How to Tell If Your SEO Is Working

Rankings are the slowest signal you have, so if you wait for them to answer this question you'll be waiting past the point where you could still have done something about it. The faster answer sits in three places: what's actually being done, how it's being reported to you, and whether the early numbers are moving. Two of those you can check yourself this afternoon without asking anybody's permission.

What follows is about telling slow apart from broken. How long the work legitimately takes is a different question with its own timeline, and it's worth reading first if you're inside the first six months, because plenty of what looks like failure at month four is just month four.

Judge the work, because you always can

Results in month four are genuinely hard to judge. The work never is, and this is where a failing engagement shows itself long before the numbers do.

• You can't name a page that was published in the last three months. Not a topic that was discussed, a page. If nobody can point you at a URL, nothing got built.
• Nothing on your site looks any different. Real work leaves fingerprints you can see: new pages, rewritten ones, changed titles, a site that loads faster than it did.
• Your Google Business Profile hasn't been touched. Open it now. If the categories, services and photos are what they were a year ago, the fastest-moving part of local search is being left alone.
• The pages that did ship would fit any practice in the country with the name swapped out. Generic pages don't rank in medicine or law, so shipping them is activity rather than progress.
• Nobody has asked you a question in months. Real work on a practice site generates questions: which procedures actually matter, what does this provider specialize in, why did you stop offering that. Silence usually means nothing specific is being written.

Judge the reporting, because it was written to be judged

A monthly report is a persuasive document. That doesn't make it dishonest, but it does mean reading it the way you'd read anything written by somebody who would like to keep the account.

• Improvements quoted with no starting position. Forty keywords improved can mean forty terms moving from position 87 to position 62, which is worth precisely nothing to you. Ask which terms, and from where to where.
• Traffic reported as one undivided number. Branded searches, meaning people typing your practice name, are not what you're paying for. They grow from your other marketing and from patients who already knew you existed. Non-branded traffic is the measure, and a report that never separates the two is worth asking about.
• Impressions climbing for months while clicks never follow. Early on that's healthy and expected. Sustained past six months it usually means you're surfacing for searches that were never going to become appointments.
• No fixed starting date anywhere in it. A report that compares this month to last month, every month, forever, can hide a year of standing still. Everything should be measured from one date that doesn't move.
• Nothing has ever gone wrong. Real work produces setbacks: a fix that didn't help, a page that didn't land, a competitor who made a move. A year of unbroken green arrows means you're reading marketing rather than reporting.

Three numbers to look at yourself

Twenty minutes, using nothing beyond the accounts you already have.

Open Search Console and compare the last three months against the same three months a year earlier. Look at non-branded impressions first, then at how many distinct queries you appear for at all. If both are up, something is working even where the positions haven't caught up. If both are flat across a full year, nothing is, and no explanation should persuade you otherwise.

Then open your Google Business Profile and look at calls and direction requests across the same window, because the map block tends to move before the organic side does and it's the quickest read available to you.

Then search your own main service and city in a private window, on a phone, off the office wifi. Not to feel good about the result, but to see who is genuinely sitting there. If you're a gastroenterologist and the three names above you are all hospital pages, that's a different fight from three local practices, and it should change what you expect.

The signs that look like failure and aren't

Being fair about this matters, because a lot of good work gets cancelled at exactly the wrong moment by an owner who was right to be suspicious and wrong about the evidence.

• Flat positions with rising impressions and a widening set of queries. That's the ordinary shape of progress before it reaches the terms you care about.
• A dip in the weeks following a site migration or a large technical change. Recovery normally takes a few weeks and it's expected, provided somebody warned you it was coming.
• A drop that lines up with a broad core update. Those move entire categories at once, and the useful question is whether the practices around you moved as well.
• A quiet stretch that matches your own season. Most specialties have months when nobody is searching, and comparing December against October will mislead you every time. Compare against the same months a year ago instead.
• Rankings up and the phone still quiet. That one is real, but it's usually a website and conversion problem rather than a search problem, and changing agencies won't touch it.

If the answer really is yes

Don't open by firing anyone, because every restart throws away the trust that had started to accumulate, and two of them in a row can cost you years you won't get back.

Ask for three things in writing first: every page published in the last six months with its URL, the non-branded traffic and position data measured from one fixed date, and what specifically is planned for the next ninety days. A capable team has all three within a day. A struggling one takes two weeks and sends you something reformatted.

If what comes back is thin, get an outside read before you move rather than after. Switching to a new agency without knowing what's genuinely wrong with the site is how a practice ends up paying three companies in a row to make the same discovery, and choosing well is what makes patience reasonable the next time round.

The awkward part of this question

The person best placed to tell you whether your SEO is working is the person being judged by the answer. That's an uncomfortable arrangement however honest everyone involved happens to be.

So treat my audit as an outside opinion rather than a pitch: what your site is genuinely doing, measured from a fixed date, set against whoever currently sits above you. You'll have it in 24 to 48 hours, and it costs you nothing. If it turns out your current agency is doing solid work in a slow market, that is what it will tell you, and that answer is worth having too. It's certainly cheaper than a restart.

Written by Ashikur Rahman

Founder of Proximity Ranker, with nine years in SEO and a law background that shapes the medical and legal work we do. Meet the founder.

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