Is My SEO Agency Doing Anything? 9 Checks You Can Run

You are paying a monthly retainer and you cannot tell what you are buying. The report looks busy. The rankings chart is green. Your phone is not ringing, and every time you ask a direct question you get a call invite and a new deck.

Here is the part nobody tells you: you do not need the agency's cooperation to find out what they have been doing. Every real SEO change leaves a dated fingerprint in a system you already own. Nine checks, about 40 minutes, free tools and your own logins.

How do you tell whether your SEO agency is doing anything at all?

Run nine checks against systems you already control — your sitemap, Google Search Console, your page source, and the Wayback Machine — and you can reconstruct the last 90 days of agency activity without asking them a single question.

This works because SEO work is not invisible. Published pages get timestamps. Rewritten title tags change the HTML. Earned links show up in link indexes. Technical fixes move counts in Search Console. If none of those moved, no work happened — whatever the deck says.

Do them in this order. Each one is a pass/fail, not a judgment call.

The systems are identical whether you run an HVAC company or a law firm. Nothing here is technical. You are reading dates and counting rows.

What does your sitemap's lastmod date reveal?

Open yoursite.com/sitemap.xml in a browser and read the lastmod dates: if the newest one is more than 90 days old, nobody has shipped a content or on-page change in that window, and no explanation covers it.

Google's own sitemap documentation says it uses the lastmod value “if it's consistently and verifiably (for example by comparing to the last modification of the page) accurate” — and that it ignores the priority and changefreq values completely. So lastmod is the one field in that file that both Google and you can treat as evidence.

One trap before you send the angry email. Some sitemap generators stamp today's date on every URL each time the site rebuilds. If all 400 URLs share one identical recent date, that is the generator talking, not your agency. Spot-check two of those URLs in the Wayback Machine (check 7) before you conclude anything.

The reverse tell is just as loud: a sitemap where the ten newest dates are all from the week the agency onboarded you, and nothing since. That is a setup sprint followed by ten months of invoicing.

Has your indexed page count moved in 90 days?

Google Search Console's Page indexing report shows how many URLs on your site have been crawled and indexed — and in a working program that number climbs while the not-indexed bucket shrinks. Flat on both for a quarter means nothing shipped.

Screenshot the report today. Screenshot it again in 30 days. The two numbers to watch are the indexed total and the reasons list underneath it — Google names them explicitly, including Crawled - currently not indexed, Discovered - currently not indexed, Soft 404, and Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user.

Those four are agency homework. A page sitting in Crawled - currently not indexed for three months is not waiting for authority to arrive. It is a thin page, a duplicate, or an orphan that nobody has looked at. If that bucket has grown every month and the agency has never mentioned it, they are not opening Search Console.

You will hear “SEO takes time.” That is true of rankings and false of indexation. Indexation is a crawl fact, not a competition. If you are new to the report, our Search Console guide for service businesses walks through exactly where these numbers live.

Who is actually listed in your Search Console users?

Open Settings → Users and permissions: you should be the Owner and the agency should be a Full user at most. Google's guidance on hiring an SEO says that when an SEO runs an audit for you, “only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access).”

Google defines the roles plainly: an Owner “has full control over properties in Search Console” and can add and remove other users. A Full user can view all data and do things like submit sitemaps and disavow links. A Restricted user can look, not touch.

Now the check almost nobody runs. Google separates a verified owner — “someone who verified ownership of the property using a token to prove ownership (such as an HTML file uploaded to the website)” — from a delegated owner, who was simply granted the status. Deleting a delegated owner cuts their access immediately. A verified owner's token stays live unless you delete the token itself.

Translation: an agency that verified your property with its own HTML file or tag can re-verify itself after you remove them from the users list. Go to Settings → Ownership verification and look at whose tokens sit on your property. You own the data. They are a guest on it — along with your ad accounts, your content, your links, and your codebase.

Have you earned a single new referring domain this quarter?

Open Search Console → Links → Top linking sites, screenshot it, and compare it against a screenshot from 30 or 90 days ago: a retainer that includes link earning and produced zero new referring domains in a quarter produced nothing you can point at.

Search Console's Links report is free, it is first-party, and it lists your linking domains — it just will not tell you when each one appeared. That is why you diff screenshots. Do it once a month and you have built your own new-links tracker for the cost of four clicks.

There is no universal correct number of links per month, and any agency that quotes you one is selling a link package rather than earning links. What is not defensible is zero: no supplier link, no association listing, no local sponsorship, no press mention, nothing, for 90 days.

The opposite pattern is worse. Forty new referring domains appearing in one week, from unrelated foreign blogs you have never heard of, is a paid link network being pointed at your domain — a risk they took with your asset, not theirs. That is a fire-them signal, not a win. Our SEO service treats links as earned or not at all.

Do your title tags look like anyone touched them?

Right-click → View page source on your five highest-value pages and read the title tag: if they still say “Home | Company Name,” duplicate each other, or lead with your brand instead of the service, nobody has done on-page work — and on-page is the cheapest, fastest thing a real program fixes first.

The failing patterns, in order of how often they turn up:

• Two or more pages share a byte-identical title tag
• The title leads with the brand name instead of the service and the city
• The title contains no term a customer would ever type
• The meta description is missing, or is the CMS's auto-generated first sentence
• The H1 and the title tag are the same string on every page
• Service pages you sell nothing from outrank the ones you do, because only they were written

Then run check 7. Paste the page URL into web.archive.org, pull a snapshot from before the engagement started, and put it next to today's page. Same title, same H1, same body copy? The retainer bought you nothing on the page you make money from. Our technical SEO audit walkthrough shows what should have changed.

What does a passing check look like versus a failing one?

A working agency leaves a dated trail on at least five of the nine checks in any 90-day window — new URLs in the sitemap, a rising indexed count, at least one new referring domain, rewritten titles, and a shrinking Core Web Vitals problem list.

On that last row: Google's thresholds for a good page experience are an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, an INP of 200 milliseconds or less, and a CLS of 0.1 or less, each measured at the 75th percentile of real page loads. Those are the numbers your Core Web Vitals report is graded against, and they have not moved in years — so a URL still in Poor after six months is not a hard problem, it is an ignored one.

The honest verdict: one failing check is a bad month. Five failing checks across 90 days is not a communication problem — it is an agency that stopped working on your account. Google's own hiring guidance warns that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, so you cannot fire them for missing a rank nobody could promise. You can absolutely fire them for a sitemap that has not changed since onboarding. And if you want the metric that settles the argument, it is booked revenue: how to measure SEO ROI.

What do you send them once you have the evidence?

Send one email containing the failed checks, the date ranges, and the screenshots, and ask for a written 30-day remediation plan with named deliverables and dates — not a call. Put it in writing so the answer has to be in writing too.

Lines that work, because each one names an artifact and a date rather than a feeling:

• 'Our sitemap shows no lastmod newer than [date]. What was shipped between [date] and today? URLs, please.'
• 'Our indexed page count has not moved in 90 days and Crawled - currently not indexed has grown. What is the fix, and when?'
• 'Search Console lists your firm as a verified owner. Please remove the token; we will re-grant Full user access today.'
• 'Zero new referring domains this quarter. Name the target sites for the next 30 days.'
• 'These five title tags are unchanged since [date]. When are they rewritten, and by whom?'

A real agency answers with dates, URLs, and an owner's name. A dead one answers with a calendar link and a fresh deck. You will know inside 48 hours.

And if you are locked into a 12-month term and the reply is a deck, you have just learned what the 12-month term was for. It protects the agency, not you. We work month-to-month with no minimum for exactly this reason: an agency that has to re-earn the month cannot afford to give you the quarter you just audited.

Ran the nine checks and want a second opinion before you make the call? We will run the same audit on your site and send the findings in writing — sitemap state, indexed-count trend, link profile, on-page reality. See what our SEO audit covers, or Get my free audit.