How to check an SEO contractor’s work

The awkward part of paying for SEO is that the client usually cannot judge what was delivered. A report arrives with charts, the invoice matches the agreement, and whether any of it was worth the money is a question the client has no way to answer.

That is fixable without becoming a specialist. There is a small set of things you can check yourself, in an hour, using data you already own.

What belongs in a monthly report

A report made of nothing but charts going up is just a presentation.

• What was done. Specific pages, specific changes, with dates.
• What is planned next month. Named tasks, not general areas.
• What is waiting on you. Approvals, texts, access.
• What changed in the numbers. With the comparison period stated.
• What did not work. An honest report has this section.

The first item is the one to insist on. Instead of “optimized the catalog”, the report names which pages, what was changed on them and when. That level of detail takes a contractor ten minutes to produce if the work was done, and it cannot be produced at all if it was not.

The last item is the strongest signal of a competent contractor. SEO involves attempts that fail, and a report that has never once said something did not work is describing a fiction.

The figures you can see yourself

Google Search Console and what to look at there

This is your account, not the contractor’s, and it holds the data that matters most.

The four numbers to watch are clicks, impressions, average position and the number of queries the site appears for. Compare each against last month and, once the site is over a year old, against the same month a year earlier. Year on year removes seasonality, and until the site has a year of history, month-on-month changes have to be read with the season in mind.

What a healthy picture looks like at three months in is more queries and more impressions, with clicks flat or slightly up. What it looks like at eight months is clicks visibly higher than the starting point. If neither has happened, the question is worth asking directly.

The pages report is worth opening too. It shows which of your pages actually receive traffic, and the answer is often that two do and forty do not. That is not a fault by itself, but it should match what the contractor says has been worked on.

Analytics and inquiries rather than visits

Traffic is a means. What you are buying is inquiries, and those are counted separately.

The check is straightforward. Does analytics record a conversion when the form is submitted, and does the number of recorded conversions match the number of inquiries you actually received? In a surprising number of accounts the answer to the second question is no, and every report built on that data has been describing something other than reality.

The traffic source of each inquiry matters as much as the count. An inquiry from search and an inquiry from a paid advertisement are both inquiries, and a report that presents the total without separating them is doing so for a reason.

Work that is visible on the site

Some of the work leaves traces you can see without any tools at all.

Comparing against a saved copy makes this easy, which is the practical reason to take screenshots of the main pages at the start of the work and keep them.

The titles are the fastest check. Search for your company, look at how the results are worded, and ask whether those words describe what you sell. If they are the same generic strings that were there two years ago, the most basic work has not been done.

Rankings and why they are the worst measure

Ranking data is the most common thing in an SEO report and the least meaningful.

The same query returns different results depending on where the person is, what device they use and what they have searched before. So a ranking report is a snapshot of one particular set of conditions, and a contractor choosing which conditions to report has considerable freedom.

There is also the matter of which queries are reported. A report showing thirty queries in the top three tells you nothing until you know whether anybody searches for them. A query nobody types can be won easily and is worth nothing, and a list of such queries is the standard way to make an inactive month look productive.

There is one legitimate use for rank tracking. Watching a small set of queries you genuinely care about, measured the same way every month, shows direction even if the absolute numbers are soft. Twenty queries tracked consistently is useful; four hundred tracked selectively is a report designed not to be read.

The honest version of a ranking report includes the search volume of each query and the traffic each one actually delivered. Without those two columns it is decoration. What to expect and by when is answered in our article on when the first SEO results appear.

How to check links if they are being bought

If part of the budget goes on external links, that part is the easiest to misreport and the most dangerous to get wrong.

Ask for the list. Every link, with the address of the page it is on. A contractor who will not provide it is not protecting a method, because there is no method that requires the client not to know where their own links are.

• Whether the pages are real. Open five at random and read them.
• Whether the link is actually there. Sometimes it is not, or it was removed.
• What the site is about. A link from an unrelated directory does nothing.
• How many other links are on the page. A page with two hundred is a farm.
• Whether the text around it makes sense. Machine-written filler is visible.

Five minutes of opening pages at random tells you more than any report. If three of the five are directories full of unrelated links, the money is buying something that ranges from useless to actively harmful.

Signs that no work is being done

The pattern is recognizable once you know what to look for.

The report arrives late, or arrives on time and says the same thing every month with different numbers. There are no questions from the contractor, which is unusual, because real work generates questions about the business almost every month.

Nothing on the site has changed. No new pages, no rewritten text, no adjusted titles. The contractor says the work is technical and invisible, which is true for one month and not for six.

A related pattern is worth naming, because it is the most common way an inactive month is dressed up.

• Reports full of tool screenshots. Automated output, not work.
• Long lists of technical remarks. Reported every month, never fixed.
• Traffic charts with no comparison period. Any line looks like growth.
• Totals that include paid traffic. Presented as SEO results.
• Vague task names. Optimization, analysis, improvements.

Any single one of those is a formatting habit. Three or four together, month after month, is a contractor producing documents instead of work. Ongoing work that is genuinely happening leaves a trail on the site itself, which is why the section above starts there, and it is also why, on a live project, SEO and project support and development tend to be handled by the same people rather than in separate silos.

Requests for access are never made and content is never asked for. A contractor who has been working for four months without once needing a text, a photograph or an answer about your trade is not producing pages.

Signs that you are being harmed

This category is worse than inactivity, because inactivity only costs the fee.

• Sudden text appearing that reads badly. Machine-written, keyword-stuffed.
• Pages you did not order. Created in bulk, thin, near-identical.
• A jump in links from unrelated sites. Especially foreign directories.
• Hidden text. Same color as the background, or positioned off-screen.
• Redirects you were not told about. Traffic being sent somewhere.

Any of these justifies stopping the work the same week. The damage from artificial links and generated pages is not gradual, and undoing it takes longer than the work that caused it.

The most common version is subtler than the list suggests. Text on your existing pages is quietly rewritten to repeat a phrase eight times in a paragraph, so that a page that read normally now reads like an advertisement written by a machine. Customers notice that before the search engine does.

Questions worth asking once a quarter

Quarterly is the right interval. Monthly it becomes pressure, annually it is too late.

The five questions are what changed in the numbers against the same quarter last year, what specifically was done, what is planned, what is blocked on our side, and what you would do differently if the budget were doubled or halved. The last one is the most revealing, because the answer shows whether there is a plan or a routine.

A contractor who answers all five without preparation is doing the work. One who needs a week to assemble the answers is assembling them rather than reporting them.

The composition of a normal monthly workload, so you know what those answers should sound like, is described in our article on what you pay for monthly in SEO.

When to change contractors and when to wait

The distinction matters, because changing at the wrong moment resets progress that was about to arrive.

Wait when the leading indicators are moving. More queries, more impressions, pages moving from Not indexed to Indexed in the Page indexing report, technical work visibly done. Those precede clicks by months, and stopping at that point means paying for the setup and leaving before the return.

Change when the site has stood still for three months and the reports do not explain why. Change when the questions above cannot be answered. Change immediately on any of the harm signals.

The middle case is the difficult one, where the work is real and the results are not coming. There the right step is an independent look at the site rather than a change of contractor, and what such a review covers is described in our article on what a website audit finds. Sometimes the problem is that the site cannot rank regardless of the work, and no change of contractor fixes that.

What to do before changing contractors

Do this while you are still on good terms, not after a falling-out.

• Collect all access. Search Console, analytics, hosting, the site itself.
• Confirm you own the accounts. Not the contractor’s personal ones.
• Take a copy of the reports. The whole history, not the last one.
• Get the link list. If any were bought.
• Export the analytics history. In case access is lost.

The account ownership question is the one that causes real trouble. If the analytics property sits in the contractor’s account, ask them to move it into yours. Google Analytics moves the whole history with the property, but only with an administrator on their side taking part. After a falling-out, without their consent, the history is gone.

How to evaluate the next contractor before signing, rather than after six months, is covered in our article on how to choose a web agency.

Conclusions

Checking an SEO contractor does not require expertise. It requires your own access to Search Console and analytics, a habit of comparing against the same period a year ago, and a report that names specific pages and specific changes.

Rankings are the weakest measure and the most reported. Inquiries are the strongest and the least reported, and the gap between those two facts explains most of the dissatisfaction in this field.

If you are paying monthly and cannot tell what it is buying, send us the site address and read-only access to your Search Console. We will compare what the reports claim against what the data shows and tell you whether the work is sound, is not being done at all, or is the kind that will cost you the site. If it turns out the work is being done properly, that is what the answer will say, and ongoing work of this kind is part of our search engine optimization service.