Google Search Console for business owners

You do not need to become an analyst. You need to be able to check four things once a month, so that the report your agency sends can be verified rather than trusted.

Set it up in your own name

Verify the property using an account you control, then add your agency as a user. If your agency set it up under their own account, ask to be made an owner, or create a second property yourself. This is the single most important administrative step in the whole relationship, and switching agencies is far easier when it has been done.

Report one: performance

This shows clicks, impressions, average position and click through rate for every search you appeared in. Two things to do with it:

1. Filter out your brand name. Add a query filter excluding your company name. What remains is the traffic SEO actually earned.
2. Compare year on year. Use the date comparison to look at the same period last year, which removes seasonality from the picture.

That single filtered number, tracked monthly, is the most honest measure of progress available to you, and it is the one we would make the primary KPI.

Report two: queries and pages

Inside the performance report, the queries tab shows what people searched to reach you, and the pages tab shows which pages earned it. Two patterns are worth looking for: searches where you rank between positions five and fifteen, which are the cheapest wins available, and pages with high impressions and very low click through, which usually need a better title. On page SEO basics covers the fix.

Report three: indexing

This tells you which pages Google has stored and which it has not, with reasons. If your agency published six pages last month and none of them appear here, the work has not landed. A rising count of excluded pages usually signals a technical problem worth investigating in technical SEO explained.

Report four: links

A list of sites linking to you and the pages they point at. It is not complete and it updates slowly, but it is enough to sanity check what a link building retainer has produced. Open a few and judge whether they are sites you would be pleased to be mentioned on. Link building explained covers what good looks like.

A ten minute monthly routine

If the two never reconcile, that is worth a direct conversation, and if it happens repeatedly, see when to fire your SEO agency.