Why switch from Directive Consulting
Directive's customer-generation model is built for B2B SaaS running blended paid and organic against pipeline. Brands leave for two reasons: the paid component shrank, or the organic and AI-search side needs specialist depth that a pipeline-blended programme does not prioritise.
Arise GEO vs Directive Consulting
Side-by-side table on scope, model, pricing shape and guarantees — including where Directive Consulting is the better buy. Read the comparison →
If pipeline attribution across paid and organic is the reporting your board actually reads, and paid is still a major spend line, keep the blended programme. Our reporting is organic and citation-share led, not pipeline-modelled.
Signals it is time to move
- →Paid budget has been cut and the organic side is now carrying the number alone.
- →Definitional and comparison queries in your category are being answered by AI without citing you.
- →The site has real technical debt — JS rendering, thin programmatic pages, or a docs subdomain fighting the marketing site.
- →Content velocity is high but non-brand organic sessions are flat.
The migration, step by step
Roughly six weeks end to end. Steps run in order; the change freeze overlaps the handover deliberately.
- Step 01You / legal · Day 1
Read the exit clause before you say anything
Pull the signed agreement and find three things: notice period, auto-renew date, and the IP/work-product clause. Most agency contracts renew silently 30 days out and treat deliverables as licensed rather than owned. Diarise the notice deadline before you open any conversation — the leverage disappears the day the renewal trips.
- Step 02You / us · Day 1–3
Snapshot the baseline while access is still friendly
Export 16 months of Search Console (queries, pages, countries, devices), GA4 landing-page revenue, current rank-tracking positions, and a full crawl of the live site. This is the before picture that decides whether the switch worked. Do it now — access to shared dashboards and third-party seats tends to evaporate on the termination email.
- Step 03You · Day 2–5
Inventory every asset and login they hold
List Search Console and GA4 property owners, Tag Manager containers, CMS and staging logins, DNS and CDN access, rank tracker seats, link-building accounts, content drafts, schema snippets, redirect maps, and any scripts injected via GTM. Anything owned by their email address is a hostage. Reassign ownership to a company account, not a person.
- Step 04Us · Week 1–2
Run an independent audit in parallel — before you terminate
A diagnosis performed while the incumbent is still working is worth more than one performed after. You get an uncontaminated read on what has actually been shipped versus reported, and if the audit says the programme is sound, you have saved yourself a switch. We scope this in 24 hours and it stands alone as a deliverable.
- Step 05You + both vendors · Week 2–6
Freeze structural changes during the handover window
No template changes, no bulk redirects, no canonical edits, no robots.txt or noindex changes, and no theme upgrades for the 30 days spanning the transition. Overlapping change sets are the single most common cause of a post-switch traffic drop, and they make attribution impossible for both sides.
- Step 06You + RevOps · Week 2–3
Preserve the pipeline attribution model
The blended attribution setup — UTM conventions, CRM source fields, offline conversion imports and lead-scoring rules — often lives in the agency's head rather than in documentation. Get it written down and confirm the CRM automations do not depend on an agency-owned integration account before you terminate.
- Step 07You · Week 3–4
Take the handover in writing, not on a call
Request the current roadmap, unshipped recommendations, the redirect map, every custom schema template, link placements and their contacts, content calendar, and the reason each open item is still open. Ask for it as files in a shared drive. A 45-minute goodbye call transfers almost nothing that survives the week.
- Step 08Us + you · Week 4–6
Rebaseline and start the 90-day plan
We re-run the crawl, reconcile it against index coverage, re-probe your AI citation set across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, then agree the metrics the engagement is judged on. Those agreed metrics are what the 180-day money-back guarantee is written against — nothing gets measured against a moving target.
What to keep, not bin
Risks and how we contain them
| Risk | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| Traffic dips in the first 30 days and everyone blames the switch | Freeze structural changes across the handover window and keep a dated change log. A dip during a freeze is seasonality or an algorithm update, not the migration — and the log is what proves it. |
| Losing link placements or content the outgoing team controlled | Request the placement list with publisher contacts and confirm nothing sits on domains the agency owns. Guest posts on an agency's own network can be removed on exit; know which of your links are rented before you leave. |
| Analytics history breaks and the before/after becomes unarguable | Transfer property ownership to a company-controlled account rather than deleting and recreating, and export raw Search Console data first. Recreated properties start their 16-month history from zero. |
| CRM integrations break when agency-owned accounts are deactivated | Audit every integration's owning account and reassign to a service account before the termination date. |
Frequently asked
Do you do B2B SaaS or only ecommerce?+
Both, though ecommerce catalogues are where our technical depth goes furthest. SaaS work is usually GEO-led, because buyers ask definitional and comparison questions and those are exactly the queries AI answers intercept before the click ever reaches you.
Can you report against pipeline rather than sessions?+
We report against organic and citation metrics agreed at the start, and we will feed those into your existing pipeline model. What we do not do is rebuild a blended paid-plus-organic attribution system — if that modelling is the core deliverable you need, a performance agency is the better fit.
What happens to comparison and alternatives pages they built?+
They stay and usually get upgraded. Comparison pages are among the highest-value GEO assets a SaaS site owns, because AI engines lean on them heavily for 'best X' and 'X alternatives' answers. We add entity anchoring, schema, and extractable answer blocks.
