How to tell whether your SEO company is actually doing anything

Not rankings. Not traffic. Not impressions, reach, or visibility score.

Inquiries.

Calls, emails, form submissions, bookings, walk-ins who mention the website. That is the entire point of the exercise, and it is the one number that cannot be presented flatteringly.

So before you open any report, answer this from your own records: are more people contacting you now than twelve months ago?

If yes, something is working, and you can argue about how much of it is the SEO.

If no, and you have been paying for a year, no report should be able to talk you out of that. A page can rank first for a phrase nobody searches. Traffic can double with visitors who were never going to buy. Neither of those is worth a dollar to you and both look excellent on a slide.

Search Console is free, it is Google's own tool, and it shows you what people searched for before they reached your site, which pages Google is showing, and whether anybody clicked.

It is the same data your SEO company uses. There is no reason you should not have it.

Set it up yourself if you do not have it. It takes about fifteen minutes. Choose the URL prefix option and verify with the HTML tag method, which needs a small piece of text added to your site, so whoever maintains it can do that part.

If your SEO company already set it up, ask them to add you as an owner. Not a user. An owner.

Then watch what happens. A good supplier adds you the same day and is pleased you asked, because it makes their next report easier to explain. A supplier who hesitates, explains why it would confuse you, or simply never gets round to it has told you something important about the rest of the relationship.

This is the single most useful thing on this page. It is free, it takes one email, and the reaction is as informative as the data.

Reports are where this business hides. A few things to look for.

Does it mention inquiries at all? If a monthly report never connects anything to a phone call or a form submission, ask why not. That connection is the job.

Are the keywords ones a customer would type? Ranking first for "emergency plumber Denver" matters. Ranking first for "affordable professional plumbing solutions provider" does not, because nobody on earth types that. Long strange phrases are easy to rank for and that is exactly why they appear in reports.

Is there a list of what was actually done? Pages rewritten, pages added, things fixed. Named. An owner's entire complaint about one company was this:

"they have not been able to provide any information regarding where my marketing spend is going"

Has anything on your site changed? This one you can check without asking anybody. Look at your own pages. Are the words different from last year? Are there pages that did not exist before? If you are paying monthly for search work and your website has not changed in six months, that is a fair question with a specific answer.

This deserves a straight answer, because "it takes time" is both completely true and the most overused excuse in the industry.

For a brand new website: three to six months before you see much of anything, and longer to see it properly. There is no way around it. Google has to find you, read you, and then decide you are worth showing, and none of that is fast for a site nobody links to.

For an established site: you should see movement within three months, even if it is small. Not inquiries necessarily, but something changing in Search Console.

At twelve months with nothing to show, "it takes time" has run out. That is no longer an explanation, it is a habit.

Be fair about the other direction too. If you signed up ninety days ago and are frustrated, you are being impatient, and switching supplier now means starting the clock again.

Guaranteed first place. Nobody can promise this. Google's own guidance tells businesses to be wary of anyone who does, because the only way to guarantee a position is to buy an ad.

They found you, not the other way round. Cold call or cold email. Very little good SEO is sold this way.

They will not give you access to your own Search Console. Covered above, and it is the clearest signal on this list.

The report has no inquiries in it. Just charts going up.

They mention buying links. Paid links can actively damage your site's standing rather than help it. An owner who posted about her shop being invisible had already bought backlinks, changed her theme and submitted sitemaps, and none of it addressed why she was missing.

A long contract with no clear way out. Ask for the notice period and the end date in writing, and ask what happens to any work done on your site if you leave.

This one is worth knowing even if you never buy SEO, because the calls go to everybody with a business listing.

The script is consistent enough to recognize. It opens with something like:

"We're having an urgent issue with the keywords on your Google business listing."

Then a deadline, usually the same day. Then a threat that your listing will be suspended or that it will, in their words, "disrupt services." Then an offer to fix it, for a fee, right now, over the phone.

Google does not cold call small businesses about their listings. Google runs its own page warning people about exactly these calls, which tells you how much of it is going on.

What to do: hang up. Do not confirm your business name, your address, or anything about your listing. Do not press a number to be removed from the list, because that only confirms a real person answered.

Then go and look at your listing yourself, in your own browser, and see that it is fine. It almost always is.

The reason this works on people is timing. These calls land hardest on owners who already suspect something is wrong with their online presence, which after reading this page may include you. Being worried about your website is not a reason to trust a stranger who calls you about it.

None of this means SEO is a con. Plenty of people do it well and are worth their fee. It is worth knowing what that looks like so you can recognize it.

They ask what you sell and who buys it before they mention Google. They talk about inquiries rather than rankings. They give you access to everything without being asked twice. The report is short and says what was done. They tell you when something is not worth doing, including when it is their own service. And they are honest about the timeline at the start, rather than after nine months.

If that describes your supplier, you are fine, and you can stop reading.

One email, three questions, and keep it neutral. You are asking, not accusing.

"Could you add me as an owner on the Search Console account for the site? Also, could you send me a short list of what was done last month, and let me know how many inquiries you think came through search? Thanks."

Everything you need is in the reply, including the parts that are missing from it.