You’re paying €300-500 a month. You get a PDF every 30 days. It has graphs. It mentions “domain authority,” “backlink velocity,” “organic impressions,” and “crawl budget optimization.” You nod, file it, and go back to work.
But here’s the thing: your phone isn’t ringing any more than it was before you started paying.
So is your SEO company actually doing anything? Here’s how to check in about 5 minutes.
The 5-minute test
Open Google in an incognito window. Search for your business name + what you do + your city. For example: “Smith Plumbing emergency plumber Leeds.”
Are you on page 1? Are you in the map pack? If you’re paying someone for SEO and you can’t find yourself when you search the most obvious thing, something is very wrong.
Now try a broader search: just “emergency plumber Leeds” without your name. If you’re not on the first two pages after 6+ months of paying for SEO, you need to have a very direct conversation with your provider.
What a real SEO provider should show you
Not graphs. Not buzzwords. Real numbers:
- Which keywords you rank for, and whether those rankings went up or down this month
- How many people visited your site from Google, not “impressions” (people who saw your listing), actual visitors
- How many of those visitors contacted you, form submissions, phone calls, emails
- What they actually did this month, in plain language. “We wrote a blog post about X.” “We fixed your page speed.” “We claimed your Google Business Profile listing.”
If they can’t tell you what they DID in plain English, they didn’t do anything.
Red flags that your SEO provider is wasting your money
- They send automated reports with no personal commentary
- They can’t explain what “domain authority” means for your actual business
- Your rankings haven’t moved in 6 months and they say “SEO takes time”
- They talk about “building backlinks” but can’t show you which ones
- You ask questions and they take days to respond
- They locked you into a 12-month contract
- You have no access to your own Google Analytics or Search Console
The 3 questions to ask them on your next call
- “What specifically did you do for my website this month? Not the report, tell me in one sentence.”
- “How many people found my website through Google this month, and how many of them contacted me?”
- “If I cancel today, what have you built that I keep?”
If they stumble on any of these, you have your answer.
SEO isn’t magic, it’s work
Real SEO means: making your website fast, writing content that answers what your customers actually search for, making sure Google can find and understand your pages, and building your reputation online.
It doesn’t mean sending you a PDF with “backlink velocity” on it every month.
If you want to see what your website actually looks like to Google right now, run our free audit. It takes 30 seconds and tells you more than most monthly reports do.