How to Tell If Your SEO Agency Is Actually Working

You are several months into a retainer. The monthly report arrives with graphs that go up. Keywords are described as improving. And nothing has changed about how many people contact you.

The hard part is that this looks identical whether the work is genuinely early or genuinely not happening. SEO really does take months, which means "give it time" is both the honest answer and the oldest cover story in the industry.

These four questions separate them. You can answer all of them yourself, and none of them require a tool subscription.

1. Can You See What Changed, and When?

Ask for a list of what was actually done last month. Not activities — outputs. Which pages were edited, which were created, which links were earned, what was fixed and on what date.

A good agency sends this without hesitating, because it is how they track their own work. If what comes back is "ongoing optimization", "content strategy" and "technical improvements" with no page named and no date attached, that is the answer.

Then check one. Open a page they said they changed and look at it. You will know within a minute whether a human rewrote it.

2. Are Impressions Moving, Even If Clicks Are Not?

This is the single most useful check and almost nobody does it, because the agency usually controls the reporting.

Open Search Console yourself — it is your property, you should have access, and if you do not, ask for it today. Set the range to the last three months and compare it against the previous three.

Impressions up, clicks flat means the work is landing and is early. Google is showing you for more things; the positions are not yet good enough to be clicked. This is what genuine progress looks like at month four, and it is not a failure.

Impressions flat and average position flat means nothing is reaching Google at all. Six months of that is not early. That is the finding.

Impressions up but only on your own brand name means they are counting people who were already looking for you. Filter the query list for your company name and see what is left.

3. Does the Reporting Name a Number You Care About?

Reports built to look good share a vocabulary: impressions, keyword counts, domain authority, "visibility", positions on terms nobody searches. All are real measurements. None of them is a business outcome.

The question to ask is simple: how many enquiries came from organic search last month, and which pages produced them? An agency that cannot answer has not set up conversion tracking, which after six months is itself the answer.

Watch for the two patterns that disguise a flat number. Reporting a ranking for a phrase so specific that only you would ever type it. And comparing against the weakest month instead of the previous one.

4. Can They Tell You What Is Not Working?

Ask directly: what have we tried that did not work, and what would you do differently?

Every real engagement has some of both. Pages that did not rank, a keyword that turned out to have no buyers behind it, a technical fix that made no difference. An agency six months into real work has a list and will give it to you.

An agency that says everything is on track, every month, for six months, is either not looking or not telling you. Neither is good, and this question catches both.

What a Fair Timeline Looks Like

So you can judge whether "early" is reasonable:

Month 1-2 — audit, fixes, the first pages. Nothing visible in rankings, and that is normal. You should still be able to see what was done.

Month 3-4 — impressions should be moving. New pages should be appearing in Search Console, even at poor positions. If impressions are completely flat here, something is wrong.

Month 5-6 — positions improving on the less competitive terms. Early clicks. Probably not the head terms yet, and on a new domain, probably not for a while — how long SEO takes sets out why.

Month 9-12 — this is where a competitive term should start to move. If nothing has changed by month twelve on a site that was technically sound to begin with, the engagement is not working.

When the Problem Is Not the Agency

Worth saying, because it is frequently true. Three things cap results regardless of who is doing the work, and a good agency will have told you about them in month one.

A brand-new domain competing against established ones. A website the agency cannot change, because the developer is a separate company and tickets take weeks. And a market where the head terms are held by competitors with hundreds of referring domains, where the realistic play is narrower terms for a year or two first.

If your agency named these up front, they were being straight with you. If they appear for the first time in month seven, as an explanation for why nothing moved, that is a different thing.

Before You Change Agencies

Switching resets a few months whatever the reason, so it is worth being sure. Two things to do first.

Run the questions above and give them a fortnight to answer properly. Some agencies are doing real work and reporting it badly, and that is fixable in one conversation.

And get a second opinion on the site itself, from someone who is not pitching for the retainer in the same breath. Our SEO audit checklist is the version you can run in an afternoon; a proper SEO audit tells you whether the site is capable of ranking at all, which is the thing worth knowing before you hire anyone else.

If you do move, how to choose an SEO agency covers what to ask the next one, and make sure you leave owning everything — Search Console, Analytics, the domain, the content. An agency that holds those is a reason to leave on its own.