The agency business and the ecommerce business are broken on both sides, and I say that as someone who runs an agency and works with merchants every day. We support around 140 clients right now. Many of them use other agencies alongside us for SEO, for paid media, for design. In all the years we have been doing this, not one agency in the UK has asked my client to set up a conversation with the development team that actually supports the website. Not one.
Think about what that means. An SEO agency is making recommendations about a site whose technical constraints it has never discussed with the people who maintain it. A PPC agency is spending the merchant’s money against conversion data flowing through tags it has never verified. Everyone is working on the same store and nobody is talking.
MageCloud Agency Reality Note
What the Broken Relationship Costs
THE AUDIT RACKET
£3,000 to £5,000 for a PDF
SEO companies charge thousands for audits that list technical issues. My developers find the same issues during routine work, and then we fix them for half the cost of the document that described them.
THE TRACKING BLIND SPOT
Ad spend on unverified data
Agencies run Google Ads for months without once checking how tags are placed or whether conversions track correctly. The optimisation is only as real as the data underneath it.
THE MISSING CONVERSATION
Zero agency-to-developer calls
Across 140 clients and years of engagements, no external agency has requested a working session with the team that maintains the site they are advising on.
Paul Ryazanov · MageCloud · the development team your SEO agency never calls
The Audit Economy Is Selling Documents, Not Fixes
Here is the pattern that genuinely frustrates me. A merchant pays an SEO agency £3,000 to £5,000 for a technical audit. A polished PDF arrives, full of findings, most of them legitimate. Broken canonicals, crawl waste, slow templates, misconfigured redirects. The merchant now owns a beautiful description of their problems and not one solved problem. The fixes are quoted separately, or worse, thrown over the wall to a development team that was never consulted about feasibility.
My Ukrainian developers surface the same categories of issue constantly, as a side effect of doing maintenance work. We can identify them and also fix them, usually for less than the cost of the document. I am not arguing audits are worthless. A fresh pair of eyes on a store finds things the owner stopped seeing, and that is real value. I am arguing that an audit whose deliverable is a PDF rather than a fixed website has its incentives pointed at the wrong outcome.
Why a Random Developer Keeps Correcting Award-Winning Agencies
The tracking problem makes the dysfunction concrete. I use a specialist, a friend in Ukraine, who checks, fixes, and reports tracking issues across accounts we work with. He regularly finds broken or misleading conversion tracking on accounts managed by large, award-winning PPC agencies. Why does a developer none of these agencies have heard of keep finding problems that five-time award winners missed? Not because he is smarter. Because he looks. Checking tag placement is unglamorous work that sits in the gap between the PPC agency’s remit and the development team’s remit, and nobody owns the gap.
Every pound of ad spend optimised against broken tracking is a pound spent learning the wrong lesson. The fix costs a few hours. The blind spot costs months of misdirected budget.
Merchants Are Not Innocent in This Either
The dysfunction has two authors. Plenty of business owners choose agencies the way they choose wine, by the label and the gift basket. The agency sends a nice package at Christmas, the account manager is charming, the proposal is beautifully designed, and somewhere inside all of it the actual work disappears. The cost of the gift is already in your invoice.
The other merchant failure is self-diagnosis. An owner decides SEO is the answer because SEO is the thing they have heard of, contracts an SEO agency, and never asks whether their niche has meaningful organic demand at all. In some niches the honest answer is that organic traffic is negligible and paid search is more cost-effective. When we advise a client of exactly that, the response is sometimes that we do not understand their vision, that we are not creative enough, that another agency gets it. The other agency, of course, will happily take twelve months of retainer to not get results. Merchants should be told the truth, and they should also want to hear it.
The Fix: Verified Proposals and One Shared Table
What I want is simple enough to describe in two sentences. Every significant agency proposal should be verified by a second, unaffiliated professional before the merchant signs, the same way serious businesses get a second quote on a building project. And every store with multiple vendors should put them at one shared table, a shared project board and a regular call where the SEO agency, the PPC agency, and the development team see each other’s work.
I wish there were a conference where agencies and business owners sat across the room from each other and talked honestly about this. Until someone organises it, cross-verification is the practical substitute. An agency that resists having its proposal reviewed by another professional is telling you what the proposal would not survive.
The Standard to Hold Everyone To
Hold your agencies to the standard of working in the open: real access granted by you, results shown in the source systems rather than in PDFs, and a willingness to sit on a call with the other vendors touching your store. Hold yourself to the standard of choosing on verified substance rather than packaging. If you want a second opinion on a proposal sitting in your inbox right now, get in touch. I will tell you what I would tell my own client, including when the proposal is good.
Related reading: Skip the Fancy Audit Report. Send a Loom. The proposal format that makes template vendors and AI filler structurally impossible.