How do I know if my SEO company is doing anything?
Short answer
Ask for a dated list of what was changed, then check that list against things you can see yourself: your website, your Google Business Profile, Google Search Console and your own call records. A provider who is working can say what changed, when, and what was measured afterward. If nobody can tell you that, treat it as your answer.
You know your SEO company is doing something when it can give you a dated list of what it changed, and you can confirm those changes yourself. SEO (search engine optimization) work leaves marks: edited pages, new pages, profile updates, fixed errors. Each of those can be looked up without taking anyone’s word for it. A report full of charts doesn’t prove work was done. A list of changes you can check does.
Ask for a change log
Put one plain question in writing: what did you change last month, and on which dates? A useful reply names specific things. A page title that was rewritten, a service that was added to the profile, a broken redirect that was repaired. It should also say why each change was made and what was measured before and after.
A reply that only describes activity in general terms (“ongoing optimization”, “link outreach”) or reports “monitoring” doesn’t tell you anything you can check. Ask again for specifics before you draw a conclusion. Some providers do real work and are simply poor at writing it down.
Check the work yourself
The accounts you should already have access to will confirm most of a change log.
| Where to look | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Your website | Open the pages the log mentions. If your site runs on WordPress or a similar system, the page history shows who edited a page and when. |
| Google Business Profile | Look at the services, categories, photos and posts. New photos and posts carry dates. |
| Google Search Console | Shows the searches your site appeared for and the clicks it received over time, plus which pages Google has indexed. It’s Google’s own data, so nobody can dress it up. |
| Google Analytics | Shows visits and what visitors did. Check that calls and form submissions are being counted at all. |
| Your phone and job records | The only place that shows whether more of the right customers called. |
If you don’t have your own login to any of these, ask for one. Asking for access to your own website and accounts is reasonable, and how the request is received tells you something.
Activity and results are two separate questions
Work can be real and still not have moved anything yet. Rankings respond slowly and competitors are working too. Some changes simply don’t help. So keep the questions apart. Was work done? The change log answers that. Did it do anything? Only a measurement taken before and after can answer that.
For a local business, the measurement I trust most is a rank grid, which checks your position from many points across your service area, alongside calls. A single ranking checked from the provider’s office says very little about a homeowner in Escondido or Chula Vista.
What doesn’t count as proof
Length is cheap, so a long report shows nothing by itself. Almost every business ranks for its own name, which makes that ranking worthless as evidence. A count of links or posts tells you something only if you can see where they are and what changed afterward. If your report leans on any of these, it’s worth learning how to read an SEO report, so you know which numbers deserve your attention.
If the answers don’t come
If you have asked twice for a change log and account access and received neither, you have learned what you needed to know. The next step is an independent look at the site and the profile, so you know what is really in place before you decide anything. That’s what a Scientific SEO Audit is for: it records the current state and measures it, so the decision rests on facts.
For my own clients, the list of changes comes with the report every time, without anyone asking, because I measure each change again about two weeks after it goes in.