How to Tell Whether Your SEO Is Actually Working
Published · Leon Lim
Rankings alone don't prove progress. Impressions, clicks and enquiry rate from Search Console do — and all three have to move together.
The honest test is not whether your ranking improved. It is whether three numbers moved together: how often you were shown (impressions), how often people clicked (clicks), and how many of those clicks became enquiries. SEO is working when impressions rise and the click-through rate on them rises too. A keyword moving from position 20 to position 6 with flat clicks is progress you cannot yet bank.
Ask for those numbers monthly, from Search Console itself, and ask what was done in relation to each one. 'We published two blogs' is an activity, not a result. 'Impressions on the service page went from 180 to 340, CTR from 1.1% to 2.3%, and four enquiries came from those clicks' is a result — and it is checkable, because Search Console is the same data any of your competitors can see.
Two things make this conversation easier. First, treat any ranking guarantee as a warning sign: no one can promise a specific position on a page that Google controls, and a monthly retainer that depends on one is priced on optimism rather than work. Second, expect the first meaningful movement to take months, not weeks — which is why the honest question at the three-month mark is not 'why am I not number one yet' but 'is the trend line up, and do I trust the people reporting it?'