If You’re Paying for SEO, Please Read This

I recently spoke to a small business owner who was paying £168 every month for SEO. When I looked at the website, only one page was appearing in Google. That does not automatically mean the SEO company had done nothing. There may have been work happening behind the scenes, and SEO can take time to produce results. But it does raise a fairly obvious question: what had the business been paying for?

SEO can feel difficult to challenge because it comes with technical language, unfamiliar reports and promises that results may take several months. Many business owners assume they simply have to trust the person doing it. Before we go any further, though, there is an even more important question.

Do you actually need SEO?

Not every business needs an ongoing SEO contract. Some businesses do not depend on Google for customers. They may work through referrals, tenders, partnerships, repeat business, marketplaces or social media. Others may need their website set up properly and made visible, but they do not necessarily need to pay hundreds of pounds every month forever.

If you have a website and potential customers are searching online for what you offer, but your business is nowhere to be found, then yes, you probably need to work on your SEO. That does not automatically mean a long contract or a large monthly bill.

Your website may need a concentrated period of work at the beginning to fix the foundations, followed by a much simpler plan to keep it growing. The right approach depends on what is wrong, what has already been done and how valuable search visibility is to your business.

Please do not let anyone frighten you into buying SEO. If someone starts talking about your business disappearing overnight, being left behind forever or losing everything unless you sign up immediately, run a mile. Good advice should help you make an informed decision. It should not make you panic.

You should know what you are paying for

SEO can describe dozens of different activities. Someone might be:

• fixing technical problems;

• checking that Google can access your pages;

• improving the wording on your website;

• researching what your customers search for;

• rewriting page titles and descriptions;

• adding structured data such as schema;

• improving internal links;

• writing articles;

• earning links from other websites;

• improving your Google Business Profile;

• or monitoring how the site performs.

They may be doing several of these things. They may be doing only one. They may, rather worryingly, be doing none.

Before you pay for ongoing SEO, you should receive a clear explanation of what is included. The person doing the work should be happy to explain what they are doing and what it means in ordinary language.

You should know:

• what work will be carried out;

• how often it will happen;

• which parts of the website will be worked on;

• how progress will be measured;

• what is outside the agreement;

• and how the work will be reported to you.

SEO cannot guarantee that you will reach number one on Google. Nobody controls Google’s results. If someone promises you the top spot, that is your first red flag.🚩

They can promise to do the agreed work properly. They can explain the strategy, measure progress and make changes when something is not working. It is entirely reasonable to expect someone to tell you what they are doing with your money.

First, check that your website is actually appearing online

Before anyone gets excited about rankings, backlinks, artificial intelligence or complicated content strategies, they should check whether search engines can access and index the website.

Indexing means that Google has found a page, processed it and added it to its searchable database. A website can be live and look perfectly normal to you while still having serious problems behind the scenes. Important pages may be blocked from search engines, missing from the sitemap, marked incorrectly or poorly connected to the rest of the site.

If a page is not indexed, it is extremely unlikely to appear in an ordinary Google search. This should be one of the first checks carried out when SEO work begins. It should not be a regretful discovery made by the business owner several months into a paid contract.

You can carry out a very basic check yourself by searching Google for:

site:yourwebsite.co.uk

Replace the example with your own domain. This will not give you a perfect technical audit, but it should show some of the pages Google knows about.

If you have a website with 30 useful pages and Google only shows the homepage, you need to ask why. A one-page website may correctly have only one page indexed, so context matters, but a multi-page website with almost nothing appearing deserves immediate investigation.

Please check this even if someone has told you that your SEO is being handled. I would be devastated if someone read this article, felt reassured because they were receiving reports, but never checked whether their actual website could be found.

You should own or control your accounts

Your SEO provider may need access to several systems, including:

• your website;

• Google Search Console;

• Google Analytics;

• your Google Business Profile;

• advertising accounts;

• keyword-monitoring tools;

• and any reporting dashboard being used.

  
  

Where possible, these accounts should belong to your business. The provider can be given the access they need, but you should not lose access to your own website and data if the relationship ends.

Google Search Console is particularly important because it shows how Google sees your website. It can show which searches your pages appear for, how many people click them, which pages are indexed and whether Google has found certain technical problems.

If someone is managing your SEO but you do not have access to Search Console, ask why. There may be an innocent explanation. Perhaps it was never set up properly, or the wrong person created the account years ago. Either way, it needs sorting.

You should receive a starting point

It is difficult to prove improvement if nobody records where you began. At the start of ongoing SEO work, your provider should establish a baseline. This does not need to be a 97-page document that nobody will ever read. It should give you a clear picture of the website’s current position.

That might include:

• how many important pages are indexed;

• current traffic from search engines;

• enquiries or sales coming from search;

• searches the website already appears for;

• current rankings for useful searches;

• technical problems;

• the strongest and weakest pages;

• and any missing or broken tracking.

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You should also agree what success means. For one business, success might mean more online sales. For another, it could mean more local enquiries, bookings, telephone calls or visits to a particular service page.

Without an agreed goal, almost any number can later be presented as a victory. A website receiving 300 visits sounds better than one receiving 30. It sounds rather less impressive if it was receiving 600 before the work started.

You should receive regular reports

For an ongoing monthly SEO service, I would expect a monthly report. A larger strategic review might happen every three months, but you should not have to wait months to discover whether any work has taken place.

I heard this week about someone being charged extra for a report. If someone has been commissioned to produce a separate audit or piece of consultancy, charging for that report may be perfectly reasonable. But if you are already paying a monthly retainer, you should not have to pay another fee to find out what was done with it.

Producing a clear report has never been easier. Search Console, Analytics and modern reporting tools already contain much of the information, and AI can organise it and produce a readable first draft very quickly. The valuable part is knowing which figures matter, checking that they are accurate and explaining what should happen next.

A useful report should explain:

• what was completed during the month;

• what changed;

• where the figures came from;

• how the results compare with the previous period;

• how they compare with the original starting point;

• what problems were found;

• and what will happen next.

The report does not need to be beautiful. It does need to be understandable. A page full of colourful graphs is not helpful if nobody explains what the graphs mean.

“Visibility increased by 200%” may sound marvellous. If the underlying figure increased from one appearance to three, the percentage is technically correct but rather less marvellous.

Check what the report is actually measuring

SEO reports can include rankings, impressions, clicks, visitors, enquiries, sales and many other figures. They do not all mean the same thing.

An impression means that a page from your website appeared somewhere in a search result. It does not mean the person clicked it, read it or bought anything. A ranking can be useful, but only when it relates to something your potential customers genuinely search for.

Being number one for a long, peculiar phrase that nobody types into Google is not a business achievement. It is a decorative statistic.

Traffic matters, but more traffic is not automatically better if it comes from the wrong people. The most useful reporting connects the work to a meaningful business result. That might be more enquiries, bookings, purchases, calls or visits to an important page.

SEO often takes time to produce those outcomes, particularly for a new website. The work being carried out should still be visible from the beginning. Results may take time. Evidence of activity should not.

Ask what actually changed

One of the simplest questions you can ask is: What did you change this month?

The answer might include:

• rewriting a service page;

• fixing page titles;

• improving internal links;

• correcting an indexing problem;

• adding schema;

• publishing an article;

• improving page speed;

• updating old content;

• or resolving errors found in Search Console.

  
  

There should normally be something concrete to point to. Some important SEO work happens in research tools or external systems, so you may not see every task by looking at the website, but your provider should still be able to explain what they did and why it mattered.

“SEO is ongoing” is not a sufficient monthly update. So is brushing your teeth, and you would still notice if nobody had done it.

Be careful with AI optimisation promises

You may now see services described as AIO, GEO, AI SEO, LLM optimisation or AI visibility. These services aim to help a business appear in answers produced by tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity.

This is a developing area, and some useful work can be done. Clear content, accurate structured data, strong evidence, helpful pages and a technically accessible website can make it easier for search engines and AI systems to understand a business.

The problem is that AI visibility is harder to measure consistently than ordinary search traffic.

Ask the provider:

• what they mean by AI optimisation;

• which platforms they are monitoring;

• what work they are carrying out;

• how they are testing it;

• and which results can genuinely be measured.

Be cautious of anyone presenting a single “AI visibility score” as unquestionable proof of success. You should also be wary of anyone promising that they can make ChatGPT recommend your business. Nobody outside those platforms can control every answer produced by them.

Carry out a basic AI check yourself

There are some simple checks you can try. Open a private or incognito browser window and ask Google:

What is [your business name]?

Then ask:

Who is [your name]?

Incognito mode reduces some personalisation, but it does not create a perfectly neutral test. Your location, language and other factors may still affect the result. It is still useful.

You should also search for the type of help you provide without using your business name. That shows whether you can be discovered by someone who does not already know you exist.

For ChatGPT or Claude, testing your own business can be harder if you have already told the system all about it. Swap with a friend or someone in your business community. Ask them to run the questions and copy the answers back to you. It takes a couple of minutes.

One test does not prove that an AI optimisation strategy is working. AI answers change, and different users may receive different results, but it can reveal whether the system understands who you are, what you do and how confidently it can explain your business.

If you are paying for AIO, your provider should be conducting broader and more consistent testing than this.

Why would someone avoid giving you a report?

There can be reasonable reasons for a delayed report. Tracking may have broken, access may be missing or a technical problem may need investigating. A repeated refusal or reluctance would get my heckles up.

Whenever I have completed good work for someone, I cannot wait to show them.

A report will not always contain spectacular results. Good reporting sometimes says that progress has been slower than expected, a strategy needs changing or a previous assumption was wrong. That is useful information. Honest reporting is useful reporting.

If someone knows what they are doing, they should be able to explain it. They may need to explain that a result takes time or that a particular figure is less important than it looks. They should not need to hide behind technical language.

Questions you are allowed to ask

You are allowed to ask:

• Is my website indexed?

• Do I have access to Search Console and Analytics?

• What was my starting position?

• What does success look like?

• What have you completed this month?

• Which pages have you worked on?

• What has improved?

• What has become worse?

• How are you measuring enquiries or sales?

• What are you doing next?

• What exactly does the AIO part of the service include?

• Can you show me the original source of these figures?

A good SEO professional should welcome sensible questions. You are not being difficult. You are asking what is happening to your business and your money.

Is SEO the best use of your marketing budget?

Once you understand what has been done, you need to decide how valuable it is to you. If you are spending hundreds of pounds every month, that is money you cannot spend elsewhere.

It could pay for advertising, sales support, PR, events, local magazines, printed materials, partnerships or direct outreach. That does not mean SEO is a poor investment. It can be an excellent one.

But SEO is one route. It is not automatically the best route for every business, and it should never be purchased because someone has pressured or frightened you. Make sure you need the results that good SEO can bring.

What happens after the initial SEO work?

In the first month or two, there may be plenty to fix. The website may need indexing problems corrected, page titles improved, schema added, service pages rewritten, internal links organised and tracking installed.

Once those foundations are in place, I believe a useful weekly blog is one of the quickest and lowest-friction ways for a small business to continue improving its SEO. You cannot produce a new case study every week, and you cannot keep inventing service pages, but you can regularly answer another question your customers are already asking.

A good weekly article creates another possible route into your website, adds useful information, demonstrates your experience and supports the pages connected to your services.

The weekly schedule is not a magic ranking trick. Google does not reward an article simply because it appeared on a Tuesday. The value comes from consistently publishing genuinely useful answers.

You can write and publish them yourself, pay someone to do it properly or use a service such as Inkie to make the process easier. The important thing is that the articles contain your knowledge and help the people you want to reach.

Publishing fifty generic articles to fill a calendar gives you fifty generic articles.

You are paying for work, judgement and evidence

SEO is valuable when it helps the right people find your business. Good SEO professionals do skilled work that customers may never see, and that makes clear communication more important.

You do not need to become an SEO expert. You should know what you are buying, what has been done and whether there is evidence that it is moving your business in the right direction.

If you are paying every month but nobody can explain any of that, it is time to start asking questions. Start with the simplest one:

Is my website actually appearing in Google?