You pay an SEO company every month. Once a month, a report arrives full of charts that mostly go up. You are not sure what any of it means for your business, and you are not sure what they did.

That is a common position, and it is not your fault. SEO is slow, partly invisible work, which makes it easy to sell and hard to check. But it is not impossible to check. Here are seven things you can do yourself, without technical skills.

1. Ask for a list of what was changed, with links

Real SEO work leaves traces: pages written or rewritten, technical problems fixed, listings corrected, links earned. Every one of those can be listed with a date and a URL.

Ask your agency: "Can you send me a list of every change you made to the site or our listings in the last three months, with links?"

A good agency can answer that the same day. If the answer is vague ("ongoing optimisation", "algorithm monitoring", "backend improvements"), that tells you something.

2. Check that the pages they mention actually exist

If the report says new pages or articles were published, open them. Read one. Does it say anything a customer would find useful, or is it general text that could be about any business in any city? Search Google for a sentence from it in quotation marks. If the same sentence appears on other companies' websites, the content was not written for you.

3. Look at Google Search Console yourself

Google Search Console is Google's own free report on how your site appears in search. You should have owner access to it. If you do not, ask your agency to add you. It is your data, and an agency that will not share it is a red flag on its own.

In the "Performance" report, compare the last three months with the same three months a year ago. Look at:

  • Clicks: people who came to your site from Google
  • Queries: the searches they used

You are looking for more clicks from searches that sound like customers. Growth that comes only from your own business name usually means people already knew you, not that SEO found new ones.

4. Search for what your customers search for

Pick five searches a real customer would type, such as "[your service] [your city]". Search each one on your phone, logged out or in a private window. Note where you appear, on the map and in the results below it. Do the same in three months. This is not a precise measurement, because results vary by location and device, but if you never appear for anything a customer would type, the report's charts are not measuring what matters.

5. Check your Google Business Profile has been touched

For a local business, the Business Profile is often where most enquiries start. Open it. Are the categories right, the services listed, the photos recent? Has anyone posted an update or replied to reviews? If nothing has changed since you set it up yourself, it has not been part of the work.

6. Check what AI assistants say about you

More customers now ask ChatGPT, Google's AI answers or Perplexity for recommendations. Ask one of them, "Who would you recommend for [your service] in [your city]?" and "What do you know about [your business name]?" If the answer is wrong, outdated or missing you, ask your agency whether that is part of their work and what they are doing about it. We explain why this happens in why does ChatGPT get my company wrong.

7. Ask how they connect the work to enquiries

Rankings and traffic are steps on the way. What you pay for is customers. Ask: "Which of the enquiries we got last quarter came from search, and how do you know?" A good answer mentions call tracking, form tracking or at least a sensible estimate. "SEO is hard to attribute" is true but not a complete answer.

How long is fair to wait?

SEO does take time, and early months often go into fixing foundations that do not show up in traffic yet. As a rough guide, you should see the work itself (changes, pages, fixes) from the first month, and movement in the searches that matter within several months. We go into the timeline in how long does SEO take. If you cannot see the work, waiting longer will not help.

If the answers worry you

You do not have to switch agencies to find out where you stand. An independent review, by someone not selling you the ongoing work, is the cleanest way to get a straight answer. That is what our website and marketing audit is: a one-time review of your site, listings, rankings and any ad accounts, with a prioritised list of what is and is not working. You keep the report whether or not you work with us afterwards.