How to know if your SEO is working: 7 signals that matter
Traffic is the last signal to move, so judging SEO by traffic alone means flying blind for months. Here's what to check instead, in the order it starts moving.
"Is it working?" is the question every SEO effort has to answer, and the obvious way to answer it — look at traffic — is also the worst. Traffic is the last signal in the chain to move. Judge by traffic alone and you'll spend months unable to tell a slow success from a quiet failure.
The signals below are ordered by when they start moving, earliest first. Everything here lives in Google Search Console and your analytics tool; if you haven't set up Search Console yet, do that first — nothing else on this list is visible without it.
1. Your pages are getting indexed
The floor. If what you publish isn't entering Google's index, nothing downstream can happen. Check Search Console's pages report: the count of indexed pages should track the count of pages you've published, with a lag of days to a couple of weeks. A widening gap between published and indexed is the earliest possible warning that something is wrong — usually technical, occasionally quality.
2. Impressions are climbing
Before anyone clicks, Google starts showing your pages — at position 30, 40, 50, where no one goes. Those appearances count as impressions, and a rising impressions line is the first honest evidence that Google considers your content relevant to real searches. It typically starts moving two to three months into a new effort, months before clicks do.
3. The range of queries is widening
Harder to fool than impressions, which one lucky page can inflate. Count the distinct queries your site appears for in Search Console and watch it month over month. A widening spread means Google is connecting your site to more and more of the ways customers phrase their problems. If this number is flat after three months of publishing, the problem is usually the topics, not the timeline — you're writing about things nobody searches for.
4. Positions are drifting up
Individual rank checks are noisy — positions vary by location, device, and day. The trend is what matters: pages that entered at 40 sitting at 25, pages at 15 testing the first page. Filter Search Console to a single important page and watch its average position over weeks. Steady drift upward is the system working; a page stuck at 60 for months is a page that needs rework or a topic out of your league for now.
5. Traffic is arriving on pages built to sell
When clicks do come, look at where they land before celebrating the total. A thousand visits to a recipe-adjacent blog post that ranks by accident is worth less than fifty visits to a page that answers what buyers ask right before choosing a provider. Traffic to the pages you built on purpose, for searches with buying intent behind them, is the version of this signal that counts.
6. People are searching for you by name
Filter your queries to ones containing your business name. When branded impressions grow quarter over quarter, it means the anonymous readers are starting to remember you — some of the people who found you through a generic search are coming back through the front door. It's slow, it's indirect, and it's one of the strongest signs the whole effort is compounding rather than churning.
7. Organic visitors are becoming customers
The only signal that pays for the other six. Connect a conversion — a purchase, a booked call, a signup — to the organic channel, and check which pages those people entered on. This is the measurement most small businesses skip, and skipping it means every other number on this list is decoration. We've written a full guide to setting this up; it takes an afternoon and settles the "is it working" argument permanently.
Six of these signals tell you SEO is starting to work. Only conversions tell you it was worth doing.
The counterfeit signals
Some numbers look like progress and aren't. If a provider is reporting these to you, ask for the seven above instead:
- Rankings for keywords nobody searches — position 1 for a phrase with ten searches a month is a trophy, not a result.
- Domain authority scores — third-party estimates that Google doesn't use; they can rise while nothing real improves.
- Total traffic without source or destination — a spike from a viral irrelevancy changes nothing about your business.
- Pages published as a metric of its own — output isn't outcome; ten indexed pages that rank beat fifty that don't.
The 15-minute monthly check
You don't need a dashboard. Once a month, open Search Console and note four numbers: indexed pages, impressions, distinct queries, and clicks. Open analytics and note one more: conversions from organic search. Five numbers in a spreadsheet row, fifteen minutes. After three rows you'll see the direction; after six you'll know — with actual evidence — whether what you're doing is working, stalling, or quietly failing.
And if the answer is "stalling": the order of this list is diagnostic. Indexing broken means a technical problem. Impressions flat means a topic problem. Impressions rising but clicks flat means titles that don't earn the click, or rankings that haven't reached the first page yet — which is a patience problem, and the only one on this list that fixes itself.