For owners who pay someone else

Is my SEO agency working? Five checks you can run yourself.

Ask for a list of the URLs changed last month, with dates. Then verify it yourself: compare your page titles against an older copy in the Wayback Machine, check whether the problems from the first audit are still live, see whether anything new was published, and ask what was done off your site and how it can be evidenced.

Below: how to run each check for free, what a real answer looks like, and the cases where nothing changing is genuinely fine.

Read the five checks Check your site free

The problem

Why you cannot tell from your monthly report.

Most monthly SEO reports are charts: rankings, sessions from search, impressions and clicks, maybe a conversion number. Every one of those moves for reasons nobody in the room controls. A competitor publishes something better. Google changes how it builds a results page. Your industry has a quiet July.

That cuts both ways, and the second half matters more than people admit. A month of genuinely good work can land inside a traffic drop, and a month of no work at all can sit under a rising line. Judging effort by the charts punishes the honest agency about as often as it lets the idle one through.

The gap is simple: a report of metrics is not a record of work. Charts describe what happened to your website, not what anyone did to it. A record of work names pages, names dates, and says what changed, and only someone who changed something can produce one.

So stop asking whether the numbers went up. Ask what was done, and then go and look.

The method

The five checks.

None of these needs a paid tool or any skill beyond opening a browser tab. Together they take a couple of hours the first time and about twenty minutes a month after that.

1. Compare your page titles and descriptions against a month ago.

The page title is the line in your browser tab and the blue headline in search results. The meta description is the grey paragraph underneath it. Rewriting these is close to the most common on-page task in the trade, so if on-page work happened, this is where you are most likely to see it.

For today’s version, open the page and read the browser tab. For an older version, go to web.archive.org, paste the page address in, and pick a capture from about a month back. The Wayback Machine is a free public archive of web pages, run by the Internet Archive.

Two honest limits. Small sites are captured sparsely, sometimes months apart and sometimes only the home page, so a missing capture tells you nothing about your agency. And it does not compare the versions for you: you open both and read them side by side. So if you do one thing after reading this page, make it this. Once a month, paste the title and description of your ten most important pages into a spreadsheet with the date. Fifteen minutes puts the record in your hands and makes every future check trivial.

A good answer · titles on the pages that make you money have been rewritten in the last few months, and someone can tell you why each one changed.

A non-answer · nothing has moved on any page for half a year, and the work is described only as ongoing optimisation.

2. Ask for a list of URLs changed, with dates.

The highest-value question on this page, because it cannot be answered convincingly without having done something. Ask it plainly: which pages did you change last month, on what date, and what changed on each.

A real answer is specific and slightly boring. It looks like a short table, one row per page, along the lines of: 12 Jun, /commercial-cleaning-brisbane, title and opening paragraph rewritten, questions section added at the foot. You should be able to open every address and see the thing described, and the dates should be spread through the month rather than clustered on the day before the report.

A non-answer restates the service. Improved on-page optimisation across the site, worked on site structure, continued technical improvements: these describe a category of work, not work. A screenshot of a task board with a card reading SEO work, May is the same thing with a picture attached.

Be fair about one thing. If your site sits on a platform your agency cannot publish to, they may have written the changes and handed them to your developer. That is a real answer, and it is checkable: ask for the document and the date it was sent, then ask your developer what happened to it.

A good answer · a dated list of specific addresses, sent within a day or two, that matches what you can see on the pages.

A non-answer · categories of activity with no pages named, or a promise to compile it that never arrives.

3. Check whether the problems from the first audit are still there.

Almost every engagement opens with an audit: a document listing problems found on your site. Find yours, usually attached to an early email or sitting in a shared drive. Pick five items that are specific and checkable rather than strategic, and check them yourself.

Most audit items are checkable by a non-technical person. Broken links: click them. Missing or duplicate page titles: open the pages and read the browser tabs. Slow pages: paste the address into Google PageSpeed Insights, which is free and needs no account. Pages missing from Google: search for site:yourdomain.com and see whether the page appears.

You are looking for movement on the specific items, not a tidier document. One pattern is worth knowing about: the audit is re-run months later and delivered again as fresh work, with much the same list inside it. Finding problems is the cheap half. Fixing them is the half you are paying for.

A good answer · most of your five items are resolved, and the ones still open have a stated reason and an owner, even where the owner is you.

A non-answer · every item is still open months later and the audit itself has been redelivered as progress.

4. Look at whether anything new was published, and whether it was any good.

Two questions, and the second is the one people skip. For the first, open your blog index and read the dates, or visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, which most sites publish and which lists pages with the date they last changed. Google search tools will also restrict a site:yourdomain.com search to the past month.

Then read one of the new pages properly. Good work here is specific to your business in a way a competitor could not copy: it answers a question your customers actually ask, and it uses your prices, your suburbs, your process, your constraints. Weak work is fluent, correct and interchangeable. If you could swap your business name for a competitor’s and publish the same page unchanged, it was written about your industry rather than about you.

The fair caveat is large here. For plenty of small sites, publishing nothing is the right decision, and improving eight existing pages beats adding eight thin ones. Volume is not the test. What you want is that somebody made the call deliberately and told you what it was.

A good answer · a small number of pages that only your business could have published, or a stated reason for publishing nothing.

A non-answer · a steady output of general-interest articles that never mention anything specific to you.

5. Ask what was done off your site, and how it can be evidenced.

A real share of SEO work never touches your website. Links from other sites, digital PR, directory clean-ups and Google Business Profile work all happen somewhere else, which is why they need asking about separately rather than assuming they are missing.

For links, evidence means addresses: the page carrying the link, the date it went live, and the page on your site it points at. You can then open each one and see the link yourself. For Google Business Profile, evidence means the posts, photos, categories, service areas or opening hours that changed, with dates, most of which is visible in the profile itself if you have access. Ask for that access if you do not have it. The profile is your business.

Now the fairness note, and it is a real one. Genuine outreach is slow. Weeks of email can produce a single placement, and a month with no new links is normal on a small business budget. The thing worth noticing is not a quiet month. It is never being able to name a single domain, ever, while a line for link building appears on every invoice.

A good answer · named pages and dates you can open, however few, and a straight explanation of what the quiet months were spent on.

A non-answer · a number of links built with no domains named, or profile work described but never dated.

The other side

What is not a red flag.

This part matters as much as the checks, because a method that finds a problem everywhere is not a method. Several things look exactly like nothing happening and are not.

  • A quiet month. Work is lumpy. A month spent on research, on a page that took four rounds of your approval, or on a fix that turned out to need your developer, can leave almost no public trace. One quiet month proves nothing at all.
  • A deliberate stability period. After a significant change, sites are often left alone on purpose so the effect can be measured against something. That is method, not idleness. The test is timing: if you were told in advance, it is a plan. If it arrives only after you asked why nothing moved, treat it as a claim to verify rather than a lie.
  • Work that is off-site by nature. Outreach, digital PR and citation clean-ups leave no mark on your pages by definition. Check five covers them. Do not let check one convict them.
  • Specifications handed to a developer who never deployed them. This is one of the most common causes of a site that has not changed in six months, and the agency is usually not the party holding it up. If the document exists and was sent, the work happened, and the queue is somewhere else.
  • Research, strategy, briefs and meetings. Real, billable, and invisible to every check here. Also the easiest things to claim, which is why they belong in a plan you agreed to in advance rather than an explanation offered afterwards.
  • A bottleneck that is yours. If drafts are sitting in your inbox unapproved, if nobody answered the questions about pricing or process, or if site access was never granted, the work may be genuinely stuck on your side. Check that first. It is the cheapest thing on this page to fix.

Then hold both halves at once. One quiet month proves nothing. Three quiet months, on a retainer of, say, $3,000 a month, with no pages named and no dates offered, is a different conversation, and a reasonable one to have out loud.

The email

What to ask for, in writing.

Send one email and ask for these six things. Every one of them is a by-product of doing the work rather than extra work created by asking, which is why a competent agency can return them quickly and without friction.

  1. A list of the URLs changed in the last three months, with the date and one line on what changed.
  2. The original audit, with the current status of each item marked against it.
  3. Any pages published, with the address and the publication date.
  4. Any links acquired, with the address of the page carrying the link and the date.
  5. Any Google Business Profile changes, with dates.
  6. What is planned for next month, named down to specific pages.

Add one more if it applies: read access to Google Search Console and Google Analytics under your own account. Both describe your business and both should be yours, whoever set them up.

Send it as a request, not an accusation, because that is what it is. The reply tells you a great deal on its own. Specifics within a few days is a good sign even when the month was quiet. Defensiveness about a list of dates is worth noticing, and so is silence.

Full disclosure

We built something that does the first four automatically.

It is called Receipts. Once a month it crawls your site, stores the before and after, and sends a record of what changed: titles, descriptions, headings, content, pages added or removed, structured data, internal links, speed measured the same way each time, and referring domains. That is checks one to four and the link half of check five. Profile work, research, briefs and meetings stay invisible to it, and that is printed in the report rather than left out. It costs the same whatever it finds, and it never says who made a change, because it cannot see that. It reports what changed.

It does not replace this page. The method above is the whole method, it is free, and plenty of owners should run it themselves twice a year and be done. Receipts is for the ones who would rather the record arrived without having to remember.

Questions

Questions.

How can I tell if my SEO agency is actually doing any work?

Ask for a list of the URLs changed last month with dates, then verify it yourself. Compare your page titles against an older copy in the Wayback Machine, check whether the problems from the first audit are still live, see whether anything new was published, and ask what was done off your site and how it can be evidenced.

What should I ask my SEO agency for each month?

A list of URLs changed with dates and a line on what changed, the original audit with the current status of each item, any pages published with their URL and date, any links acquired with the linking page URL, and any Google Business Profile changes. Ask in writing. A competent agency has all of it already and can send it in a day.

Is it normal for nothing on my website to change for months?

It can be. Sites are often left alone deliberately so the effect of an earlier change can be measured, and for a small site improving what exists can beat publishing more. What matters is whether the quiet was planned and told to you in advance, or offered as an explanation only after you asked.

Can I check what my agency changed without asking them?

Partly. The Wayback Machine at web.archive.org stores older copies of public pages, so you can compare a page title or a paragraph against a previous capture. Small sites are captured sparsely, sometimes months apart, and nothing is highlighted for you, so you read both versions and compare by eye.

What are the warning signs that an SEO agency is not doing the work?

A refusal to name specific URLs or dates, a monthly report made entirely of ranking and traffic charts with no record of actions, an audit that gets re-run and re-delivered with the same items still open, link counts with no linking domains named, and published pages so generic that any competitor could have used them unchanged.

How do I know if my SEO is working if rankings have not moved?

Separate the work from the result. Rankings and traffic move for reasons nobody controls, so they are a poor test of effort over a single month. Judge the work by whether specific changes were made to specific pages on specific dates, and judge the result over quarters rather than weeks.

Should I fire my SEO agency if I cannot see any changes?

Not on one month, and not before you have asked. Send the written request for URLs, dates and status, and see what comes back. A specific answer within a few days is a good sign even when the month was quiet. Vagueness repeated across several months, on a retainer that matters to your business, is the point at which the conversation changes.

Is any of this unfair to ask an agency?

No. Everything on this list is a by-product of doing the work rather than extra work created by the request. Someone had to change a page, publish a post or send an outreach email, and each of those leaves a record somewhere. Asking to see it is the same as asking a builder which walls went up.

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