How to Tell If Your SEO Agency Is Actually Doing the Work

I’ve been doing this since before “SEO” was even a common term, and one question came up more than almost any other when people registered for my last webinar:

How do you know if the company you’re paying is actually doing anything?

One registrant put it bluntly: they’re paying a lot of money for SEO and the return on it, in actual profit, is close to zero.

Another asked how you’re supposed to evaluate an SEO company at all when every single one promises “unbelievable results.”

I’ve been on the other side of this industry long enough to tell you honestly: your instinct to question this is a good one. There are a lot of consultants charging what they want and delivering little, mostly because most business owners have no way to check their work.

Here’s how to actually check it.

Start with what you’re supposed to be able to see

A legitimate SEO relationship should be able to show you, in plain terms, what’s actually being done to your website and why.

If you’ve asked “what specifically did I pay for this month” and gotten a vague answer, or a report full of jargon with no explanation, that’s a real warning sign.

You’re the business owner.
You’re entitled to understand what someone else is doing to represent your company online, not just receive an invoice

What a real monthly meeting with your strategist looks like

Your monthly meeting with your strategist should feel like a working meeting, not a status update read off a slide.

Let me say that again:

Your monthly meeting with your strategist should feel like a working meeting, not a status update read off a slide.

That distinction sounds small, but it tells you almost everything about whether the relationship is actually working.

A working meeting goes both directions. Your strategist walks you through what’s actually happening with your visibility, in plain English, and tells you what moved, what didn’t, and what they’re changing next month because of it, before you have to ask. If something’s slipping, that gets said out loud, along with the plan to fix it, not buried under whichever number happened to look good that month.

A status update read off a slide is the opposite. It’s a one-way presentation of whatever’s flattering, delivered on a schedule, with little room for your actual questions or your actual experience running the business. If you regularly leave these calls without a clear answer to “so what actually changed because of this,” or the same few slides get walked through every month with only the numbers swapped out, that’s not a strategy session. It’s a formality someone’s billing you for.

There’s one more test worth applying every single month: does what they’re telling you match what you’re actually seeing in your business? If your strategist says visibility is climbing but your team hasn’t fielded a new inquiry in months, one of those two things is wrong, and it’s worth finding out which one before you renew anything.

Know what should be a one-time cost versus an ongoing one

Some SEO work is genuinely one-time: writing your meta titles and descriptions, fixing broken links, cleaning up duplicate content, getting your site mobile-friendly and fast.

Once that’s done well, it’s done.

You shouldn’t be paying for it again every single month unless you’ve specifically agreed the site needs another pass.

If your invoice looks identical month after month with no new content, no new strategy, and no explanation of what changed, ask why.

What to actually ask when you’re interviewing an SEO specialist

One registrant asked specifically how to interview a specialist to confirm their skill set and make sure they’re not going to get your site penalized by trying to game the system. Start with this question, because it will tell you more than any other one on this list:

Ask specifically what they’re doing about AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, not just traditional Google rankings.

This is the part of SEO that’s moving the fastest right now, and most providers haven’t caught up to it. A lot of them are still selling the same keyword-and-backlink package they were selling five years ago, with “AI” mentioned somewhere in the pitch and nothing underneath it actually changed. Ranking on page one doesn’t mean what it used to when a customer’s first answer comes from an AI Overview or a ChatGPT response instead of a list of blue links.

If your provider can’t explain, specifically, how they’re structuring your content and your site so AI tools can confidently cite your business by name, they’re only solving half the problem you’re actually paying them to solve.

A real answer sounds concrete. It should cover how they’re building content that directly answers the exact questions your customers are asking, rather than vague marketing copy. It should cover how they structure your pages so a machine can clearly tell what your business does and who it’s for.

If what you get instead is a blank stare, a buzzword, or a pivot straight back to “well, rankings are still rankings,” that’s your answer, and it means you’re not just paying for the wrong strategy, you’re paying someone to solve a problem that’s already a few years out of date.

Once you’ve asked that one, a few others are worth a follow-up: what they’d do in the first 90 days and why, in that order, if they are offering backlinks, ask whether they’re buying backlinks in bulk (a real risk factor for getting your site flagged) or earning them from legitimate, relevant sites, and how they’d handle your Google Business Profile if you’re a local or service-area business. Worth knowing, but none of them will tell you as much about whether this provider is actually current as the AI question does.

Just as an aside, you might want to ask who owns your Google Search Console, Analytics, and Business Profile accounts once the work starts. They should be set up under your own login, with you granted admin access, not buried inside an agency’s master account you can’t see into. In addition, ask if you will have admin access to your own website as well as the hosting account. If a company can’t or won’t hand you that access, that alone tells you they’re planning on you never leaving.

Ask what happens to your rankings and your content if you cancel. A legitimate provider builds things that belong to you: your website content, your backlink profile, your accounts. If the honest answer is that your traffic collapses the moment you stop paying, you were never really building an asset, you were renting one.

Ask how they define success, and push past “rankings.” Rankings for a keyword nobody searches, or that doesn’t lead to a phone call or a form fill, aren’t worth much. A provider who’s actually thinking about your business will talk about inquiries, leads, and revenue, not just where you sit in a search results list.

If the answers are vague, generic, or entirely about rankings with nothing about your actual customers, that’s telling you something.

What shady SEO agencies actually do to clients

A lot of what makes people distrust this industry isn’t imaginary, and I’d rather you hear it plainly than keep wondering. This is what actually happens to business owners, so you can recognize it if it’s happening to you.

Some agencies report on rankings you were always going to have anyway. Your own brand name, or a keyword phrase nobody actually searches for, dressed up in a monthly report full of green arrows and upward charts. That kind of report can look like real progress while telling you nothing about whether a single new customer found you because of it.

Some agencies keep your Google Search Console, Analytics, Business Profile, and even your website login inside their own agency account instead of yours, so you have no way to check their work yourself and no way to leave without starting over from zero. If you don’t currently have your own admin access to your own accounts, ask for it today. Don’t wait until you’re already trying to leave.

Some agencies buy backlinks in bulk from low-quality link farms. It looks impressive on paper (a hundred new links this month!) while quietly putting your site at risk of a Google penalty down the road, usually well after that agency has moved on to their next client.

Some agencies write the same generic content for every business in your industry, with your name swapped in where the last client’s used to be, so nothing on your site actually reflects anything true or specific about your business. That’s exactly the kind of content both search engines and AI tools are now actively pushing down, not up.

And a few will flatly promise you a guaranteed first-page ranking, or a specific traffic number by a specific date. No legitimate provider controls Google’s algorithm. Anyone guaranteeing a rank is either dangerously overconfident or telling you what you want to hear to close the deal.

Is my website’s SEO even sufficient right now?

This is the question underneath almost all of the others, and there are really two honest answers, depending on how deep you want to go.

From the outside, without you handing anyone a single login, we can already tell a fair amount: how your website is put together technically, roughly where you stand in search, and whether AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are picking your business up at all. That’s what our free AI Visibility Audit gives you, a real first look, not a guess.

But the fullest answer to “is my SEO actually working” lives inside your own Bing and Google Search Console data: your real impressions, clicks, and rankings, broken down by the exact queries people are typing in. That’s not something anyone can see from outside your site, and it’s genuinely one of the most useful tools we have once we start working together, because it shows precisely where you’re being seen and precisely where you’re getting skipped.

The audit’s job is to tell you honestly whether it’s worth going that deep.

Anyone telling you your SEO is “fine” or “needs work” without ever having looked at either your online presence, website, competition or your Search Console data isn’t giving you an answer. They’re guessing.

What’s the most cost-effective way to become findable again, without paying for ads?

Organic visibility (not paid ads) comes down to the same fundamentals regardless of budget:

• a technically healthy website
• content that actually answers what your customers are searching for
• an accurate Google Business Profile if you’re local,
• and a track record of other credible sites linking to or mentioning you.

I want to be straight with you about what that actually costs when it’s done properly, though, because “cost-effective” doesn’t mean “cheap,” and I’d rather you hear real numbers from me than assume.

Ongoing SEO work with us typically runs around $1,600 a month, usually over a 12-month engagement, because rebuilding real visibility takes sustained work, not a one-time fix. If your website itself needs to be rebuilt rather than repaired, that’s a separate project, typically $8,000 to $30,000 depending on scope. Anyone quoting you a fraction of that for comparable work is either cutting corners you won’t see until later, or not doing the same thing at all.

That said, spending real money doesn’t guarantee real results.

What matters is doing the right things, in the right order, for as long as it actually takes.

A lot of paid SEO relationships fail not because the client didn’t spend enough, but because the spend went toward the wrong things first. Doing five things poorly still costs more, in wasted time and money, than doing two things well.

The honest next step

Before you decide whether to fire your current SEO company, hire a new one, or take it in-house, get an actual, specific picture of where your website stands today. That’s what our free AI Visibility Audit gives you: a real look at your current visibility across both traditional search and AI tools, with no obligation attached. It’s the fastest way to find out whether what you’re paying for is working, or whether it’s time for a different conversation.