s done, these brands are usually winning. And it’s not just simply because they are big brands. It’s usually a result of trying to protect the brand image. They don’t want to “spew out garbage” and see the brand image deteriorate.

Shifting SaaS SEO Talent Upward

Your costs are going to increase. However, so will your output and your results. The setup, in terms of roles and responsibilities will stay the same. However, it’ll be more like the following:

• Senior SEO talent with a focus on previous experience in the space: We see this shift happening already when hiring in-house. Marketing leaders want previous experience in SaaS or in their specific niche.
• Copywriting talent with expertise: Hiring generalized copywriters just isn’t working. They need to comprehend the subject matter and can add something to it. Whether you’re making blog posts or even writing copy for internal pages, there needs to be something worth going to (in terms of User).
• Executive oversight: Hiring experienced professionals that can bridge the gap between execution and attribution. This isn’t just as simple as getting GA4 set up and calling it a day. Board members are going to want to see blended CPA or CAC costs as well as see them broken down by channel and then from cohort based on channel. In short, they want to see that the strategy is working, what to lean into, and what to steer away from.

In short, the proposal is simple: as SEO has become “harder” (which it has), the need to shift upward is a requirement from businesses (both buy and sell-side).

What to Look for In a SaaS SEO Agency

What to look for then becomes a primary focus on whether the agency can fill the exact above needs for you. That’s probably going to result in some early checks. Something like:

• Deep expertise in SaaS: A generalized agency is good, however, a focused agency is going to be best. It’s not just about the ability to do “the SEO work.” It’s also the ability to understand what business metrics SaaS companies care about. Usually, it’s everything pointing toward customer acquisition cost (CAC). And everything that sits in the middle of getting to that.
• Leadership oversight: I would argue that it’s better to have an agency that has less partners to work with at a higher cost. Meaning, executive leadership can dig into the problem sets without the need of account or project management. Usually, those are fairly rudimentary tasks anyway. And not worth the spend. It’s more about the ongoing analysis and ensuring that as work rolls out, it’s heading in the right direction as quickly as possible.
• Less clients, more focus: Very similar to the above, however, the market is changing quickly. With agencies that have 8-15 clients per month per squad, there’s very little time to “actually look at what matters.” It’s rather focused on getting you deliverables. Instead of getting you results. Look for an agency that’s going to create a Slack channel with you. That’s going to ensure that you can talk in an ad-hoc fashion. Where conversation can be more real-time and needs can be more real-time versus scheduled meetings.

This isn’t really ground-breaking stuff. However, cycles in internet history have had moments where less of this type of model is needed and when more of this type of model is needed. If Google didn’t shift the way that it wanted to operate (as a result of AI-boom and craze), we wouldn’t be here. You could still end up just hiring generalized SEO and copywriting teams and still getting away with success.

However, as Google wanted to have higher quality controls over what appeared through its search engine, they gave us a lot of warnings. Mentions from the search teams about focusing on experts, mentions from the search teams about focusing on quality. And mentions about producing helpful content that visitors want to save and bookmark. These are all indicators that “the age of generalization” is over. At least for now.

Other SaaS SEO Resources

• SaaS SEO Trends for 2024
• Reasons SaaS SEO Campaigns Fail
• B2B SaaS SEO
• SaaS SEO Meaning and Definition
• SaaS SEO Budgets
• SaaS SEO KPIs
• SaaS SEO Roadmap: Examples
• How Important is SEO for SaaS (Facts)
• SaaS SEO Audit
• 13 SaaS SEO Mistakes to Avoid
• SaaS SEO Checklist

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