How to check if your SEO agency is actually working

You check whether your SEO agency is working by asking for three things every month: the Google Search Console numbers (clicks, impressions, average position, by page and by query), the Google Business Profile numbers (calls, direction requests, website clicks) and a concrete list of the work done, with the addresses of the pages touched. If one of the three is missing, or if you can't open Search Console yourself and see the same numbers, you have no way of knowing whether you're paying for work or for a nice-looking PDF.

Below: what the report should contain, which numbers look good but say nothing, what to ask on the call and the signs that it's time to switch. As an example we use our own site's numbers, including the parts that don't look good.

First test: the accounts are in your name

Before any report, check who owns the accounts. Search Console, your Google Business Profile and Google Analytics should be on your account, with you as owner, and the agency should only have user access. If the agency created them on its own account, ask for the transfer now, not on the day you want to leave.

With your own access, checking takes ten minutes. Open Search Console, go to Performance, pick the same period as the report and compare the numbers. If you've never used it, our Google Search Console guide shows where each number lives. Without access, every number in the report is one you have to take on trust.

What a monthly SEO report should contain

Two details separate a useful report from a decorative one.

The right comparison. A good month placed next to a weak one looks spectacular. Ask for 3-month windows to see the trend and, if your business is seasonal, a comparison with the same month last year. The comparison period should stay the same from one report to the next.

Searches without your business name. People who search for you by name would have found you anyway. The growth that counts is on searches like "dentist Cluj" or "parquet fitting price". In Search Console you can filter out queries that contain your business name and see exactly that part.

In Google Business, remember that the "calls" in the stats are taps on the call button, not completed calls. What each number there means is in our guide to Google Business statistics.

What an honest report looks like: our own example

To make it concrete, here are the numbers for our own site, mpowebstudio.com, a new domain, from Search Console, in 3-month windows:

By month, clicks were 69 in July, 128 in August and 128 in the first 24 days of September.

The work list for June to September: technical fixes (structured data, sitemap, hreflang for 6 languages, page speed), about 1,046 articles in 6 languages published in daily waves, 260 service pages by city and industry (by 24 September), automatic submission of new pages to Bing and Yandex via IndexNow, and internal links between articles and service pages.

A good report doesn't stop at totals. When we split the data by page type (the 24 September export), the city-and-industry pages had an average position of 15.6 and a CTR of about 2.6%, roughly four times the blog articles' 0.7%. Four Cluj pages had average positions between 2 and 5. And on 21 September, two quote requests arrived from Google search in a single day.

The same report also has to say what isn't working. Clicks are still modest in absolute terms. Most of them came from articles in other languages, not from the Romanian-language pages. The most competitive national searches, such as "preț site web" (website price), were still around position 85, because a new domain's authority is built over time and with links.

One last detail: after 24 September we rewrote 5,703 article titles that Google was showing cut off. The effect isn't measured yet, so it goes under "work done", not "results". That is exactly the separation to ask your agency for.

Vanity numbers

Some numbers look good in a report but say nothing about customers:

• Total impressions. They can multiply from searches none of your customers make. Ask for them by page and by query.
• The number of "ranking" keywords. It usually counts everything in the top 100 results, which includes results pages almost nobody opens.
• Position 1 for your business name or for phrases nobody searches.
• Tool scores: domain authority, speed score, audit score. Our site scores 100/100 in Ahrefs Site Audit. That means the tool found no technical errors, not that the site brings customers.
• Backlink count. A few links from sites in your line of business are worth more than hundreds from directories nobody visits.
• Total traffic in Analytics, if it isn't split by source and country.
• Average position on its own. Google calculates it from your site's topmost position in each impression (the official explanation). When the site starts appearing for new searches, at first in weak spots, the average can get worse even while things are going well. Read it together with clicks and impressions.

Questions to ask on the call

• Which pages did you change this month, and what has happened to them since?
• Which searches without our business name bring clicks now that didn't three months ago?
• How many calls, forms or messages came from Google, and how are we measuring them?
• Which links did you get, from which sites, and can I open them?
• What didn't work, and what are you changing?
• Why is this next month's priority and not something else?
• Can I see the same numbers in my own Search Console account?

"It's a process, it takes patience" is a fair answer in month one. By month five, the answer should come with pages, searches and numbers.

Signs it's time to switch agencies

• You don't have access to Search Console or your Google Business Profile, or the accounts are in the agency's name.
• The report comes only from an agency tool, with no numbers from Google.
• The work list is missing or identical every month ("on-page optimization", "monitoring"), with no pages or addresses.
• The comparison period changes from month to month, always to whichever looks better.
• Every drop is blamed on an algorithm update, with no page-level analysis.
• You were promised the first page. Google doesn't sell positions, so nobody can guarantee them.
• Links show up from sites with no connection to your line of business, delivered in bulk packages.
• After 6 months there's no growth in searches without your business name, and nobody can explain why. As a benchmark, technical fixes usually take 2–4 weeks and rankings usually move in 3–6 months.

The report and the money

What you pay matters less than what you get for it, counted. If you pay a monthly retainer, you should know what it means in pages, articles, fixes and links. Market price benchmarks are in how much SEO costs in 2026.

The work list has one more job: it makes a work guarantee checkable. With us, a month whose deliverables weren't delivered is refunded, and the plan runs monthly, with 30 days' notice and no minimum term. Without a list, neither you nor the agency can say what was delivered. Our packages and what each one includes are on our SEO services page. If you'd like a second opinion on your site, we'll do a free mini-audit on WhatsApp.