By Andy Wu
How long does it take for SEO to work? Real results, meaning more calls and sales from Google, usually take 6 to 12 months. But you should not wait a year in the dark. Early proof shows up much sooner, and you can check it yourself for free.
I sell no SEO, so nothing here is written to keep you paying. You will get the evidence that should exist at month 1, 3 and 6, a 20-minute check you can run tonight, and the point where slow stops being normal.
How long does it take for SEO to work? What you should see, month by month
SEO usually takes 6 to 12 months to bring more calls and sales, but new pages should be indexed and non-branded impressions rising by month 2 to 3. The gap exists because SEO has two clocks. The first is Google finding and reading the changes. Google says crawling a page “can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks”. The second is Google trusting those pages enough to show them to buyers. That part is slower, and nobody can promise a date.
What you can hold an agency to is the evidence along the way. These checkpoints are my rule of thumb, not Google’s. Adjust them up for a brand-new site or a crowded market, like personal injury law in a big city.
| When | What should exist | Where you check it |
|---|---|---|
| Month 1 | A written plan, a list of fixes made, tracking set up, and you as owner of every account | Your inbox and your own logins |
| Month 2 to 3 | New and changed pages indexed. Impressions rising on searches without your business name | Search Console: URL Inspection and Performance |
| Month 4 to 6 | Clicks rising on those same searches. Some calls or forms from organic search | Search Console, plus call and form tracking |
| Month 7 to 12 | Enough new leads that the fee starts paying for itself | Your sales records |
Notice what is missing: rankings. A report can show “37 keywords improved” for terms no customer types, the same trick that props up a guaranteed SEO ranking. Impressions and clicks from Google’s own tool are much harder to dress up.
If the first-quarter evidence never shows up, the money in the second half of the year will not either.
How to know if SEO is working: a 20-minute check in Search Console
To know if SEO is working, open Google Search Console, set the Performance report to the last 16 months, filter to non-branded searches, and compare clicks before and after the month you started paying. Your agency controls its own report, but not Google Search Console, which is free and shows Google’s own data about your site. If you cannot log in, stop here. That is the first problem to fix (see sign 6).
- Open Performance, then Search results. Google’s own guide says to choose the Date filter and “select Last 16 months”, the full history the tool keeps.
- Strip out your own name. Google added a branded queries filter that splits searches that include your brand from those that do not. Pick Non-branded. People who already know your name would find you anyway. Non-branded searches are the new customers SEO is supposed to bring. Google notes the filter isn’t available for sites with a low number of impressions and can misclassify some queries. If you do not see it, filter out your business name by hand.
- Look at clicks, not impressions. Clicks are people arriving. Impressions are people scrolling past.
- Find the month you started paying. Everything to the right of it is what you bought.
- Open the Pages tab and sort by clicks. Are the pages the agency wrote in the list at all?
- Open the Queries tab. Would a customer type these before buying? Or are they odd phrases nobody uses?
The most common picture in a failing retainer is flat clicks under rising impressions. It also looks great in a monthly report. Now you can tell the difference.
When slow SEO stops being normal
Slow SEO stops being normal at month 4: if your non-branded impressions have not moved by then, SEO is not working, and “give it more time” is not a plan. Month 4 is my rule of thumb, not Google’s, but it rests on Google’s own timing. Crawling a changed page takes “a few days to a few weeks,” so by month 4 the work from month 1 has had time to be crawled several times. Flat impressions after that mean the pages are not earning a place in the results. At that point, ask the harder question: is paying for SEO worth it for a business like yours at all?
Waiting has a price: every extra month is another full fee with nothing to show for it. Check the fee itself against what a business your size usually pays. Then decide how many more months you can afford to find out.
Is my SEO agency ripping me off? 7 signs in the results
Your SEO agency may be ripping you off if three or more of these seven signs show up in the results: flat months nobody raised, a report of vanity numbers, no list of work done, spam links, content you would not sign, no owner access, and an upsell at every review. One sign can be bad luck; three is a pattern. These are signs in the work after you sign, not in the proposal.
1. Six months with no early signs, and they have not raised it. The flat line is not the worst part. The worst part is that you found it first. A good agency brings you a bad chart with a diagnosis attached.
2. The report is all vanity numbers. Impressions, rankings, “domain authority” and hours spent. Domain authority is a score from an SEO tool vendor, not from Google. A useful report shows organic visits, then calls, forms or sales, then the work done that month. If yours is mostly tool charts, you are paying for what a $99 to $139 tool would show you, and doing SEO yourself may cover that part.
3. Nobody can list what was done. Email them: “Please list the work completed in the last 30 days, with the pages changed and the dates.” A working agency replies with a list. A stalling one replies with “ongoing optimization.”
4. The links come from sites you would be embarrassed by. Ask for the last 20 links they built. Open ten. If your link sits next to posts about casinos and payday loans, you paid for links Google treats as spam. Bulk link packages are one of the red flags you can catch in the proposal, before any link is built.
5. The content is something you would never put your name on. Read the last three articles all the way through. Do they mention your real services, your city, your prices?
6. You cannot check the results yourself. If you are a guest user, not the owner, in Search Console and Google Analytics, you only ever see the agency’s version of the numbers. Owner access is the first thing to fix.
7. Every review ends in an upsell. Six flat months, and the fix is always a bigger package. The diagnosis should be “here is what did not work and why,” not “we need more budget.”
My agency says it works on it every day: how to see what’s actually done
To see what an SEO agency actually does, ask in writing, before your next renewal date, for the monthly work list with pages changed, owner access to your accounts, and a list of who holds each one. You do not need a fight. You need documents. Send this:
Before we renew, I would like to review the work. By [date], please send: the work done each month with the pages changed; owner access to Search Console and Analytics; a list of who holds each account (domain, hosting, website, Business Profile); and the name of the person managing my account.
Ask for owner access, not user access. Google’s Search Console help says an owner “has full control over properties in Search Console,” so with it you see every number the agency sees. A good agency sends it within days, including the parts that look bad. An honest one that is struggling sends it late, with a plan. That may be worth staying for. A bad one offers a call instead of documents. That reply is your answer.
Switching SEO agencies without losing your work
To switch SEO agencies without losing work, take owner access and exports of every account before you give notice, then hand over in that order. If the proof email brought a call instead of documents, the decision is made.
The order matters because of how Google’s tools handle ownership. On a Business Profile, Google’s ownership help page says “only the primary owner can transfer primary ownership,” and a new owner must wait 7 days before managing every feature, so start a week before you give notice. In Search Console, verify yourself as an owner first: Google warns that if all verified owners are removed, the remaining users “will lose access to the property after a grace period.”
Before you hire the next one, hold every candidate to the checkpoints above and write them into the new contract, so month 3 and month 6 come with evidence you agreed on in advance.
Next time, how to choose an SEO company starts with named people, because if you cannot name who worked on your site this month, you cannot judge the work.