How can we tell if our SEO is working and improving?
Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 15/04/2026
Subject: SEO Reporting
Introduction
We absolutely get it, finding and whittling down that list of prospective agencies, well, that can be a hard task in itself for any business.
There’s so much choice out there, but let’s say you’ve now found a marketing company that you like and want to work with.
You’ve had a meeting; you like the director and the marketing staff, so it’s now time to go full steam ahead on the project.
But, hold your horses, this has got you thinking, how do we track SEO progress throughout the period of investment?
How can we tell if our SEO is working?
Well, first things first: you should set the metrics, these will be the basis for checking SEO progress each and every month. Most certainly don’t let an agency bamboozle you with science, fancy graphs and quick catch-up calls that tell you everything is going great, when, well it might not be sometimes!
Instead, choose metrics that are clear and widely accepted as the metrics that will need improving.
They are as follows:
- Organic traffic / Visitor numbers
- Number of conversions (CRO or conversion rate optimisation)
- Monitoring the bounce rates across key pages
- Monitoring dwell times
- Number of pages visited
- Keyword rankings
- Number of do-follow and no-follow backlinks earned (checking the companies backlink profile)
- Page speed
- And more
Why does it feel like no progress is being made?
As you can appreciate, the performance of your marketing greatly depends very much on which company you hire.
Some are simply the best in the world, the bee’s knees, and very much worth their weight in gold!
However, some companies, well, sometimes don’t do much for their fee, or make a complete and utter mess of it. Perhaps, for example, they are using AI-written / duplicated text or mixing in a lot of AI text into blog posts and product descriptions. This “spammy text” can cause the website nose-dives during a Google algorithm update because the text is “content thin” or just spammy, since thousands of other businesses have offered similar sounding advice.
However, as a general rule, you appreciate that SEO is a long-term strategy. It can take 3-6 months to start seeing tangible results from your local SEO efforts, for national SEO things will take longer.
And therefore, as the old saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, and agencies do need time to implement quality work.
Which SEO metrics do you deem as really important to follow?
Organic traffic
Undoubtedly, one of the most important metrics to follow is your business’s organic traffic; use Google Analytics for this task.
Therefore, you don’t have to pay for an expensive SEO tool to monitor this because Google offers a free one called “Google Analytics”.
It may take some time for you to understand how Google Analytics works; however, it’s a really useful tool suited for businesses of any size.
The dashboard is a piece of cake to use and navigate when you get used to it.
Head on over to the “Reports” tab, then “Acquisition” within Google Analytics and find out how many organic visitors your website is receiving per day, week or say each month.
You will want the number of organic visitors to increase over time.
However, a word to the wise, don’t just increase organic traffic by bringing in visitors to blog posts who are unlikely to purchase from you.
The example our agency always gives is a rather simple one: it’s easy to write a mass of celebrity stories or articles on current news worthy topics; however, this can generate a lot of organic traffic, and normally these create temporary spikes in organic visitor numbers that do not last very long.
Therefore, these customers might often just be interested in reading say celebrity gossip or a newsworthy news story for a short period of time.
These organic visitors may not be the visitors you need to generate more sales.
Instead, focus on writing “evergreen content marketing”, that’s really helpful content marketing that has a really high “Google EEAT score”.
If this content marketing helps customers to answer a question they have regarding your products or services , then you are bringing in a better type of visitor to your website.
Therefore, if you have written a 2,000-word guide about “which diamonds are best for an engagement ring”,- well, that’s the type of customer who is most likely doing some research before buying a brand-new engagement ring.
Conversion rate optimisation
This ties into our previous point: you can use Google Analytics to clearly see how many shoppers are making a purchase and how many are filling in a contact form, for example.
This, therefore, allows the marketing team to determine whether they are attracting the right organic shopper to the website.
Keyword rankings
Often, a business or marketing agency should set a clear goal from the outset to improve the website for specific keywords.
Perhaps these are long-tail keywords; you need to track where they rank in the Google SERP.
Various SEO tools can be used to see whether they are improving, in terms of moving up Google’s organic rankings or not.
Domain and Page authority
You might want to use a really good, top-quality SEO tool, such as Moz Pro.
This way, you gain a better understanding of which companies are linking to your website.
How many do-follow and no-follow backlinks do you have? Are they quality links? Are they mostly spam links?
Then you can check the website’s overall domain authority. Have you got a high DA score? Does your agency perhaps need to build more high-quality, relevant backlinks to improve the DA score?
User engagement metrics such as “dwell times” and “bounce rates”
It’s a really good idea to improve dwell times and reduce the bounce rates.
If your business, or let’s say the agency you hire, has really good copywriters working at the agency, they can write helpful content marketing that’s not just useful to the shopper but also interesting to read at the same time (contributing to higher dwell times). The writing style and the quality of the information may help you hold shoppers’ interest for long periods.
Marketing businesses worldwide refer to this as an increase in the time on page, or dwell times. And by doing so, you also have the massive opportunity of adding internal links into the work as well, and therefore, what you can do is reduce the bounce rate, plus increase the number of pages that the shopper is visiting- which many SEO companies believe helps to improve a company’s organic search engine optimisation.
Page speed
You can use Google’s tools to check how fast your company website is.
For example, Google has offered the Google Page Speed Insights tool and the mobile-friendly test tool.
Basically, your marketing business, and the web designers should work together to speed up the website on mobile and desktop versions.
This can sometimes help to reduce that bounce rate.
Which tools would you recommend using?
We would recommend using Google Analytics; Google Search Console is also essential. Plus, when you walk into most agencies, you will see most SEO staff with tabs open using Ahrefs, as well as SEMrush. We at this agency personally like using Moz Pro; we think it’s fantastic.
FAQs about measuring how well your organic SEO is doing:
How long does it take for SEO to work?
This depends greatly on the level of competition. If your business is, say, a solicitor’s practice, let’s say you operate in the magic circle, these businesses often spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on their digital marketing each year. Therefore, to compete against these businesses, which are heavily investing in SEO, means it takes more work, more effort, and more time to rank higher than them in Google’s SERP’s.
However, if you’re a local business and the competition level is generally much lower, an agency can often generate results in a much shorter period.
What is the most important metric to track?
We would say organic traffic, bounce rates, and the backlinks are the more important metrics to monitor.
How do I know if my keywords are working?
You need to select keywords with a high search volume.
This means that a high level of shoppers are asking that question.
Then you have to monitor monthly, or perhaps more frequently, where the business ranks for those terms.
Can a high bounce rate mean my SEO is failing?f
Sometimes this could be true, for example, if your bounce rate is much higher than your direct competitors’ in comparison. However, sometimes the business sector generally have a high bounce rate across all the companies on the first page of Google.
For example, let’s say you sell a certain brand of e-bike; shoppers might go from website to website checking prices. This, in turn, increases the bounce rate for all businesses.
However, if you sell a service, such as if you’re a top employment lawyer, well, if the bounce is high there, you have to question why? Often, organic visitors to a website who want to hire a professional service don’t go for price; they go for experience and how good the company is.
Therefore, if you say a solicitor, and your bounce rate is high, you do have to question why that is.
Could the web design be improved?
Is the website slow?
Is the page content thin? Therefore, more information could be added to help the shopper make a purchase decision.
What tools are best for beginners to track SEO?
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are both brilliant SEO tools.
Want to hire one of best SEO companies around?
We have in excess of 10 years experience. We have some of the best SEO consultants, the best knowledge in this city.
Therefore, for a no obligation quote, do call us today.