How to tell whether your SEO is actually working
Six months into an SEO retainer, most business owners cannot answer a simple question: is this working? The reports arrive full of green arrows, and the phone rings about the same as it did before. The problem is usually that the wrong things are being measured. Here is how to judge it yourself, using tools you already have, in the order the numbers actually matter.
Start at the end: enquiries
The only number that pays your wages is enquiries, so count them. Form submissions, phone calls, emails, walk-ins if that applies to you. Write down the monthly figure for the last six months before you look at anything else, because it anchors every other number to reality. If enquiries have not moved and everything else looks wonderful, the everything else is decoration.
Count them the same way each month, and note where they came from when you can. Asking new customers how they found you is unfashionable and still one of the better data sources a small business has.
Then the number that predicts it: the right kind of traffic
Visits are only useful when they are the right visits. A hundred people searching for your service in your city are worth more than two thousand who landed on a blog post from the other side of the world. So when traffic is up, ask which pages grew and what those pages are for. Growth on your service and contact pages is a good sign. Growth on one stray article, with nothing else moving, usually is not.
What Search Console actually tells you
Google Search Console is free, it is specific to your site, and it answers questions no other tool can. Three things there are worth a monthly look. Clicks: how many people actually came from search. Impressions: how often you appeared at all, which tells you whether Google is starting to consider you for more searches. And queries: the real phrases people typed, which shows whether you are being found for the things you get paid for or for things that will never become a job.
A pattern worth knowing: impressions climbing while clicks stay flat usually means you are appearing but not being chosen, which is a titles-and-descriptions problem rather than a ranking one. That is a fixable afternoon of work, not a bigger budget.
Why rankings make a poor scoreboard
Rankings feel like the obvious measure and they are the easiest to be misled by. Results are personalised and shift with the searcher's location, so what you see when you search your own name is not what a customer sees. A single reported position is an average across all of that. And a first place for a phrase nobody searches is worth precisely nothing, while page two for a phrase your customers use every day is worth chasing.
Rankings are a useful diagnostic, not a result. Use them to explain a change in enquiries, never as a substitute for one.
Give it a fair timeframe, and compare fairly
SEO compounds, so month one and month six do not look alike, and judging it on a fortnight tells you nothing. Equally, do not compare December to January if your trade has a season. Compare the same month against last year where you can, and read the direction of travel over a quarter rather than the wobble week to week.
The questions a good report answers
Whoever is doing your SEO, including us, a report should be able to answer four things in plain words: what was done this month, what changed in enquiries, what that suggests about next month, and what is not working. A report that only shows things going up is not a report, it is a sales document. If a month was flat, the honest version says so and explains what changes.
If the numbers say nothing is happening
Before you change providers, work out which layer is stuck. If the technical foundations are shaky, nothing above them can work, and our 20-minute website health check will tell you quickly. If the foundations are fine but you are being found for the wrong phrases, the problem is the content layer, and what your customers actually type is where to look.
If you would like a second opinion on what your numbers are really saying, tell us the situation and we will give you a straight answer, including if the answer is that your current provider is doing fine. No page-one promises, because nobody honest can make them.