How to evaluate SEO agency performance
Most SEO reports are designed to be reassuring rather than useful. Here is what to look at instead, and the questions that get a straight answer.
Start with one number: qualified inquiries
Not sessions, not rankings, not impressions. How many people contacted you who could plausibly become customers, and is that number rising.
Everything else in an SEO report is a leading indicator on the way to that number. Useful, but not the scoreboard.
Traffic can rise while the business gets nothing
This is worth understanding because it is the most common way a program looks healthy and is not. A site can hold its traffic for years while attracting entirely the wrong person.
On this agency’s own site before its rebuild, one page produced 87% of all organic traffic. Its visitors were 96% informational and 0% commercial: people looking for a downloadable report template, not an agency. The traffic number looked survivable. It was not.
Ask what share of your organic traffic comes from commercial-intent searches. If nobody has measured it, that is the answer.
Leading indicators worth watching
These move before revenue does, and they are all checkable in Search Console and analytics rather than an agency dashboard.
- Impressions on commercial terms, not total impressions
- Share of tracked keywords on page one, rather than a handful of cherry-picked rankings
- Conversion rate from organic sessions, which tells you whether the right people are arriving
- Indexed pages against crawled pages
Metrics that flatter without meaning much
Keyword counts with no volume attached. Rankings for your own brand name, which you would hold anyway. Total traffic where the growth is all informational. Domain authority scores, which are third-party estimates rather than anything Google uses.
None of these are lies. They are just not evidence that the work is producing customers.
What a useful monthly report contains
It should open with inquiries and what they cost, say what was actually changed that month and why, and name what is planned next. It should be readable by someone who does not do SEO for a living.
If you cannot tell from the report what was done, ask for a change log. Any agency doing the work can produce one.
Questions that get a straight answer
Four worth asking on the monthly call.
- Which commercial terms are we closest to page one on, and what would it take?
- What did you change on the site this month?
- Which of our pages compete with each other?
- What would you stop doing if the budget were cut by a third?