Why switch from Ignite Visibility
Ignite Visibility runs strong full-funnel programmes, and the paid side is frequently the reason a brand stays. The common trigger for this migration is not dissatisfaction with the agency — it is realising that organic and AI visibility need depth that a full-funnel remit cannot supply.
Arise GEO vs Ignite Visibility
Side-by-side table on scope, model, pricing shape and guarantees — including where Ignite Visibility is the better buy. Read the comparison →
If paid media is the majority of spend and organic is genuinely integrated with it — shared landing pages, shared keyword strategy, blended reporting — splitting the account can cost you more in coordination than you gain in depth.
Signals it is time to move
- →Organic is treated as a support channel for paid rather than a P&L line of its own.
- →Technical SEO findings are documented but sit unshipped quarter after quarter.
- →Your catalogue has grown past the point where template-level issues can be handled ad hoc.
- →AI-search visibility has never been measured on your account.
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 04You + both vendors · Week 1
Draw the paid/organic boundary on paper
If you keep paid with the incumbent, write down which landing pages each side owns, which keywords are deliberately covered by both, and who approves template changes. Ambiguity here produces the worst outcome of any split account: two teams editing the same page and neither reporting the change.
- Step 05Us · 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 06You + 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 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. |
| Split accountability on shared landing pages | Assign a single owner per URL and require both vendors to log template changes in one shared change log. |
Frequently asked
Is it a bad idea to split SEO and paid across two agencies?+
It works well with one condition: a shared keyword and landing-page map plus a single change log. Without those, you get duplicated effort on the pages that matter most and irreconcilable reporting. With them, specialisation on both sides usually beats the bundle.
Who owns the landing pages built for paid campaigns?+
Check the contract, then check reality. Pages built on your CMS are yours; pages hosted on an agency landing-page tool leave with the agency. If revenue depends on them, migrate them onto your own domain and templates before notice.
How do you avoid organic and paid cannibalising each other?+
Map the branded and non-brand split explicitly, keep paid off head terms you already own in position one to three unless there is a defensive reason, and report incremental rather than total conversions on overlapping terms.
