How to tell if your SEO agency is actually doing anything

SEO is the easiest service in the world to fake, because the work is invisible and the results are delayed. By the time you suspect nothing is happening, you have usually paid for a year of it.

The good news is that real SEO work leaves fingerprints. Pages appear. Text changes. Technical files get updated. Links show up. If none of that is happening, no amount of reporting can cover for it. Here is how to check, yourself, in about an hour.

What real SEO work leaves behind

Every legitimate SEO engagement produces some combination of these artifacts. They are all things you can verify without taking anyone's word for it.

New or rewritten pages on your site. This is the main one. SEO is largely the business of having a genuinely useful page for each thing people search. If no pages were added or substantially rewritten in the last three months, very little happened.

Changed titles and meta descriptions. The blue link text in search results. These get tuned.

Internal links. Older pages pointing to newer ones with sensible anchor text.

Technical changes you can see in the source. Schema markup, canonical tags, a sitemap that includes your new pages, an image compression pass, a fixed heading structure.

Fixed errors. Broken links gone. Redirects in place for pages that moved. Crawl errors in Search Console trending down.

Earned links or citations. Your business mentioned somewhere it was not mentioned before. Supplier pages, local associations, trade directories, chamber listings, press, podcasts.

Google Business Profile activity. New photos, new posts, services and categories updated, reviews responded to.

That is the whole list. If you ask what was done and the answer does not map to at least three of those categories, you are paying a subscription, not buying work.

Check your own site first

Start here, because it takes fifteen minutes and tells you most of what you need to know.

Compare your site to last year. Go to web.archive.org, enter your domain, and look at a snapshot from twelve months ago. Then look at today. Are there pages now that did not exist then? Is the text on your main service pages different? If the site looks essentially identical, nothing structural has happened.

Count your pages. In Google, search site:yourdomain.com. You will get a rough count of indexed pages. Then ask your agency how many pages they have added. The numbers should be in the same universe.

Read one of your service pages out loud. Is it specific to your business, your city, your equipment, your process? Or is it generic text that could belong to any competitor? Generic pages are a strong signal that nobody who understands your trade has touched them.

View the page source. Right click, view source, search for "application/ld+json". That is schema markup. On a local service business site you would expect to see your business type, address, phone and service details marked up. Its absence is not fatal, but its presence tells you someone technical has been in there.

Check your sitemap. Visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Do your newest pages appear? When was it last updated?

Then check Search Console

If you do not have access to your own Google Search Console, stop reading and go get it. Your agency should add you as an owner, not a user, today. If they resist, that is the single biggest red flag in this entire article.

Once you are in, four reports matter.

Performance, twelve month view, clicks. Not impressions. Clicks. Set the date range to the last sixteen months and compare year over year. This is the closest thing to truth you have.

Performance, filtered to exclude your brand. Add a query filter that excludes your business name. Branded searches grow when your reputation grows or when you run ads. Non branded clicks are what SEO is supposed to produce. If non branded clicks are flat for a year, something is wrong.

Pages report. Sort by clicks. Are any of the pages your agency says they created actually getting clicks? Are new pages appearing in this list at all?

Indexing report. How many pages are indexed versus not indexed, and why. If an agency built you fifty pages and forty of them are "Discovered, currently not indexed," the work exists but it is not working, and they should be telling you that.

Vanity metrics versus real ones

Reports are where bad SEO goes to hide. Here is the translation.

Impressions. Your listing appeared somewhere in results. It does not mean anyone saw it or that you ranked on page one. Impressions can climb while clicks fall. Treated alone, this is the most misleading number in SEO reporting.

Keyword rankings, cherry picked. Agencies choose the keywords they report. Rankings for your business name, or for phrases nobody searches, are free wins. If the keyword list changes between reports, you are watching selection, not progress.

Average position. An average across hundreds of queries, most of which do not matter. It can improve while you lose money.

Domain authority or similar third party scores. Vendor invented metrics. Google does not use them. They are useful for rough comparison and useless as a deliverable.

Social reach and followers. Not SEO. Not even adjacent.

Hours worked or tasks completed. A hundred "optimizations" with no page changes is a hundred nothings.

The metrics that actually matter are short:

• Non branded organic clicks, trending over months, not weeks
• Form submissions and phone calls attributable to organic search
• Number of pages that get at least some organic clicks, which should grow as you publish
• Rankings for the specific money phrases you agreed on in writing at the start
• Google Business Profile calls, direction requests and website clicks
• Closed revenue, where you can trace it

Questions to ask on your next call

Ask these verbatim. Then be quiet and listen to how they answer, not just what they say.

1. What pages were added or rewritten in the last ninety days? Send me the URLs.
2. Show me non branded organic clicks, year over year, in Search Console.
3. What are the five phrases we are actually trying to win, and where do we stand on each?
4. How many of the pages you built are indexed? If some are not, why?
5. What links or citations did we earn this quarter, and where?
6. What is on the roadmap for the next ninety days, specifically?
7. Am I an owner on Search Console, Analytics and my Google Business Profile? Can you confirm with a screenshot?
8. Who is doing the writing, and do they know anything about my trade?
9. What have you found on my site that you recommend we stop doing?
10. If I canceled tomorrow, what do I keep?

A good partner answers all of these without getting defensive, and will usually volunteer the bad news first. A bad one pivots to impressions, mentions an algorithm update, or tells you SEO takes time. SEO does take time. That is not an answer to any of the questions above.

A quick monthly habit

Give yourself fifteen minutes on the first of the month and do this:

1. Open Search Console, Performance, last three months versus previous three months
2. Note non branded clicks, up or down
3. Open your Pages report and look for new URLs
4. Open your own site and find something that was added last month
5. Check your Google Business Profile for new photos, posts and review responses
6. Write down one question for your next call

Do that six months in a row and you will know more about your own SEO than most owners who have paid for it for five years.

If you find nothing

You have two options. Have a direct conversation with specifics, which sometimes works, because some agencies simply let small accounts drift. Or move on, and make sure you take your accounts, your content and your access with you when you go.

If you want a straight read on what has and has not been done on your site, we will look at it with you at Heights Digital. Call 210-729-4008 and we will go through Search Console together, even if the honest answer is that your current setup is fine.