SEO Transparency Guide

How to Tell If Your SEO Company Is Actually Doing Anything

If you are paying an SEO company every month, it is reasonable to want to know what is actually being done to your website. How do you know your SEO company is doing something meaningful instead of simply sending you reports every month?

SEO can be difficult to evaluate when you are not the person doing the work. Rankings, traffic graphs, impressions and keyword counts can all sound impressive, but those numbers alone do not tell you whether your website is actually being optimized well.

You Can Check More of Your SEO Company's Work Than You Might Think

At SC Marketing Technologies, transparency is important to us. We have earned 45 five-star Google reviews, are verified across established third-party agency directories, Semrush lists us as the best SEO agency in Springfield, Missouri, and we were named a 2026 Springfield Tech Council finalist for Technology Service Provider of the Year.

Those are credibility signals we are proud of, but we still do not think a business owner should simply take an SEO company's word for what is being done. You should be able to see evidence of the work.

If you are trying to find out whether your SEO company is actually optimizing your website, there are several things you can check yourself without purchasing expensive SEO software.

And if you are researching an SEO company before hiring one, many of these same tests can be used on the agency's own website.

This is not intended to replace a complete SEO audit. It is a practical way to look for evidence of meaningful optimization and know which questions to ask when something does not add up.

1. Right-Click Your Images and See If They Have Been Optimized

If you are wondering, “How do I know if my SEO company is actually doing anything?”, this is one of the easiest checks you can perform.

Open one of your important service or location pages. Right-click one of the main images and choose Inspect.

What to look for Your browser should highlight an <img> element. Look for an alt="" attribute and inspect the image filename.

You might see something like:

 <img
  src="/commercial-roofing-springfield-mo.webp"
  alt="Commercial roofing installation in Springfield Missouri">

On a local SEO page, relevant images can naturally reinforce the service and geographic market. That does not mean every image should be stuffed with the exact same keyword.

Does the alt text accurately describe what is shown?
Are important images missing alt text?
Does relevant service or location context appear naturally where appropriate?
Are filenames descriptive instead of something such as IMG_4837.jpg?
Has somebody copied the exact same keyword-heavy alt text onto every image?

Alt text should not be written only for Google. It should accurately describe the image. Keywords and location terms should appear only when they genuinely fit what the image shows.

2. Inspect the Page and Find Its Main H1

Another easy way to tell whether an SEO company is optimizing your website is to inspect the main heading on an important page.

How to check Right-click the page and choose View Page Source or Inspect. Search for <h1 .

Ask yourself whether the primary H1 clearly describes what that page is about.

Weak

Welcome to Our Website

This does not clearly communicate the page's main topic, service or location.

Clear

Commercial Roofing Services in Springfield, Missouri

A visitor and search engine can immediately understand the primary topic.

For a typical service or local landing page, we generally like to see one obvious primary H1 that clearly communicates the main topic of the page.

Having more than one H1 is not automatically an SEO penalty, but if you cannot tell what the primary heading is supposed to be, the page structure may deserve a closer look.

Do the H2s and H3s support the main topic?

Supporting headings should expand on the subject of the page. For example, a commercial roofing page might include sections covering materials, pricing factors, repairs, replacement, warranties, service areas and common questions.

3. If You Are Paying for Local SEO, Is Your Location Actually on the Page?

If you are trying to find out whether your SEO company is doing local SEO, actually read the pages that are supposed to rank locally.

Suppose a roofing company wants to rank for roof repair in Springfield, Missouri.

If the only mention of Springfield is buried in the website footer, the page may not contain much meaningful local context.

Try this simple test: Ignore the header and footer. If you read only the main body of the page, would you know what city or region the company serves?

On a properly developed local page, geographic relevance may naturally appear in:

The title tag
The H1
Supporting H2 and H3 headings
The body content
Service-area information
Internal links
Relevant images and image descriptions
Structured data where appropriate

Local SEO does not mean repeating the same city after every keyword. The location should be woven naturally into useful information for the customer.

4. Check the Title Tag

If you want to see whether an SEO company has performed basic on-page optimization, check the page's title tag.

How to check View the page source and search for <title> .

Generic

 <title>Services | ABC Company</title>

More intentional

 <title>Commercial Roofing Springfield MO | ABC Roofing</title>

Important service and location pages should generally have unique titles that communicate the topic of that specific page.

If every page uses nearly the same title, or important services are simply labeled “Services,” ask what on-page SEO work has actually been performed.

5. Does the Website Answer the Questions Customers Are Actually Asking?

A page does not become useful SEO content simply because a keyword appears several times.

Good content should clearly answer the questions a potential customer needs answered before choosing a company.

Open one of your most important service pages and see whether it answers questions like:

What does the service cost, or what affects the cost?
How does the process work?
How long does it normally take?
Who is this service best suited for?
What options are available?
What problems does it solve?
Which geographic areas are served?
What should someone expect after contacting the company?
What makes this provider different?

Clear answers are useful for people, search engines and AI systems trying to understand what a business actually does.

Google & Local Search Clear services, geographic context, headings, internal links, useful content and authority signals help search engines understand which searches a page may be relevant for.

↔

AI Search & Answer Engines Clear facts, entities, services, customer questions, relationships and third-party credibility give AI systems more information to understand and describe the business.

6. Ask: Could This Content Belong to Almost Any Company?

This is one of our favorite ways to identify generic SEO content.

Take a paragraph from the website and temporarily remove the company name.

Example of generic content

“At ABC Company, we pride ourselves on providing high-quality solutions tailored to meet each customer's unique needs. Our experienced team is committed to providing exceptional service and complete customer satisfaction.”

Could that paragraph appear on a roofing website, a dentist's website, an accountant's site, an HVAC website and a landscaping website?

If the answer is yes, it is not telling search engines or prospective customers very much.

Strong content contains specifics

Real products and services
Actual processes
Specific markets and service areas
Real customer concerns
Actual policies
Specific expertise
Real examples and observations
Differences between available options
Situations where a service may or may not be appropriate

If you are trying to determine whether an SEO company is creating a real content strategy or simply fulfilling a monthly content quota, this distinction matters.

7. Check for Duplicate or Reused Content

If you are paying for original SEO content, you can perform a simple duplication check yourself.

Check for duplication across your own website

Copy a distinctive sentence from a service or location page and search Google for:

 site:yourwebsite.com "paste the exact sentence here"

If the same paragraph appears across 20 city pages and the only thing changing is the city name, ask how those pages are being differentiated.

Check whether the copy appears on other websites

Search the exact sentence in quotation marks without using the site: operator.

If supposedly custom content appears word-for-word on unrelated business websites, that deserves a conversation with whoever created it.

Duplicate content is more nuanced than a simple “Google penalty.” The larger issue is whether the content gives Google and customers a reason to prefer your page over all the other options available.

8. Go to Schema.org and See What Structured Data Is Actually on Your Website

If your SEO company tells you it is doing structured data or schema work, this is something you can inspect yourself.

How to check Go to validator.schema.org, enter your homepage or another important URL and run the validator.

Depending on the type of business and the page you are testing, you may see schema types such as:

Organization
LocalBusiness or a more specific business subtype
WebSite
WebPage
Service
BlogPosting or Article
BreadcrumbList
Person

But do not stop at: “My website has schema, so the SEO company must be doing schema work.”

Many website platforms and SEO plugins can generate structured data automatically.

9. Is Your Schema Customized, or Is Rank Math or Another Plugin Generating It Automatically?

WordPress plugins such as Rank Math and other SEO tools can automatically create portions of a site's structured data.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Automatic schema can provide a useful foundation.

However, if you are paying an SEO company specifically for advanced schema implementation, it is reasonable to ask what was actually customized.

Look for signs that the markup may be mostly generic

The exact same basic schema appears on almost every page.
A detailed service page contains only generic WebPage information.
Important services are not represented.
Business information is incomplete or incorrect.
Locations or relevant business relationships are missing.
The schema type does not accurately describe the page.
Very little appears customized to the actual company.

One important distinction: You usually cannot prove who created a line of schema simply by viewing the final code. What you can evaluate is whether the markup contains meaningful business-specific and page-specific information or looks primarily like default output.

10. Copy the Page Code Into ChatGPT and Ask It What Is Actually There

You do not need to know HTML or JSON-LD to start examining your website code.

How to do it Right-click the page, select View Page Source, copy the relevant code and paste it into ChatGPT.

You can use this prompt:

 Analyze this website page code from an SEO perspective.
Tell me:
1. What the title tag is.
2. Whether a meta description is present.
3. How many H1 elements there are and what the main H1 says.
4. Whether the heading structure clearly describes the page.
5. What image alt attributes are present.
6. Whether local city or service-area signals appear naturally.
7. What structured data or schema is present.
8. Whether the schema appears generic or contains meaningful page-specific information.
9. Whether a canonical tag is present.
10. What internal links appear on the page.
11. Whether there are obvious signs of generic or templated content.
12. What obvious on-page SEO elements appear to be missing.
Do not assume something was manually optimized simply because it exists.
Explain the findings in plain English.

ChatGPT cannot reliably tell you which SEO company personally created a piece of code simply by looking at it.

It can, however, help translate the code into plain English and give you much better questions to ask your provider.

11. Check Google's Rich Results Test Too

Schema.org's validator and Google's Rich Results Test are useful for different purposes.

Tool	What It Helps You Check
Schema.org Validator	Helps identify the Schema.org structured data found on the page and whether the markup can be parsed correctly.
Google Rich Results Test	Helps show whether Google detects markup associated with rich-result types that Google currently supports.

A page can contain valid structured data without being eligible for a visible Google rich result.

12. Check Whether Your Blogs and Service Pages Are Actually Connected

Another way to tell if your SEO company is doing strategic work is to look at internal linking.

Open an important service page and look at how the website is connected around it.

Do relevant blog articles link to the service page?
Do related services link naturally to one another?
Can users move deeper into related topics?
Does the link text explain where the link is going?
Are important pages buried several clicks deep?
Does nearly every link simply send people back to the homepage?

Blogs should not exist on an island.

A good content strategy should help strengthen the commercial pages that are actually responsible for producing leads or sales.

13. Look at the Last Five Blogs Your SEO Company Published

If you are trying to find out whether your SEO company is really developing a strategy or just meeting a monthly blog quota, review the most recent articles.

For every blog, ask:

What search or customer question is this article supposed to answer?
Which service or product does it support?
Does it internally link to a relevant service page?
Does it include information specific to the actual company?
Does it give clear answers or mostly contain broad filler?
Is it meaningfully different from other content already on the site?
Does the reader have a clear next step?

If the only reason a blog exists is “your SEO package includes four blogs per month,” that explains the deliverable. It does not explain the strategy.

14. Open Google Search Console and Look at What Is Actually Growing

If you are asking, “How do I know my SEO company is doing something?”, do not evaluate performance from a PDF report alone.

Make sure you have access to your own Google Search Console property.

Where to look Open Performance → Search Results. Compare a meaningful period, then inspect both Queries and Pages.

Look beyond the overall totals.

Which queries are gaining impressions and clicks?
Which pages are gaining visibility?
Are those searches related to services the business actually sells?
Are commercially valuable searches improving?
Are impressions going up while clicks stay flat?
Are your primary service pages improving, or only informational blogs?

15. More Organic Traffic Does Not Automatically Mean Better SEO

This is something we watch on our own website too.

A third-party SEO platform may estimate traffic coming from searches that have very little commercial value. Websites can even begin ranking for geographic markets the company does not actually target.

Those rankings may increase the number on an SEO graph without increasing the number of qualified prospects.

Traffic Volume and Business Value Are Not the Same Thing

Generic Traffic

High

Service Relevance

Low

Buyer Intent

Low

Illustrative example only. This graphic demonstrates why total organic traffic should not be used by itself to measure SEO success.

Now compare that traffic with searches such as:

roof replacement Springfield MO
commercial roofer Springfield Missouri
roofing company near me
best roofing company Springfield MO

Those searches may produce fewer visitors but represent people who are much closer to hiring a company.

When an SEO company tells you traffic increased dramatically, ask:

Which searches actually caused the increase?

16. Check Whether the Keywords That Could Actually Make You Money Are Moving

Keyword count alone is not a meaningful measure of SEO success.

A website ranking for 1,000 informational phrases can theoretically generate less business than a website ranking extremely well for 20 high-intent searches.

Informational

How does a roof work?

This can generate traffic, but the person may have no intention of hiring a roofing company.

Commercial

Roof replacement Springfield MO

This search indicates substantially stronger local service intent.

If you are paying for local SEO, ask your provider to show you how your commercially important service and location queries are performing.

17. Ask to See the Technical SEO Work

Some valuable SEO work is not obvious when looking at the front end of a website.

That does not mean you cannot ask to see it.

If you are trying to determine whether your SEO company is performing technical SEO, ask for examples of problems identified and corrected.

Technical work may include:

Canonical corrections
Redirect fixes
Broken links
Indexation problems
Sitemap issues
Crawlability problems
Structured data improvements
Internal-linking corrections
404 errors
Duplicate or competing URLs
Page-level technical problems

Your SEO provider should be able to explain:

What was wrong? What was changed? Why did it matter?

18. Check Whether Your Company Is Being Understood in AI Search

Customers are no longer discovering businesses only through a traditional Google search results page.

People may also ask ChatGPT and other AI answer platforms for local providers, recommendations and information about businesses.

Try realistic prompts that a prospective customer might actually use:

 Who are some roofing companies in Springfield, Missouri?
What are some good commercial roofers in Springfield MO?
Who offers [your service] near Springfield?
What should I look for when choosing a [service provider]?

Do not treat one AI response like a fixed Google ranking.

AI results can vary based on model, context, wording, available sources and other factors.

Instead, look for broader patterns.

Does the AI system understand what your business does?
Does it associate the business with the correct location?
Does it understand your major services?
Are competitors appearing consistently while your company is absent?
Are third-party sources describing your business accurately?

Strong traditional SEO, clear website content, structured information, third-party mentions, reviews, citations and authority all contribute to the broader information ecosystem search and AI systems use to understand businesses.

19. Ask Your SEO Company to Show You the Work, Not Just the Report

If you are trying to find out whether your SEO company is actually doing anything, one question can reveal a lot:

“Show me what you changed, where you changed it, why you changed it and what happened afterward.”

A useful explanation could look something like this:

What	Example
Page	/commercial-roofing/
Work completed	Updated the title and H1, expanded service content, added relevant internal links and implemented appropriate Service schema.
Why	The page did not clearly communicate the primary service or geographic market and had limited topical depth.
What to measure	Search visibility, relevant queries, qualified traffic, conversions and other meaningful performance indicators can then be evaluated over time.

That tells you substantially more than:

“We worked on your SEO this month.”

The 20-Minute “Is My SEO Company Actually Doing Anything?” Check

If you want a quick way to find out whether your SEO company is doing something on your website, start with these ten checks:

Right-click several important images and inspect their alt text and filenames.
Inspect an important service page and identify the H1, title tag and supporting heading structure.
Read the page and see whether the service location is clearly represented if you are paying for local SEO.
Search distinctive pieces of website copy in Google to look for duplicate or reused content.
Run your homepage and important service pages through the Schema.org validator.
Look at whether the schema contains meaningful information specific to the business or appears largely generic.
Copy relevant page code into ChatGPT and ask it to explain what is present and what appears missing.
Review the last five blogs your SEO company published and determine why each exists.
Open Google Search Console and inspect which queries and pages are actually growing.
Ask your SEO company for examples of specific changes completed during the last 90 days.

You do not have to become an SEO expert to hold an SEO company accountable. You just need to know where to look.

What If You Are Trying to Evaluate an SEO Company Before You Hire Them?

These same checks are useful if you are looking for a new SEO company and want to determine whether the agency appears to practice what it sells.

Look at the SEO company's own website.

If an agency tells you it specializes in technical SEO, local search, structured data, content optimization and AI search visibility, look for evidence of those things on its own site.

Does the company rank for relevant services in its own market?
Are its important service pages clearly optimized?
Does the site answer useful customer questions?
Is there third-party credibility outside of its own website?
Does its structured data make sense?
Does its content contain actual expertise or generic filler?
Can the company explain its work in plain language?

No SEO website is going to be perfect. SEO is also constantly evolving.

But an SEO company's own digital presence can still tell you quite a bit about how seriously it takes the strategies it recommends to clients.

So, How Do You Know If Your SEO Company Is Actually Doing Something?

You should be able to find evidence.

That does not mean every SEO task will be obvious from looking at the front of your website, and it does not mean rankings should increase every single month.

It does mean your SEO company should be able to show you what it has worked on, explain why those changes matter and connect the strategy to meaningful search visibility.

Look at your pages. Inspect the images. Check the headings. Review the content. Test the schema. Examine Search Console. Look at which searches are actually growing. Ask questions.

If you are paying for SEO, you deserve to understand what is being done.