Let's get the conflict of interest out of the way first, because in this particular corner of the internet it matters more than usual.
Go and search "is my SEO agency doing anything". Look at who wrote the results. Almost every single one is an SEO agency. They're answering the question "should you fire your agency?" while quietly hoping to be the one you hire next. Some of that advice is genuinely good. All of it has a thumb on the scale.
We sell a $4.99 report. We don't do retainers, we don't do consulting, and we honestly don't care whether you keep your current agency or not. That's the only reason this guide can tell you something the others won't: a lot of agencies are doing perfectly good work that just hasn't paid off yet. Firing them at month four is one of the most expensive mistakes a small business can make, and it happens constantly.
So here are 12 checks. Most take two minutes. None of them require you to understand SEO.
First, What Does "Nothing Is Happening" Actually Look Like?
Here's the thing that makes this so hard to judge: real SEO work and total neglect look identical from the outside for about four months.
That's not an excuse the industry made up to buy time. It's just how Google works. It has to crawl your changed pages, decide whether it trusts them more than it did before, and then slowly adjust where it puts you. On a small site with not much authority, that process takes months, not weeks.
Which means the question you're probably asking, "why hasn't my traffic gone up", is the wrong one. It's unanswerable this early. The right question is:
Has anything actually changed on my website, and was it the right thing?
Both halves of that are checkable today. That's what the rest of this is.
Check 1: Has Anything Changed on Your Site At All?
Open your website. Pick a couple of pages the agency was supposed to work on. Right-click, choose "View page source", then hit Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for <title>.
That title tag is the blue headline people see in Google. It's usually the very first thing any competent agency rewrites, because it's cheap and it works.
Don't have a record of what it used to say? Go to web.archive.org, paste your URL, and pick a date from before you hired them. You'll get a snapshot of your old site. Compare the headlines and page titles.
What it tells you: if your titles and headings are word for word identical to a year ago, no on-page work has been done. Full stop. This is the clearest single signal on the list.
Check 2: Are New Pages Actually Being Published?
Type this into Google: site:yourdomain.com
That shows you roughly everything Google knows about on your site. Note the number of results, then check again in a few weeks.
Content is where most of a retainer goes. If your contract says four articles a month and that number hasn't moved since spring, you've got a straightforward conversation to have and you've got evidence for it.
Check 3: Do You Have Access to Your Own Google Search Console?
Quick explainer, because the name is unhelpful: Google Search Console is a free tool that shows you exactly how your site performs in Google. Which searches you show up for, how often, and whether anyone clicks. It's the closest thing to a lie detector that exists in SEO, because the data comes from Google itself rather than from any tool or agency.
It belongs to your business. Not your agency's.
If nobody has ever given you access, ask today. A good agency adds you without blinking, usually before you think to ask. Hesitation here is worth paying more attention to than anything else in this article, because the same numbers that prove progress also expose its absence.
Once you're in, open the Performance report. Two numbers matter:
- Impressions means how many times you appeared in someone's search results.
- Clicks means how many times someone actually came to your site.
Rising impressions with flat clicks feels like failure. It usually isn't. It means you're now appearing for more searches but sitting too far down the page for anyone to reach you yet. That's precisely what real progress looks like right before it turns into traffic.
Check 4: Is the Work Happening On Your Site, or Just in Documents?
Ask for a list of every page they've created or edited in the last 90 days, with the actual links. Then click them.
Sounds almost too obvious to bother with. It catches something surprisingly common though: work that gets delivered as advice and never gets implemented. A 40-page audit PDF is a real deliverable, someone genuinely worked on it, and if nobody ever acted on it then it produced exactly nothing.
Thick reports plus an unchanged website equals work that stopped at the recommendation stage.
Check 5: Are the Basics Actually Sorted?
Four quick ones, a minute each:
- Padlock in the address bar? That's the security certificate. If it's missing in 2026, nothing else here matters.
- Does it work properly on your phone? Open it on yours. If you're pinching and zooming to read anything, that's a fail, and most of your visitors are on phones.
- Is it fast? Run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights. Free, no signup. Under 50 on mobile means speed is costing you customers.
- Can Google see your pages? In Search Console there's a URL Inspection tool. Paste in your three most important pages. Each should say "URL is on Google".
Check 6: Do You Rank for Your Own Business Name?
Search your business name in a private or incognito window. You should be the first result.
If you're not, something is broken well below the level of content strategy and it needs sorting before anything else gets attention. Your own name is the easiest ranking any business will ever hold.
Check 7: Which Searches Are You Actually Turning Up For?
Back in Search Console, sort your Performance report by impressions and read the top 20 searches.
Now the question that actually matters: would a person searching that phrase ever buy from you?
This is where a shocking number of retainers quietly go wrong. Ranking for "what is a plumber" is not remotely the same as ranking for "emergency plumber Bristol". The second one is worth maybe a hundred times more even though it gets a fraction of the searches. An agency chasing traffic numbers instead of customers can look extremely busy for a year without moving your revenue by a penny.
Check 8: Are Rankings Moving in the Right Direction?
In Search Console, compare the last 3 months against the previous 3 and look at average position.
Going from position 60 to position 35 shows up nowhere in your bank account, but it's real progress and it's exactly what month four should look like. Going from 12 to 8 is worth actual money. Six months of flat or falling positions, while content is being published the whole time, means the content isn't aimed at anything winnable.
Check 9: Are Links Being Built, and Are They Real Ones?
Quick explainer: a backlink is just a link from someone else's website to yours. Google treats them a bit like recommendations. A link from a respected site says "this business is legit". A link from a spam site says the opposite, and can actively hurt you.
Link building is often the priciest line on the invoice. Ask which sites have linked to you this quarter, then go and visit two or three.
You're checking one thing, and you don't need any expertise to judge it: would a real human ever read this page?
A genuine link sits inside a genuine article on a site with an actual audience. If you land on a page of unrelated articles in broken English, stuffed with links to a car insurance company, a casino and a dentist, you're paying for links that can get you penalised. Our guide on spotting toxic backlinks covers what to do if you find them.
Check 10: Do the Reports Say What Was Done, or Just What Happened?
Pull up the last three monthly reports and look for one specific thing: a list of actions, with dates.
Charts of your traffic aren't a report on the work. They're a report on the weather. A useful report says "we rewrote these six pages, fixed these broken redirects, published these two articles, earned these three links".
If yours is all graphs and no actions, just ask them straight: what did you change on my website last month? The answer, or the squirming around it, tells you everything you need to know.
Check 11: Is Anyone Fixing the Technical Stuff?
Technical problems quietly put a ceiling on everything else. Pages accidentally hidden from Google, broken redirects, missing descriptions, pages that take eight seconds to load. Publishing content on a technically broken site is like planting seeds on concrete.
The free way to check: in Search Console open the Pages report. It lists what Google has indexed and what it's skipped, with reasons. Read the "Not indexed" section properly. If pages you care about are sitting in there, that's a real problem nobody's dealing with.
Check 12: Get an Opinion From Someone With No Stake in It
Everything above relies on your own read of the situation. At some point the genuinely useful move is a second opinion from somebody who doesn't want your business either way.
That's the thing we actually built. You put in your domain, pay $4.99, and get back a report on what's working and broken right now: where you rank, the state of your backlinks, technical problems in plain English, and whether AI tools like ChatGPT ever mention you. Takes a few minutes. Doesn't know or care who your agency is.
And here's the part that no agency-written article will ever tell you: this quite often clears the agency. A report showing healthy technical foundations, rankings that are climbing deep in the results, and a link profile that's growing is hard proof that real work is happening and simply hasn't surfaced yet. That's worth knowing before you blow up a working relationship at exactly the wrong moment.
So What Do You Do With the Answers?
If most checks pass: the work is real. Ask for a specific timeline of what should appear and when, then hold them to that list instead of to a vague feeling.
If checks 1, 2 and 4 all fail: nothing meaningful is being done to your website. Ask what changed, in writing, and see what comes back.
If the technical checks fail: fundamentals are being skipped. Annoying, but this is also the fastest category to fix.
If check 3 fails and they push back on giving you access: sort that out before anything else. Your data is yours, and an agency that keeps it hidden is choosing to make its own work impossible to verify.
Five Questions to Ask on Your Next Call
The checks above are things you can do without involving anyone. But at some point you'll be on a call, and the quality of your questions decides how useful that call is. Vague questions get vague answers.
These five are hard to deflect:
- "Which specific pages did you change last month, and can you send me the links?" Not "what did you work on". Pages and links. This is the question that separates work from activity.
- "Which searches are we targeting, and roughly what do you think each is worth to us?" A good agency has a considered answer. A weak one talks about traffic in the abstract without connecting it to anything you sell.
- "What's the single biggest thing holding us back right now?" If the honest answer is "your site is slow" or "you've got almost no links", you want to hear it. If every answer is upbeat, that's its own signal.
- "What should I expect to see by month six, specifically?" Get it in writing. Not a promise of rankings, which nobody can guarantee, but a clear statement of what work will be finished and what movement is realistic.
- "If I wanted to leave, what would I keep?" This one is uncomfortable and it's the most revealing. Content on your site, links pointing at your domain, and your own analytics accounts should all be yours. If large parts of the work live on their platform or their systems, you're renting your SEO rather than owning it.
What Good Actually Looks Like
It's worth saying plainly, because so much SEO advice is written as though every agency is a scam. Most aren't. A good one, working on a small business site, tends to look like this:
Month one is unglamorous. Fixing technical problems, rewriting page titles, sorting out the pages Google can't see properly. Nothing you'd notice as a visitor and nothing that moves traffic yet.
Months two and three, content starts appearing and they'll be reaching out to other sites for links. Search Console starts showing you appearing for more searches, deep down the results where nobody clicks. This is the stretch that feels like nothing is happening, and it's the stretch where most people lose their nerve.
Months four to six, positions start climbing into ranges where people actually see you. Impressions rise noticeably. Clicks begin, slowly, on the less competitive searches first.
After six months, if the work was aimed at the right searches, traffic compounds. Each new piece of content lands a bit faster than the last, because the site as a whole is more trusted.
If your experience roughly matches that shape, things are working, even if it doesn't feel like it yet. If you're at month eight and nothing on your website has changed since month one, that's a completely different conversation.
How Long Should SEO Take Before I See Results?
For a new or small site, expect three to six months before rankings visibly move and six to twelve before traffic properly follows. Bigger established sites move faster, sometimes in weeks for technical fixes, because Google already trusts them.
What should never take six months is a straight answer about what work has been done. That's available today.
If you want the independent version, run a TrackSEO report for $4.99. No subscription, no sales call, no pitch for a retainer at the end. Just what your site looks like right now, so your next conversation with your agency is about facts instead of feelings.