How to Tell if Your SEO Company Is Working Right Now

You pay an SEO team every month to promote your website, and all you get back are long, confusing reports full of graphs. On calls, you just nod along, because you don’t want to sound uninformed or ask basic questions about the meaning of all those fancy technical terms.

‍

‍

Many entrepreneurs perceive search engine optimization as black-box magic, where they just give money and hope for the best. But you don’t have to be a professional programmer or a technical expert to stay in control and understand whether your agency is actually delivering results. In this article, we will tell you very simply how to check the work of your team and clearly understand whether you’re throwing your marketing budget down the drain.

How to Know If Your SEO Is Working: Focus on What Matters

Stop obsessing over how many articles were published or how many links were built, as these are just inputs, not outcomes. You need leads and sales, so the first thing you need to pay attention to during the analysis is your qualified organic traffic. Your website should attract exactly those people who are really ready to buy your product or order a service, and not just attract random visitors from all over the Internet.

‍

‍

The second and much more important indicator of success is your conversions: form submissions, calls, and orders. Thousands of visits don’t mean much if your phone doesn’t ring for days. Any reputable SEO agency always sets up analytics in such a way that you can clearly see how many people made a purchase after coming from Google Search. If the overall traffic is growing, but the actual sales are zero, then you are either bringing the wrong people to your site, or your site has UX issues that hurt conversions.

Tools: Where to See the Real Numbers

Don’t rely solely on screenshots that your agency sends you in monthly reports, because the numbers there can be cherry-picked or presented selectively to justify the lack of results. You must have your own access to the analytics, where your main assistant will be Google Search Console (free). It shows a clear picture of which search queries people use to find you and how often they click your result in the search results.

You’ll also want Google Analytics, where you can very clearly see what people do on your site and where they most often drop off. And to check the quality of the backlinks you’re paying for every month with your own money, just ask your contractors to have them screen-share Ahrefs live during a video call. Let them show you a real graph of your site’s growth in site authority metrics in real time without any spin.

What Matters in SEO (and Why Results Are Hard to Measure)

For stable financial success, you need three pillars that work together: a fast, technically sound site, useful content, and high-quality, authoritative links from other websites. If a hired team does one thing and completely ignores other areas of work, you will never get the desired result and will simply waste your time.

But why is it so difficult to calculate exact ROI the next day? The answer is that this isn’t pay-per-click advertising, where you paid for a click and immediately received a conversion, because here the customer’s path is much longer and more complicated. A person can find your detailed expert article, read it carefully, think it over and compare options, and a week later remember your brand and make a direct purchase on the site. Attribution isn’t perfect, moreover, Google is constantly changing its rules, and your traffic can swing after algorithm updates.

How Long SEO Takes (and Why Exact Forecasts Are a Red Flag)

All business owners want to know the exact payback period for their investments, but it’s worth being completely honest and admitting that no one can guarantee exact traffic numbers by the end of the year. The secret ranking algorithms belong to a large corporation, not your marketing agency, so if they draw you a graph with exact visitor numbers for the months ahead at a meeting, you’re being sold a fantasy to get you to sign.

‍

‍

Noticeable results usually appear typically after 3-4 months of constant and systematic work on the website. Search engines need time to crawl, reindex, and reassess your site in order to see your corrected technical errors, index new content, and take into account the appearance of new links on the Internet. This is a real long-term play, where you build a solid and reliable foundation for your business for many years to come.

How to Tell If Your SEO Company Is Working: Simple Rules

In order not to burn your annual budget in vain and stay in control, always use these simple rules when communicating with your team:

• Demand a clear and transparent action plan so that you understand exactly what SEO services you will be provided with next month and what exactly you are paying for.
• Ask them to explain the work in plain language, and feel free to pause the conversation and ask for a simple explanation if you hear a bunch of incomprehensible technical terms that are designed to hide the lack of results.
• Compare performance year over year (YoY), because there is no practical sense in comparing summer sales with winter ones if you have a pronounced seasonal business.
• Keep asking what they’re doing to improve conversion rate (CRO/UX), because real experts are always interested in how to make your site more convenient for the buyer, and not just write texts for search engines.

Take a Step Towards Honest Marketing Today

If, after carefully reading this article, you have started to doubt your current agency, don’t wait for a miracle. Paying big money for incomprehensible technical reports without real sales is a direct path to nowhere, because you have every right to get clear answers about your website and its financial potential.

We are ready to conduct an in-depth independent audit of your project without jargon, fluff, or pushy sales. We will show you real growth points and create a step-by-step plan to generate consistent leads and revenue. Write to our team of experts today by simply following this link SEO agency contact, and together we will make your web resource work at full capacity.