Author: Ryan Walsh

Date: 01/05/2025

As we all know, when people want to find a product or service, they often turn to Google for help finding a local business.

Businesses that therefore don’t partner with highly effective SEO businesses will often be left in the dust by the competition.

Therefore, regardless of whether you run a small or a large company, you will often need the help of a marketing agency.

 

This is to implement the following:

– Content marketing that gains clicks, visitors and makes sales
– Improves the U.X of the website
– Builds do-follow and no-follow links with high DA score
– Helps to improve the technical SEO for the website
Yet this presents a new question: How do you decipher and determine whether their work is good quality?
How do you know if the SEO work is effective?

There are many ways to check this, such as organic traffic and where the website ranks for important SEO keywords using Google Search Console.

You therefore need to ask questions such as, is the SEO keywords ranking starting to get closer to page one of Google’s results?

What’s the dwell time like for key pages? (Use Google Analytics)

Is the bounce rate increasing or decreasing on important pages?

This article will explain some metrics to consider when evaluating whether your search engine optimisation company is doing a good job.

How to evaluate your SEO company’s work and whether they are doing a good job

 

Keep things simple

Our best advice would be to keep things simple.

What we mean by this is that you can purchase hundreds, if not thousands, of various SEO reports and read them all until the end of time.

Each may offer different statistics and metrics regarding your business’s search engine optimisation performance. Some may even contradict each other.

SEO is complicated, so agencies are employed worldwide and spend many hours deciphering exactly how Google’s algorithm is changing and improving.

However, does the reporting need to be complicated?

In our opinion, no.

It doesn’t need to be complicated at all.

When you think of your online business, you should consider it a physical store.

For example, if you worked in a brick-and-mortar business, you would want to see a good flow of people coming in and out of the company. If you didn’t see a good number of customers coming into the business, well you may wonder, have you set your business up in the correct location?

The first question is therefore, how many organic visitors is the business obtaining? Is the number of organic visitors in Google Analytics improving?

 

Seasonal trends

However, you do have to account for two things, Google updates and seasonal trends relating to your business.

There’s no point in giving your SEO company a hard time if sales fall off a cliff in January, if this is normal for your e-commerce business, as you sell items mostly given as Christmas gifts.

So, you do have to take into account seasonal trends.

Then there’s Google updates

What we mean and want to talk about here is the large updates, the Google Core Updates, as these can cause “ranking flux”. This can temporarily affect some companies for keywords, which means that sales may drop.

However, if the SEO agency has done everything right, followed white hat methods, then the drop in visibility should only be temporary as

 

Google rolls our the Google Core Update.

Google Analytics

Therefore, we recommend that any company set up two things: a Google Analytics account and a Google Search Console account.

You can obtain information about how many organic visitors your website receives there.

Google Analytics can offer a ton of useful information such as:

Number of organic visitors

Number of visitors coming from social media, direct or Google Adwords (Paid)

The page or websites bounce rate

The dwell time

 

Is more always better when it comes to organic traffic?

The answer to that question is yes and no.

 

 

Let’s explain why that is so.

You should aim to obtain more organic traffic and increase this number monthly; however, you still need to get the right visitors.

Visitors who will want to buy from you.

 

What do we mean by that?

Well, a business could obtain a million more organic visitors per month, yet if none of them purchase from you, what’s the point?

You want to obtain customers who are likely to make a purchase.

Those who have “purchase intent”.

Therefore, there will be keywords which mean that someone is just browsing and researching the idea of buying that product. An example of this would be “whats the fastest charging electric car”.

This means that they are on Google researching electric cars, yet are not at the buying stage just yet.

Then there will be shoppers who are out to buy that product right now, with purchase intent.

So, where are the shoppers on their buying journey?

Which are the shoppers who are most likely to buy now?

 

Which keywords are they using?

Such as they know which model electric car they want, they just looking for dealership that offers the best price.

Then, how do you optimise your website for those SEO keywords?

For example, someone looking for “organic castor oil, next day delivery” is someone most likely to want to purchase the item right now.

However, if someone was searching, can castor oil help with hair regrowth? They may not want to purchase it right now, yet they are just researching the idea.

The point we are trying to make is that, as far as reasonably possible, you attract shoppers who want to purchase items right now.

 

 

How many pages have been indexed in Google Search Console?

If you offer a lot of helpful advice, people seeking an answer to a question regarding your product or services will read your advice.

Therefore, the more helpful advice your business can offer, the more visitors you can obtain.

The more organic visitors you can obtain, the greater the opportunity to turn those visitors into actual paying customers.

Therefore, do you use Google Search Console to see how many pages are indexed? Is the number of indexed pages growing?

Then use Google Analytics to monitor engagement. Is the engagement increasing? Is the dwell time good?

Is the bounce rate low?

Are shoppers going on to read more pages? Spending more time browsing the items that you have for sale?

Therefore, both Google Search Console and Google Analytics monitor engagement.

a growing number of indexed pages with a high Google EEAT score

You want as many high-quality pages/blog posts in the index as possible. So, since you started working with your appointed SEO company, has the number of indexed pages increased?

Does content marketing, such as blog posts, have high Google EEAT scores?

Also, the added content marketing needs to be very high quality.

Therefore, whether you’re writing or producing the content marketing within your company, or an SEO expert produces it, it should always be high-quality SEO work.

 

 

How many impressions and clicks is your business generating?

Use the performance tab in your Google Search Console account, and check vital SEO metrics such as total impressions and clicks.
Simply put, the total number of impressions states how often your business website appears in Google’s search results. In terms of clicks, this indicates how frequently shoppers select your page from the SERPS.

 

Is the number of impressions and clicks increasing?

Use Google Search Console to check the keyword average position.

This is perhaps the most critical metric that our busy SEO consultants check for during most working hours of the week. That metric is where your most essential keywords rank in Google.

You use Google Search Console and the “keyword average position” information to check this.

Some keywords are more important than others.

Some keywords will help you drum up much business, while others will only generate a trickle of monthly visitors.

Therefore, SEO agencies like ourselves call the main keywords the “high search volume keywords, ” meaning that many people are searching for these keywords per month.

Often, the keywords with the highest search volume will be the shorter ones relating to your product or service.

Let us give you an example,

Employment solicitors + name of city will generate more organic visitors than the keyword compromise agreement solicitors + name of city.

Keyword research is key.

Your SEO agency should conduct keyword research before any on-page or off-page optimisation work begins.

The reason is that you need to know which keywords you are optimising the website for.
We use Moz Pro and also Google Search Console for this work.

 

What to be wary of

Seo businesses need to follow best practices, also called “white hat best practices”. However, needless to say, some companies will look to take shortcuts, which can cause, well, sometimes significant damage to a website’s organic search engine optimisation.

So, here are things to be wary of when hiring a marketing business

 

Promises of a large number of links

If a business builds spam or low-quality links, this can cause significant problems.

The website can incur an algorithmic penalty. Therefore, some businesses grab new clients by making statements such as “we can build a large number of links per month for a low fee”- such statements should have you concerned and worried, as no business should be building spam or low-quality links.

For those in the know, they will know that link building takes time and is a slow process.

Therefore, a business building spam links and low-quality links can cause problems.

Many businesses have logged into their Google Search Console account to find that they have a manual penalty applied by Google.

This can sometimes result in a company website getting deindexed, which is not what you want.

 

FAQ:

How do you tell if your SEO company is doing a good job?

Good communication
What we believe is just as important as good SEO work is whether the SEO expert is a good communicator and whether you enjoy working with them.

You have to consider that SEO is a very long-term process; you usually will be working with the company over a long period.

This could be multiple years; therefore, you should enjoy working with your SEO team.

Look for a business where you feel you can work well with that company.

 

Owns up when there are problems

Sometimes you employ the very best SEO minds in the whole world. Yet things can go wrong.
For example, a plugin update can fail, a website could go offline due to server problems, having knock-on effects on the business’s search engine optimisation.

Therefore, work with companies that own up when there are problems so that you stay informed and have a complete idea of how well your SEO is improving.

 

Increases the organic traffic

Ultimately, you will want to see an increase in organic traffic to your company website.

Therefore, you should have the login details to your Google Search Console and your company’s Google Analytics to check if the number of organic visitors is increasing.

 

Increases conversions

It’s good to bring more organic traffic to your website, yet you should also notice increased conversions.

Are you gaining more sales? This is the ultimate deciding factor: is your SEO company helping your business to generate more sales?

Adds high-quality content marketing with a high EEAT score

The content marketing added to your website can’t be content thin, it shouldn’t be duplicated, and you shouldn’t use AI to write the content marketing.

The content marketing needs to be high quality and well-written.

The written work needs to have a high Google EEAT score.

 

Builds quality links

Your business should only build quality links.

Knows about link velocity

The links should be built over a protracted timeframe.

More clicks in Google Search Console

You should notice more click appearing in your Google Search Console account.

Who is Ryan Walsh?

Ryan Walsh is one of the best SEO experts available in Cardiff.

Ryan has over 10 years experience and now works with a wide range of businesses.

We can help to improve your companies organic and also local search engine optimisation.