How do you know if SEO is working?

SEO is working when more of the right people enquire, from searches you can name. Rankings and traffic are clues. They are not the result.

That is the test I use with owners. If a report cannot point at enquiries, it is describing activity. Activity is easy to buy and easy to mistake for progress.

The result that counts

Start from the enquiry, then walk backwards. Which page were they on, which search brought them there, and was that search something a buyer would type.

"IT support near me" from a facilities manager who then books a call is working. A blog post about a broad industry topic that ranks and produces nothing is not, however flattering the graph looks.

You need three numbers, kept together:

• Enquiries from organic search, not all enquiries mixed in with email and referrals.
• The queries those people used, from Search Console, not from a rank tracker.
• The page they landed on. A homepage that ranks for your brand name is not the same as a service page that ranks for the job you sell.

The clues, in order

Enquiries lag the work. While you wait, look at the steps that have to move first, in this order. Skipping ahead is how people declare SEO a failure in week three or a success because a vanity term moved.

1. The pages can be found. The commercial pages are indexed. Search Console is not full of "crawled but not indexed" on the pages you care about.
2. Impressions appear on commercial queries. People searching for the service, the problem, or the place are being shown your pages, even if they are not clicking yet.
3. Clicks follow on those same queries. The title and description match what they searched. A rise in clicks on irrelevant queries is a warning, not a win.
4. Those clicks become enquiries. If clicks rise and enquiries do not, the problem has moved from search to the page. More SEO will not fix a page that does not say what happens next.

What a useful report looks like

A monthly note can be short. Which queries gained impressions, which pages produced enquiries, what you changed, and what you are leaving alone.

Brand searches (people typing your company name) belong in their own line. They usually mean the site is easy to find once someone has already heard of you. They do not mean new buyers are discovering you.

I would rather see five enquiries from three specific service queries than a traffic chart with no source. The first tells you what to write next. The second invites you to celebrate a number that may be existing customers looking for your phone number.

When it is too early to judge

A new page on a new subject often needs a few weeks before it is even shown, and a few months before you know if it will hold a place worth having. Competitive commercial terms take longer than a local phrase with a clear service behind it.

Technical repairs are the exception. If the site was blocking search engines, fixing that can show up quickly, because you removed a brake rather than building authority from nothing.

Judge the work against the stage you are in. Indexed and impressing is progress in month one. It is not a result in month six.

What SEO is not doing

SEO does not make a weak offer convincing. If the page could belong to any competitor, ranking it just puts more people in front of a page that does not help them choose.

It also does not replace a page that converts. Search and the page are one job: the query gets them there, the page has to turn that visit into a conversation. If you only measure the first half, you will keep buying the wrong fix.

If you want the longer version of what the page itself should do, that sits in what a lead generation website actually is. The search work that feeds it is SEO Growth.