Is Your SEO Agency Working? How to Check in an Hour

You can tell whether an SEO agency is working by checking three things: what they shipped, what changed in your own Search Console, and whether they can explain the link between the two. You do not need to be an expert, and you do not need their dashboard. An hour with your own accounts is enough to know whether to stay, push, or leave.

What counts as working

An agency is working if it ships agreed changes on schedule, those changes are aimed at your real business goals, and your leading indicators move in the right direction over a fair period. Rankings for one or two trophy keywords are not the test. Neither is a rising chart with no dates on it.

Separate two questions. Did they do the work? That has a yes or no answer every month. Did the work pay off? That takes longer, and depends partly on your market, your site's history and how fast you approve things. An agency can fail the first question in month two. It is rarely fair to fail them on the second before month six.

Check the work before the results

Ask for a list of what was shipped last month, with URLs. Then look at the pages yourself. This takes 15 minutes and tells you more than any chart.

• New or rebuilt pages: do they exist, are they good enough that you would show them to a customer, and do they answer a search your buyers make?
• Technical fixes: is there a ticket or change log that says what was changed and why?
• Links and mentions: can they name the sites, and are those real sites a customer might read? Links you cannot be shown are usually links you would not want.
• Hours: if your plan states hours or deliverables, does the list match?
• Your approvals: were items stuck waiting on you? Be honest about this one.

If the list is vague, such as ongoing optimisation or link outreach with no detail, ask for specifics in writing. For comparison, our sample monthly report shows the level of detail we think a client should get, including a section on what did not work.

Four Search Console checks that take under an hour

Open Google Search Console yourself. If you do not have access to your own property, that is the first problem to fix: the account should be in your name, with the agency added as a user.

1. Non-branded clicks, year over year. In the Performance report, add a query filter that excludes your company name, then compare the last three months with the same three months a year earlier. This removes seasonality and removes people who already knew you.
2. Pages. Switch to the Pages tab and check whether the pages the agency built or changed are gaining impressions and clicks. Work that cannot be seen here after several months needs explaining.
3. Page indexing. Look for a growing count of pages that are crawled but not indexed, or sudden jumps in excluded pages. Either can mean low-quality pages are being produced in bulk.
4. Manual actions and security issues. Both reports should say no issues detected. A manual action for unnatural links or spam during an engagement is a serious finding.

Then open analytics and check organic leads or sales, not only visits. Traffic that never enquires is a cost, not a result. Our analytics and reporting page explains how to tie organic visits to leads.

A fair timeline

Expect visible work from the first month, leading indicators by month three, and business results somewhere between months six and twelve in most markets. The table below is a guide, not a guarantee. Established sites with technical problems can move faster, and new domains in competitive markets move slower.

Core updates can move results in either direction during any of these periods. A good agency explains what happened and adjusts. Our guide to recovering from a Google update covers how to read those drops.

Red flags in reports

• Charts with no dates, no source and no comparison period.
• Ranking tables full of your own brand name, or of long phrases with no search demand.
• Totals that mix branded and non-branded traffic, so normal word of mouth looks like SEO.
• Domain authority or similar third-party scores presented as the result. These are vendor estimates, and Google does not use them.
• A link count with no list of linking sites.
• Dozens of near-identical city or service pages counted as content delivered.
• No mention of anything that went wrong, month after month.
• Reports you cannot verify because you lack access to your own accounts.

Several of these overlap with warning signs you can spot before signing. We list those in SEO agency red flags.

Questions to ask at the next call

1. What did you ship last month? Please send URLs.
2. Which of those do you expect to matter most, and when should we see it in Search Console?
3. What did not work in the last quarter, and what did you change because of it?
4. What are our non-branded clicks compared with the same period last year?
5. Which leads or sales can we trace to organic search?
6. Where exactly did our links come from?
7. What are you waiting on from us?
8. If you were in my position, what would make you stop this engagement?

Clear answers, even uncomfortable ones, are a good sign. Defensive or vague answers to simple questions are the most reliable signal that it is time to look elsewhere.

If the answer is no: how to leave cleanly

Before you give notice, make sure you own everything. Leaving is easy when the accounts are yours, and painful when they are not.

• Confirm you are the owner of Search Console, analytics, Google Business Profile, your domain and your CMS. Remove the agency's access after the final handover, not before.
• Ask for a full list of work done: pages, redirects, links built, tools connected.
• Export reports and any keyword or content plans you paid for.
• Check the contract for the notice period and who owns the content. You should.
• Get an independent audit of what was done, so the next plan starts from facts.

For a quick outside view, run key pages through our free audit tool. If you want a full review and a plan, a one-time audit is listed on our pricing page next to the retainers, which start at $2,200 a month with no lock-in. You can also book a strategy call and we will tell you plainly whether the problem is the agency, the market or the budget.

Questions