Your SEO is working if the pages that make you money are showing up for more of the right searches, getting more clicks from them, and turning more of those clicks into leads or sales.
That’s it. That’s the entire definition of it.
Now, those three things tend to move in that order, usually months apart, and you can check all of them yourself for free in Google Search Console and Google Analytics, or any other software you may be using to track your website’s data.
Whether your SEO agency is working is a separate question, and in my opinion, a simpler one.
Can they show you what changed on your site this month? Results take time, but work really doesn’t. Can they explain how the work they did actually lead to the outcomes that you want?
A lot of SEO reports never answer these questions. They show charts that go up no matter what, and a list of tasks that sound busy, but you’re left guessing.
The short version
- Judge SEO on the pages and searches that bring in money, not on total site traffic.
- Check the signals in the order they move. Pages get indexed, then impressions rise, then positions improve, then clicks grow, then leads follow.
- Search Console tells you how Google sees your site. Google Analytics tells you what visitors did once they arrived. You need both.
- Separate branded searches (people typing your name) from everything else, because brand searches grow for reasons that often have nothing to do with SEO.
- Impressions can rise while clicks stay flat now that AI Overviews answer a lot of searches on the results page. Watch leads, not just clicks.
- For an agency, ask what changed on your site this month. If they can’t point to it, you have your answer.
What organic traffic actually is
Organic traffic, sometimes called SEO traffic, is visits that come from unpaid search results (organically).
Someone searched on Google, Bing or another search engine, saw your page in the regular results and clicked it. Clicks on ads don’t count, and neither do people who typed your address in directly or came from a link on another site.
In Google Analytics 4 this shows up as the “Organic Search” channel. One thing that trips people up is traffic from AI chat tools like ChatGPT. It usually lands in the Referral channel (or from June 2026, there’s a separate channel in GA4 called “AI assistants”) rather than Organic Search, so if you’re trying to see everything search-related, check both.
Organic traffic is the number most people look at first, and I’d put it near the bottom of the list. It mixes your best pages with blog posts nobody who buys from you ever reads, and it rises and falls with the seasons.
It’s worth tracking, of course, just not as the only number.
Decide what “working” means before you look at anything
The biggest reason people can’t tell if their SEO is working is that nobody wrote down what it was supposed to do. So before any metrics, make a short list of the pages that actually matter to your business. Service pages, product categories, the pages with your contact or booking form. Then list the searches those pages should show up for.
Next, save a baseline. Note down where impressions, clicks, rankings and organic leads stood for those pages before the work started.
If you’re already months into an engagement and never did this, do it today and use it from here on. Without a starting point, every report is just a story.
The signals to check, in the order they move
SEO results show up in a predictable sequence. If you know the order, you can tell whether things are on track months before the sales numbers change.
| Signal | Where to find it | What it tells you | How soon it moves |
| Indexing | Search Console, Page indexing report | Google can include your pages in results | Days to weeks |
| Impressions | Search Console, Performance report | Google is showing your pages for more searches | Usually first |
| Position for target searches | Search Console, filtered by query or page | Your pages are climbing | Weeks to months |
| Clicks and click-through rate | Search Console, Performance report | People are choosing your result | After positions improve |
| Organic visits to key pages | Google Analytics 4 | Search visitors are reaching the pages that matter | Alongside clicks |
| Leads and sales from organic | GA4 key events, your CRM or store | SEO is making you money | Last |
If the early signals are moving and the later ones aren’t yet, that’s normal. If nothing is moving at all after three or four months of real work, something’s wrong.
Search Console shows you how Google sees your site
Search Console is free, it comes straight from Google, and it’s the most reliable SEO data you’ll ever get. The Performance report shows impressions, meaning how often someone saw a link to your site in Google, clicks, and your average position.
A few habits make it much more useful. Compare the last three months with the three months before, and with the same three months last year if your business is seasonal.
Filter by page to see how your money pages are doing on their own, and filter by query to see the searches you care about.
Since late 2025 there’s also a branded queries filter that uses AI to split searches for your brand from everything else, though it’s rolled out gradually and may not appear for sites with few brand searches. In June 2026 Google also started rolling out a generative AI performance report that shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, if your property has it.
One warning about average position. It’s averaged across every search your site appears for, so it can get worse while your SEO is working. When your pages start showing up for hundreds of new searches at position 40 or 60, those drag the average down even as your important keywords climb. Always check position for specific queries and pages.
Google Analytics shows you what visitors did next
Search Console stops at the click. Google Analytics 4 picks up from there and tells you whether those visitors did anything useful.
To check organic traffic in GA4, go to Reports, Acquisition, Traffic acquisition. The report groups visits by default channel group, and the Organic Search row is your SEO traffic. To see which pages that traffic lands on, open the Landing page report under Engagement and add a comparison for Session default channel group matching Organic Search.
The number to care about most is key events, which is what GA4 now calls conversions, for things like form submissions, calls and purchases.
Don’t worry when GA4 and Search Console disagree. Search Console counts clicks, GA4 counts sessions, and GA4 misses visitors who block tracking or decline cookies, so GA4 almost always shows fewer.
Watch the trend in each tool rather than trying to make them match. GA4 also doesn’t show which searches people used, because Google stopped passing that information to analytics years ago. For keywords, you need Search Console, and linking the two tools lets you see Search Console data inside GA4.
Rank trackers and “visibility” scores
Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush and dedicated rank trackers check your positions for a list of keywords every day or week.
Many of them also give you a visibility score, which is an estimate of what share of clicks you’d get across those keywords based on where you rank and how many clicks each position usually gets.
These are useful for spotting trends and seeing how you compare with competitors. They’re estimates, though, based on the keyword list someone chose.
If the list is full of easy terms nobody searches for, the visibility score looks great and means nothing. Make sure the tracked keywords are the ones your money pages should rank for, and treat Search Console as the source of truth when the two disagree.
I’d rather see one page climb for a search that brings in leads than a thousand new keywords sitting at position 80.
Where the numbers can fool you
Brand searches aren’t SEO wins. If people hear about you from ads, social media, a podcast or word of mouth, they’ll search for your name, and your organic traffic goes up.
That’s great, but it often doesn’t have much to do with SEO. The searches SEO is responsible for are the ones where people don’t know you yet, like “roof repair in Pasadena” or “best standing desk for small spaces.” Always look at non-branded numbers separately.
Site-wide totals hide what matters. A blog post that goes semi-viral can double your organic traffic while your service pages lose ground. The chart goes up, the report looks great, and your leads drop. Look at the pages that make money first.
Seasonality fools everyone. A landscaping company’s traffic in May tells you nothing compared with March. Compare against the same period last year before deciding anything.
And know that AI Overviews change the math. When Pew Research tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025, people clicked a regular search result in 8% of visits when Google showed an AI summary, compared with 15% when it didn’t, and they clicked a link inside the summary itself in just 1% of visits.
So you can rank well, get more impressions and still see flat clicks for searches where an AI summary appears. When that happens, judge SEO on leads and on the searches where people still click, which tend to be the commercial ones.
And don’t forget that tracking breaks more often than rankings do. If organic traffic falls off a cliff overnight, check that your analytics tag is still on the site before anything else. Redesigns, new cookie banners and plugin updates break tracking all the time.
And third-party scores aren’t Google’s. Domain Authority comes from Moz and Domain Rating comes from Ahrefs. They’re useful for comparing sites, but Google doesn’t use either one, and they can climb for months while your rankings go nowhere. If a report leads with them, you can safely assume that the agency is NOT doing the work well.
How to tell if your agency is working
Everything above tells you whether SEO results are moving. With an agency, you also need to know whether the work is being done, because results lag behind the work by months and a bad agency can hide in that gap for a long time.
The single best question is “what changed on my site this month?” It’s the first thing I’d want to see in any report if I were the client.
A good answer is a list of pages that were updated, built or fixed, with URLs and dates, plus the reason each one was done. Google itself suggests asking any SEO you hire, “will you share all changes made to my site?”
If the answer is vague, or it’s all “research,” “monitoring” and “strategy” month after month, you’re paying for the idea of SEO.
| What to check | Good sign | Red flag |
| Work shipped | A list of specific changes with URLs and dates | “Ongoing optimization” with nothing you can point to |
| What the report focuses on | Non-branded clicks and leads for your key pages | Domain Authority, total keyword counts, site-wide traffic |
| Explanations | Clear reasons for what moved and what didn’t | Every dip blamed on a Google update |
| Access | You own Search Console and GA4, and the agency is a user | The agency owns the accounts and sends you screenshots |
| Promises | Honest ranges and a plan to check against | Guaranteed rankings or a “special relationship” with Google |
The access point is worth dealing with even if everything’s going well.
Your Search Console, Google Analytics and any other accounts should be under your company’s Google account, with the agency added as a user.
That way you can check the numbers yourself whenever you want, and you keep all your history if you ever switch.
The promises point comes straight from Google. Its guidance on hiring an SEO says “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google,” and warns against SEOs who claim a “special relationship” with Google or advertise “priority submit.”
Anyone who promises guaranteed rankings is either lying or planning to use tactics that can get your site penalized, and I wrote about where those lines are if you want to check what you’re being sold.
Timing matters too. Judging an agency on sales after six weeks isn’t fair to them, and I explained what a realistic first half year looks like in how long SEO takes. But judging them on work shipped after six weeks is completely fair. Changes should be going live from the first OR second month.
A monthly check you can do yourself
You don’t need an agency’s report to know where you stand. Once a month, this takes about fifteen minutes.
- Open the Search Console Performance report, set it to compare the last three months with the previous three, and turn on the non-branded filter if you have it. Note clicks and impressions.
- Filter to your five or ten most important pages and check whether their clicks, impressions and positions are moving in the right direction.
- Look at the Queries tab for the searches you care about most and write down their positions.
- Check the Page indexing report for any sudden jump in pages Google isn’t indexing.
- In GA4, check key events from Organic Search for the same period.
- Write down what changed on the site that month, whether your agency did it or you did.
After three or four months of this, you’ll be able to see whether the work lines up with the results, which is the whole point.
If it isn’t working, find out where it’s stuck
When SEO isn’t working, the signal where things stall tells you most of what’s wrong.
| What you see | Likely cause | Where to look |
| Key pages not indexed | Technical problem, like a noindex tag, blocked crawling or duplicate content | Page indexing report, site settings, SEO plugin |
| Indexed but almost no impressions | Pages don’t target searches people make, or Google doesn’t see them as relevant | Keyword targeting, page content |
| Impressions but stuck on page two or lower | Competitors have better pages or more authority | Content quality, internal links, backlinks |
| Good positions but few clicks | Weak titles and descriptions, or an AI Overview answering the question | Titles and meta descriptions, the results page itself |
| Clicks but no leads | The page doesn’t convince people or makes it hard to act | The page, the offer, the form |
| Nothing changed on the site | The work isn’t being done | Your agency, or your own to-do list |
Most of the fixes for the middle rows are on-page work, and my on-page SEO checklist covers what I check.
The last row is the one nobody likes to hear, and it’s the easiest to check.
If you want more on this, I write a newsletter called Built to Rank. It’s occasional emails on what’s actually working in SEO, written from my real day-to-day work, and it only goes out when I have something worth sending.
A couple more questions
How long before I can tell if SEO is working?
Impressions and indexing usually show movement within the first two to three months once changes go live. Clicks and leads take longer, and four months to a year is the range Google itself has given.
What are the most important SEO KPIs?
For most businesses, three. Non-branded clicks to the pages that make money, leads or sales from organic search, and rankings for the handful of searches your business depends on. Everything else is there to explain why those three moved.
Why is my organic traffic down when my rankings haven’t changed?
The usual suspects are seasonality, an AI Overview or other feature appearing above your result, a drop in brand searches, or broken tracking.
Compare with the same period last year, check the results page for the searches that dropped, and make sure your analytics tag is still firing before you assume the worst.
Can I see which keywords people used in Google Analytics?
Not in GA4 on its own. Search keywords come from Search Console, and if you link Search Console to GA4 you can see that data in both places.