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Having worked in the industry (though not for a while), I think the only thing you should should be paying for is experience. Yes, there are lots of scammers, even in fancy offices with fancy testimonials. But ultimately the only way you can evaluate an unknowable system is through experience, and the only way to improve the quality of that evaluation is by running lots of experiments.

Only agnecies who have lots and lots of clients are getting enough of an overview to test techniques in a repeatable way, across industries, audiences, etc. This one appears to have less than 10 employees and listed SEO last in their own list of services - suggesting maybe one or two staff who do a bit of it.

There is no way you should be handing over tens of thousands to someone who clearly doesn't have a lot of experience in SEO. They can only give generic entry level advice and hope for the best, which is exactly what this client got.

Is a big agency a guarantee of success? Absolutely not. But a tiny agency is almost a guarantee of failure of ROI. That said, I have known some very smart self-employed consultants in the industry, I don't want to tar them with the same brush.