How to Get Better SEO Work From Your Agency

Most agency relationships start with energy.

New audits. Fresh ideas. A clear plan. A team that feels close to the work.

Then a few months pass.

The meetings get familiar. The reports repeat. The agency is still doing the work, but the relationship feels less useful than it did at the start.

In this conversation, SearchPilot founder Will Critchlow sits down with Paddy Moogan to talk about how in-house SEO teams can get better work from their agencies.

They discuss when it makes sense to use an agency, what should probably stay in-house, why relationships often go stale, and how AI is changing the kind of work agencies used to be hired to do.

Paddy brings the agency side of the story. He has led agency teams, co-founded and run his own agency for ten years, and now works with agency founders as a coach and board member. Will brings the in-house side SearchPilot sees every day through their work with large ecommerce, retail and enterprise websites.

WEBINAR

Free · 45 min · Replay included

Wednesday 13th May • 5 pm BST / 12 pm ET / 9 am PT

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When an agency is actually useful

Paddy argues that brands should not default to agencies. He and Will talk about where agencies add the most value, especially when the team needs outside context, pattern recognition, or confidence on a high stakes decision.

What should stay in-house

Some SEO work depends too much on internal context to fully outsource: product priorities, trading goals, engineering constraints, customer insight, and business politics. The session covers where in-house ownership matters most.

Why agency relationships go stale

A lot of agency relationships start strong, then settle into the same meetings, reports, and recommendations. Paddy explains why the drift often starts around month five or six, and how to spot it early.

What AI changes about agency support

AI is putting pressure on basic delivery work, especially the junior tasks agencies have often been hired to do. Will and Paddy talk about what this means for agencies, in-house teams, and the skills that will matter next.

Who Should Attend?

SVP Digital & Ecommerce
VP of Marketing / Global Head of Marketing
Head of SEO
Director of Ecommerce, Director of Digital Marketing
Head of Product
Anyone responsible for ambitious SEO targets who needs a practical, proven framework

Who's Paddy Moogan?

Paddy Moogan Moogan is the founder of The New Leader, an online training platform for people who want to become more effective managers and leaders. He started it after seeing how many people are asked to manage teams without being given any real training.

He also works with agency founders as a coach and board member, helping them navigate agency growth, leadership, client relationships, and team structure. Before that, he co-founded and ran his own agency for ten years, exiting in 2024.

Earlier in his career, Paddy worked with Will at Distilled, where he went on to lead the UK business. In this session, he brings the agency side of the story in-house teams rarely hear directly: how agencies think, where relationships drift, and how to get better work from the people you bring in.

Who's Will Critchlow?

Will Critchlow is the CEO and co-founder of SearchPilot, the SEO experimentation platform that helps enterprise websites, specifically large ecommerce, take search out of React Mode and put it into Control Mode. After 15 years running Distilled, an agency he built into a global search powerhouse, Will founded SearchPilot in 2020 to give marketing and engineering teams a way to run statistically-rigorous SEO A/B tests across thousands of pages and see uplift in weeks.

Today, the platform powers rapid-fire testing for $100M+ ecommerce, marketplace, and travel brands, safely optimising millions of product pages through controlled testing. Will’s data-driven approach has helped hundreds of companies turn their biggest, least-understood channel into a controllable performance engine with provable ROI.