How do I know if my SEO company is doing anything? Seven checks, twenty minutes, no jargon
A roofer I spoke to in the spring had been paying an agency £250 a month for eleven months. He had a PDF report every month with a green arrow on it. When I asked him what had actually changed on his website in that time, he did not know, and neither did I, so we looked.
His site had four pages in August and the same four pages the following June. Same words. Same page titles. The only thing that had moved was the copyright year in the footer, and his web host had done that automatically. Eleven payments, and the whole of the work was a monthly document describing it.
That is not a story about a crooked agency. It is a story about a British tradesman with no way to check, which is the normal position and a fixable one. Every check below is free, takes about twenty minutes in total, and needs nothing you do not already have. External figures and quotes were read on 4 September 2026.
Do not judge it on rankings: those take months in the UK and cannot answer the question at month two. Judge it on the evidence trail. Real work changes something you can see: pages added or edited, sitemap dates that have moved, activity on your Google Business Profile, and queries in Search Console you were not appearing for before. No trail after three months means no work.
The mistake nearly everyone makes first
Asking "am I ranking yet?" at month three is the wrong question, because the honest answer is no even when the work is excellent. Ask "what has changed?" instead. Effort leaves a trail from week one. Results do not arrive for two quarters.
These two questions get muddled constantly and the confusion protects the wrong people. A provider doing genuinely good work gets sacked at month four because nothing has ranked, which is normal and I have published my own Search Console series showing exactly how normal. A provider doing nothing at all survives to month eleven, because "SEO takes time" is a true sentence and it covers them perfectly.
Separate them. Results are slow and partly outside anyone's control. Work is fast, visible, and entirely inside your provider's control. You are entitled to check the second one every single month.
The seven checks, in the order I would run them
All seven use free tools, none needs you to understand SEO, and the whole set takes about twenty minutes. Run them before you write an angry email, because six of the seven produce a screenshot you can attach.
Six of the seven produce something you can screenshot, which matters more than any of them individually: a polite email carrying two dated screenshots gets a different reply from one that says you feel like nothing is happening.
What real work leaves behind
Every legitimate SEO activity produces a visible artefact within days, and the artefact appears long before the ranking does. Absence of the artefact is not slow progress, it is absence of the work.
| What they say they are doing | The trail it leaves | Where you check it | If it is missing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Writing content | New or rewritten pages | Wayback Machine, site: search | No content was written |
| On-page optimisation | Changed page titles and headings | Wayback Machine, browser tab text | Nothing was edited |
| Technical fixes | Sitemap dates move, indexing errors fall | sitemap.xml, Search Console Pages report | Ask for the before and after |
| Local SEO | Dated photos, posts, review replies | Your Google Business Profile | The profile has been left alone |
| Link building | Your name on a real page elsewhere | Open the link, search the page | The link does not exist |
| Keyword targeting | New query rows in Search Console | Performance, compared quarter on quarter | Nothing new is being aimed at |
| Reporting | A PDF | Your inbox | The only one that proves nothing |
Read the last row twice. The monthly report is the one deliverable that can be produced without touching your website at all, and it is the one most tradespeople are shown as proof. The roofer had eleven of them.
The report is not the work
A report leading with impressions and average position is not automatically dishonest. Both genuinely move early, which is the problem: they move early whether or not anyone is helping. Across the ten weeks to 25 August 2026 this site collected 8,694 impressions and 27 clicks, a ratio of 322 impressions per click. The impressions chart looked magnificent.
What Google itself tells you to watch for
Google publishes its own guidance on hiring an SEO and it is blunter than anything a UK agency will send you. The headline sentence is that "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google".
The same page tells you to "beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a 'special relationship' with Google, or advertise a 'priority submit' to Google", to be wary of firms "that email you out of the blue", and to be careful "if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do". On access it is specific: during an audit, "only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access)".
It also gives you a positive test, which is the more useful half. Your SEO "should ask questions about what makes your business unique, who your competitors are, how search results can help, and how your customers find you". Nobody selling a template package asks a Yorkshire roofer which two towns actually pay well.
That first figure is from my own audit of 100 real, working British trade websites, one-person and small firms across plumbing, electrics, carpentry, building, roofing, gardening and decorating. Thirty six of the hundred had content that had visibly not been touched in years, and a fair few of those owners were paying somebody a monthly fee at the time.
You have run the checks. Now what?
There are only three outcomes, and two of them do not end the relationship. Decide which one you are in before you send anything.
Where you stand if the answer is nothing
A British sole trader buying SEO for the business is a trader, not a consumer, so the Consumer Rights Act 2015 does not apply to you. The older Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 does, and it still implies a term of reasonable care and skill.
This catches people out. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 defines a consumer as "an individual acting for purposes that are wholly or mainly outside that individual's trade, business, craft or profession", and buying marketing for your own firm is inside your trade.
What does apply is section 13 of the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982: "In a relevant contract for the supply of a service where the supplier is acting in the course of a business, there is an implied term that the supplier will carry out the service with reasonable care and skill." The standard is about how the service was carried out, not whether you ended up on page one, which is the right test here.
Say this plainly, because I am a web designer and not a solicitor. A disputed contract is a solicitor's job. What I can tell you is what to do first, and it is the same in every case: get named as owner on your domain, your hosting and your Search Console, take the dated screenshots while you still have access, and then take proper advice. People do this in the wrong order and lose the evidence along with the account. Who owns what in a trade website arrangement is worth reading before any of this becomes urgent.
What I would want if I were paying for it
Three things, agreed before the first payment: you own every account, you get a named list of what will be published each month, and month six has a number attached to it that a customer would actually search.
None of that is unreasonable to ask for. If a provider will not put a month's planned pages in an email, that is the answer to the question in the title, arriving before you have spent anything.
Worth knowing before you buy at all: paid clicks bill per click and stop the afternoon you stop paying, and I have run the three-year sum on both routes with real figures rather than the usual hand-waving.
For what it is worth, I charge £300 every four weeks for SEO on a site you already have, or £350 with the website built and hosted alongside it. Four-weekly billing is thirteen payments a year, so that is £3,900 rather than £3,600, and I would rather you saw it written down. Whoever you use, own the accounts and run the seven checks. Twenty minutes a month is cheap insurance against eleven months of green arrows.