Here's a common one. A business has paid an SEO company $800 a month for eighteen months, which comes to $14,400. Ask the owner what they got for it and they forward a PDF. It has a lot of green arrows on it, and nobody at the company can say what any of them mean.

That doesn't automatically mean the agency did nothing. Plenty of good SEO work produces boring reports. But you shouldn't have to take it on faith either. If you're asking whether your SEO agency is working, you can check most of it yourself in about twenty minutes, without hiring a second SEO company to audit the first.

Some context on where I'm coming from: I sell SEO. Before Marshland I spent years as an engineer at enterprise companies, where search work came with real budgets and real accountability, and someone in finance wanted a straight answer about what the money bought. So I've seen what the expensive version looks like up close. Agencies aren't scams, mostly. But you should be able to see the work from the outside, and tell whether it's happening.

Why SEO reports are so hard to read

The numbers that are easy to report are the ones with the least connection to revenue.

Domain authority went up four points. You rank #3 for some keyword. Site health score: 94. Impressions are up 22%. Every one of those can be true while your phone rings exactly as often as it did last year.

Nobody planned it that way. Leads and revenue are hard to attribute, and they move slowly. Vanity metrics are easy to pull and they nearly always go up eventually. So the report fills up with whatever is cheap to measure. That suits the people selling SEO, and it also suits the owner who doesn't want to dig in. The catch is that a report full of green arrows looks exactly the same whether the agency is working hard or coasting.

That's the reason to look at the raw data yourself.

The twenty-minute check

You need access to two things: Google Search Console and your Google Business Profile. If your agency set up Search Console and never gave you a login, the safest fix is to verify ownership yourself. Add the DNS TXT record Search Console gives you at your domain registrar, which you control. That makes you a verified owner, and the agency can't remove you. If you can't do that today, ask them to add you as an Owner for now, then verify yourself when you can. An owner they added is an owner they can remove, so don't stop there. You own the website, so you should own that access. And do it soon: Search Console only keeps 16 months of history.

1. Search Console: are people finding you for the right things?

Open Search Console and click Performance, then Search results. Open the date picker, go to the Compare tab and choose "Compare last 6 months to previous period." Then click the Queries tab.

Ignore the totals and scroll through the actual search terms. Ask yourself one question: would I want a customer to find me by typing this?

Say you're a roofer in Mesa and your growth comes from "what is a roof" and your own business name. People searching your name already know you exist, so that growth isn't new business. You're looking for growth on searches like "roof repair mesa" or "tile roof leak gilbert." Those are buyers, and they don't know who you are yet.

2. Are the new pages getting seen at all?

Most SEO retainers include content, usually blog posts and city or service pages. In the same Performance report, click the Pages tab. Find the pages published in the last year and look at their impressions.

Give a new page a few months before you judge it. But a page that's been live for six months or more with zero or near-zero impressions isn't doing much. Before you blame the content, paste its URL into the URL Inspection bar at the top of Search Console. If it says the page isn't on Google, the problem is that Google never indexed it, and that's a question for the agency too.

A couple of duds is normal. If every page they've written in the last year is indexed and still sitting at nothing, then either the content isn't targeting anything people search for, or it was never written with search in mind.

And if you can't find any new pages, you've learned something too.

3. Has your Google Business Profile changed?

For local businesses, the profile often matters more than the website. Pull it up and look for things you can see: new photos, updated services, recent posts, review responses, correct categories, accurate hours. Then check the Performance section for calls and direction requests over time.

If the profile looks exactly as it did when you signed the contract, nobody's been working on it.

What a real deliverable looks like

Real SEO work leaves evidence you can click on. At the enterprise companies I worked for, the SEO requests that reached engineering came in as tickets, and each one had to ship and be checkable. A small business deserves the same standard, just scaled down. Here's what that looks like:

  • Published pages, with URLs. You can visit them and read them, and they're about something your customers actually search for.
  • Technical fixes you can check in a browser. "Fixed 14 broken links" should come with the links. "Improved page speed" should come with a before and after from PageSpeed Insights that you can run again yourself.
  • Citations and listings you can click: Yelp, BBB, Apple Maps (via Apple Business Connect), Bing Places, industry directories, with your name, address and phone number matching everywhere.
  • Review activity you can see on your own profile.

SEO report red flags: the word "optimization"

Search your last three reports for "optimized" or "optimization." In a lot of reports it shows up in every other line item.

"On-page optimization." "Meta optimization." "Ongoing content optimization." It sounds like work, and sometimes it is. It's also a word that can describe ten minutes of editing a title tag, or nothing at all, and you can't tell which from the report.

So for every "optimization" line, ask which page, what changed, and what it said before. A good agency can answer that in one email, because they keep a change log. If the answer is still vague, that tells you something: at best, nobody is tracking what gets changed on your site. If you want a broader framework for this sort of reading, reading a tech proposal like a CFO would works just as well on monthly reports.

What to do if the check comes back empty

Don't fire them yet.

SEO is slow. Some agencies are doing decent work and just reporting it badly. Firing a competent provider over a bad PDF and starting over can easily cost you another six months while the new agency gets up to speed.

Instead, send one specific question with a date attached. Something like:

"Can you send me a list of every page you've published or changed on our site in the last six months, with URLs, by the 30th?"

That's it. It's a fair question that doesn't accuse anyone, and an agency doing real work can answer it in an afternoon. How they respond tells you more than any report. A clear list on time is a good sign. A meeting invite to "walk through strategy" in place of the list is a bad one. If it comes to replacing them, start with five questions to ask a marketing agency before you sign.

If you're local and want to know which work matters most for Phoenix-area businesses specifically, here's what actually changes local rankings around Phoenix.

If you'd rather someone else looked

If you'd rather not dig through Search Console yourself, I'll run this same twenty-minute check on your account for free and tell you plainly what I find. You'd add me as a restricted user on Search Console, which is view-only. Business Profile has no view-only role, so we can either go through it together on a screen share, or you can add me as a manager (which can edit) and remove me the moment I'm done. Get in touch and I'll send you the steps.

Sometimes the answer is "your agency is doing fine, keep them." It happens a lot, and I'll tell you when it does. A business owner who trusts their current provider again is a fine outcome for me.

Do this today

Open Search Console and set the Performance report to compare the last 6 months with the 6 before. Go to the Queries tab, sort by the change in clicks, and write down the five search terms that grew the most. If none of them is something a new customer would type, send the agency the six-month question from above with those five terms attached. Their reply, and their next report, will show you whether they heard it.