Changing SEO agencies in India is common and usually messy. The contract ends, the last invoice clears, and the outgoing team disappears with most of the useful context in their heads and the rest in a Google Drive folder nobody shared. Three months later the new team is still reconstructing what was already known, and the client is paying twice for the same discovery work.
A handover is not a courtesy. It is an asset transfer, and it is worth writing into the contract before you need it.
Here is what should actually change hands.
1. Every account, in your own name
This is the one that causes real damage. Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Business Profile, Bing Webmaster Tools, the rank tracker, the hosting panel, the CDN, the CMS — all of it should be owned by an email address at your domain, with the agency added as a user.
If the property was created under the agency's own account, you do not own your historical data. When they revoke access you lose the Search Console history that tells you whether anything worked. Sixteen months of query data is not recoverable, and no new property can backfill it.
Check this on day one of an engagement, not at the end. If you are already mid-engagement and the properties sit under an agency email, ask for ownership transfer now while the relationship is still cordial.
2. The backlink file, with its provenance
You need a spreadsheet of every link the agency built: source URL, target URL, anchor text, date, and whether it is dofollow. Not a screenshot of a dashboard. A file.
Two reasons. First, the next team needs to know your anchor distribution before adding to it, or they will over-weight whatever is already over-weighted. Second, if any of those links were bought or placed on networks, you want to know before Google tells you. A handover that produces no link file usually means there is nothing worth showing, and that is itself useful information.
3. The keyword-to-URL map
Not a keyword list. A map: which keyword is assigned to which page, and why. This is the document that prevents the single most common technical problem in Indian service sites, which is two or three pages quietly competing for the same term. If no such map exists, the engagement was running without one, which explains a lot.
4. A change log against the site
Every title rewrite, meta description, canonical change, redirect, schema block, robots.txt edit and .htaccess rule, with dates. This matters more than most people expect. When traffic moves six weeks later, the only way to attribute it is to know what changed and when. Without a log you are left correlating against Google's update calendar and guessing.
Ask specifically for the redirect map. Old URL to new URL, with status codes. Redirects are where handovers break — a later redeploy drops a rule nobody documented, and a page that ranked for two years starts 404ing.
5. The content inventory and what is still in draft
Published URLs, publication dates, target keywords, and the pipeline: what was briefed, what was written, what was approved and never posted. Half-finished content is paid-for work. It should not be lost because a Trello board got archived.
6. The technical debt list
Every competent agency keeps a list of things it wanted to fix and could not — usually because they needed developer time, or a decision, or budget. That list is the most valuable page in the whole handover and the one least likely to be offered voluntarily. Ask for it by name.
What to do in the first fortnight after you receive it
Verify rather than trust. Spot-check twenty links from the file and confirm they are still live and still carry a link to you. Re-crawl the site and compare against the change log. Pull a Search Console export for the last sixteen months before anything can expire. Confirm you can log in to every account yourself, without the agency.
A good handover takes the outgoing team about a day to produce. A bad one costs the incoming team a month. The difference is almost entirely whether anyone asked for it in writing at the start.
On the agency side, the same list is worth keeping continuously rather than assembling at exit — much of it overlaps with what belongs in a monthly SEO report that predicts revenue rather than merely describing activity.
If you are mid-transition and unsure whether what you have been handed is complete, an SEO expert in India can audit the handover itself in a day — reading what is missing is usually faster than rebuilding it later.