The question I am asked most often, when business owners begin to suspect that their "marketing person" might not be doing what they think he is doing, is always some version of the same thing: "How can I tell?" Because the truth is, when you are not in the trade, the work of SEO is largely invisible to you. You see invoices arrive, you see screenshots of dashboards, you hear words like "impressions" and "conversions," and from the outside it all looks like marketing. But appearances, in this domain, are deeply deceiving.
So let me give you a checklist. Ten questions, simple ones, that you can answer in about ten minutes. If most of them come back as "no," I think you already know what that means.
The checklist
1. Does your agency have Editor access to your Google Search Console?
Google Search Console is, without exaggeration, the central nervous system of SEO. It is where Google tells you which queries are bringing impressions to your site, which pages are indexed, which technical issues exist, and how your organic visibility is changing over time. No serious SEO professional works without it. If your "marketing person" has never asked you for access — or if they ask "what is Search Console?" — that alone tells you everything.
A Google Ads specialist works inside the Google Ads dashboard. An SEO specialist lives inside Search Console. They are different rooms of the same house, and most people only have keys to one.
2. Does your agency have Editor or Administrator access to Google Analytics 4?
Same logic. SEO without analytics is flying blind. If they cannot see organic traffic trends, bounce rates by page, conversion paths from organic visitors, and engagement metrics over time, they cannot do SEO. Full stop.
3. Have they ever published, edited, or improved content on your website?
This is the question that, in my experience, settles the matter most quickly. SEO is, in large part, an editorial discipline. New blog posts. Improved service pages. Rewritten meta descriptions. Better titles. New internal links. If you go to your website right now and look at the "last updated" dates, and nothing has changed in six months, it is very simple: no SEO work is being done.
A Google Ads specialist almost never touches your website. They write ad copy that lives inside Google's interface. They build landing pages, sometimes, on a separate landing page builder. The actual content of your website is, to them, not really their concern.
4. Can they tell you, off the top of their head, three keywords your site currently ranks for organically?
Try it. Just ask. An SEO professional lives in this data — they will know your top organic keywords the way a chef knows their pantry. A Google Ads specialist may know your top paid keywords, which is a completely different list, and very often will have no idea about the organic ones at all.
5. Do their monthly reports include organic ranking changes and organic traffic trends?
Look at the last report they sent you. Carefully. What does it actually contain? If it is dominated by:
- Cost per click (CPC)
- Click-through rate on ads
- Cost per acquisition
- Total ad spend
- Impressions on paid placements
- Conversion rate from ads
…then what you are looking at is a Google Ads report, not an SEO report.
A real SEO report should contain:
- Organic keyword rankings and how they have moved
- Organic traffic from Google Search Console
- Top performing pages and what they are ranking for
- Technical issues found and fixed
- Content published or improved
- Backlinks earned
- Schema markup or structural changes
If these things are absent, no SEO is being done.
6. Have they ever discussed technical issues with you — page speed, mobile usability, schema markup?
Technical SEO is a real, non-trivial part of the discipline. Page load speeds, Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, structured data, canonical tags, robots.txt, sitemaps. These are not optional. If you have been working with someone for six months and they have never raised any of these topics, the work is not happening.
7. Have they ever optimized your Google Business Profile?
For local businesses — restaurants, dentists, plumbers, lawyers, anyone with a physical service area — your Google Business Profile is arguably more important than your website itself. Categories, photos, services, posts, Q&A, review responses. A real local SEO professional spends meaningful time inside this tool. A Google Ads specialist, generally, does not.
8. Have they ever talked to you about reviews and review strategy?
Reviews are now one of the strongest local ranking factors and the primary signal that AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity use when recommending businesses. A serious SEO consultant will, sooner or later, bring up review generation, response strategy, and reputation management. If reviews have never come up in conversation, an entire pillar of modern SEO is missing.
9. Have they ever mentioned AI search, GEO, or being cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity?
This is the newest one, and the one that distinguishes a genuinely modern SEO practice from one that is stuck in 2019. AI search now drives a measurable portion of business discovery. Optimizing to be cited by AI systems is a real discipline (sometimes called Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO). If your provider has never even mentioned the existence of this shift, you should ask yourself how current their playbook actually is.
10. Can they show you, with dated evidence, the specific work they have done on your site this month?
This is the final test, and it is the one that exposes everything. Ask them, politely: "Can you send me a list of the SEO tasks you completed this month, with dates, and ideally with screenshots or links to the changes?"
A real SEO professional will not hesitate. They will send you a list — content published on these dates, technical fixes shipped, schema added to these pages, internal links updated, GSC issues resolved. The list may be short or long, but it will exist.
A Google Ads specialist who has been quietly billing you for "SEO" will, when faced with this question, get vague. They will talk about "ongoing optimization." They will send you another dashboard screenshot. They will mention how "SEO takes time." And in that vagueness, you will have your answer.
What to do next
If you ran through this checklist and most of the answers were "no" — or worse, "I do not know" — please do not feel embarrassed. You are not the first business owner to be in this position, and you certainly will not be the last. The confusion between SEO and Google Ads is the single most common misunderstanding in small business marketing, and the people who benefit from that confusion are not particularly motivated to clear it up.
What you should do is two things, in this order.
First, have a direct, calm conversation with your current provider. Show them the checklist. Ask them, point by point, which items they are actually doing. Listen carefully not just to the answers, but to the manner of the answers — defensiveness and vagueness tell you something important.
Second, get an independent, neutral assessment of your website's actual organic search performance. Not a sales pitch, not a discovery call, just data. That is exactly why we built SEO Standings — it will look at your site the way Google looks at your site, and tell you, in plain language, what is working and what is missing. If the gap between what you are paying for and what is actually happening is large, you deserve to know that. And if your current provider is doing excellent work, the audit will show that too. Either way, the truth is on your side.
Related reading: