How to Tell if Your SEO Company is Working in 3 Easy Steps

Choosing the right SEO company can make all the difference in how visible your business is online. However, once you’ve signed the contract and your SEO efforts are underway, it’s crucial to know whether the strategies being implemented are actually producing results. After all, SEO is a long-term investment, and it can sometimes be difficult to tell if the changes you’re seeing are due to the work your SEO company is doing.

In this article, we will break down three straightforward ways to assess whether your SEO company in India is achieving the results you need to succeed online. These steps will help you track progress, measure effectiveness, and ensure you’re getting the return on investment (ROI) you expect.

Step 1: Track Keyword Rankings and Organic Traffic

One of the most tangible indicators of SEO success is improved keyword rankings. These rankings reflect how well your website is performing in search engine results pages (SERPs) for the keywords or phrases that matter most to your business. Tracking keyword rankings is an easy way to gauge whether your SEO company is working.

How to Track Keyword Rankings

1. Choose Relevant Keywords: Start by identifying a set of target keywords that are important for your business. These should be words or phrases that potential customers might use when searching for your products or services.
2. Use SEO Tools: There are various SEO tools available to track your keyword rankings. Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and Google Search Console provide accurate data on where your website stands in the SERPs for specific keywords.
3. Set Baseline Metrics: Before you start any SEO work, it’s important to track where you rank for your chosen keywords at the beginning. This gives you a baseline to compare against after a few months of SEO work.
4. Monitor Progress Over Time: Once your SEO company starts implementing changes, regularly monitor your rankings. You should begin to see gradual improvements, especially for long-tail keywords. While SEO takes time, significant drops in rankings should not occur, and if they do, it’s time to have a conversation with your SEO provider.

Analyze Organic Traffic

Keyword rankings alone are not enough; you need to see a steady increase in organic traffic—people finding your website through search engines. If your keyword rankings improve but you don’t see an increase in organic traffic, something might be off.

1. Google Analytics: Use Google Analytics to track your website’s organic traffic over time. Look at the number of sessions coming from search engines (organic traffic) compared to the total number of sessions.
2. Compare Time Periods: Track the growth of organic traffic before and after your SEO company started working on your site. A successful SEO campaign should show steady growth over time, even if that growth isn’t instantaneous.
3. Quality of Traffic: Not all traffic is equal. Monitor the engagement metrics of visitors coming through organic search—such as bounce rate, time spent on site, and pages per session. If these metrics improve, it’s a sign that your SEO efforts are attracting more qualified visitors.

Step 2: Check for Improvements in Your Website’s Technical Health

A major component of SEO is optimizing the technical structure of your website to ensure that search engines can crawl and index your site without any issues. If your SEO company is doing its job, you should see improvements in your website’s technical health.

Conduct a Technical SEO Audit

One way to determine if your SEO company is addressing the technical aspects of your site is by running a technical SEO audit. This audit checks for common issues that might affect your site’s ability to rank, such as broken links, slow page load times, or issues with mobile optimization.

There are a variety of SEO audit tools that can give you a quick overview of your site’s health. Some of the most popular tools include:

• Google Search Console: This free tool by Google helps identify crawl errors, broken links, and other issues that could impact your site’s search engine performance.
• SEMrush: This platform provides a comprehensive audit tool that evaluates things like site speed, internal linking structure, mobile-friendliness, and other SEO-related factors.
• Screaming Frog: A website crawler that identifies technical issues on your website, including issues with metadata, duplicate content, broken links, and more.

Key Metrics to Watch

1. Page Speed: Search engines like Google prioritize fast-loading websites. If your website’s speed improves, this will have a positive impact on your rankings. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix to check the speed of your site and identify areas for improvement.
2. Mobile Friendliness: With more users browsing the web on their phones than ever before, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites. If your SEO company has made your website more mobile-friendly, you should see improvements in mobile traffic and rankings.
3. Site Structure: A well-organized site structure helps both users and search engines navigate your website more effectively. Ensure your SEO company has optimized your website’s architecture, making it easy to find key pages and reducing the risk of duplicate content or broken links.

Step 3: Evaluate Conversions and ROI

At the end of the day, the primary goal of SEO is to drive more revenue for your business. To evaluate if your SEO company is working, you need to measure conversions—actions that drive value, such as purchases, sign-ups, or form submissions.

Set Clear Conversion Goals

Before you can assess whether your SEO company is delivering results, you need to define what success looks like. Conversion goals vary depending on your business model, but common goals include:

• Sales: If you sell products online, track how many purchases come from organic search.
• Leads: For service-based businesses, conversions may be tracked through contact form submissions or phone calls.
• Sign-ups: For SaaS or subscription-based businesses, track how many new users sign up through organic search traffic.

Once you have clear goals, use analytics tools to track the conversion rates from organic traffic. If your SEO company is improving the quality of visitors to your site, you should see a higher percentage of these visitors taking action (converting).

Calculate ROI

To calculate the return on investment (ROI) from your SEO efforts, you need to compare the value generated from organic search traffic to the cost of the SEO services. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Determine the Value of a Conversion: If you’re tracking purchases or leads, figure out how much each conversion is worth in terms of revenue.
2. Track Organic Conversions: Use Google Analytics or your e-commerce platform to track how many conversions are coming from organic search traffic.
3. Compare Costs: Compare the total amount you’re paying your SEO company with the revenue generated from organic search traffic. If the revenue exceeds the cost, your SEO campaign is providing a positive ROI.

Look for Long-Term Trends

SEO is a long-term strategy, so it’s important to evaluate performance over several months. Short-term spikes in traffic or conversions can be misleading, especially if they result from temporary factors like seasonal trends or one-off promotions.

Look at long-term trends in your conversions, traffic, and ROI. If these metrics continue to improve over several months, it’s a strong indicator that your SEO company is working effectively.

Final Thoughts

SEO is not an overnight fix, and results take time to materialize. However, by tracking keyword rankings, monitoring organic traffic, evaluating your site’s technical health, and measuring conversions, you can get a clear picture of how well your SEO company is performing.

These three steps—tracking progress through key metrics, assessing your site’s technical health, and measuring ROI—will help you stay informed about the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. By keeping a close eye on these areas, you can ensure that your SEO company is delivering real value and working toward achieving your business goals.