A plumber rang me last year, and within about ninety seconds I could tell something had been bothering him for a while. He’d been paying for SEO for fourteen months. Couldn’t tell me if his rankings had moved. Couldn’t remember if anyone had looked at his website in that time. Couldn’t say whether he’d had a single customer come through Google in a year and a half.
“I just assumed it was happening,” he said.
It’s a conversation I have more often than I’d like. Not because the businesses are doing anything wrong, but because SEO is genuinely easy to hide behind jargon, and a lot of people are paying for something without any real way to check whether it’s working.
Here are five checks any local business owner can do, no technical background required, to find out whether their SEO is actually earning its keep.
SEO is often one of the bigger ongoing costs in a local business that nobody ever properly questions. You review subscriptions, insurance, and suppliers. SEO deserves the same treatment, because unlike most expenses, it’s genuinely easy to hide behind reports full of numbers that don’t mean much.
Running these checks means you know exactly what you’re getting, rather than finding out another year from now that the dial never moved.
Ask your SEO provider to show you where your business ranks for the searches that actually bring customers in. Not vanity terms, the real ones: “electrician Joondalup”, “physio near me”, the specific phrases that lead to enquiries. You should be able to see those tracked somewhere you can log in and view yourself, going up or down over time.
If nobody can show you this, it usually means the rankings aren’t being tracked. And if nobody’s tracking the rankings, nobody actually knows if the work is paying off.
Good SEO almost always involves adding fresh, useful content to your site. New service pages, location pages, blog posts that answer questions your customers are actually asking. If your website looks exactly the same as it did twelve months ago, there’s a fair chance not much SEO has actually happened.
You don’t need special tools for this one. Just have a proper look through your own site. If you can’t spot anything new, ask your agency what they’ve added and when. A straight answer should be easy for them to give.
A report should tell you three things clearly: what was done, what results it produced, and what’s planned next. If what you’re receiving is a wall of graphs and acronyms that leaves you more confused than before you read it, that isn’t really a report. It’s a smokescreen.
You’re allowed to ask for a plain-English summary. Any SEO partner worth paying will give you one readily, because they want you to understand the value you’re getting. If the response is defensive or vague, that tells you something important.
Open your Google Business Profile and check that your hours, address, services, and photos are all current. For local service businesses, this is often the first thing a potential customer sees, and it’s been doing a lot more work than most people realise.
Your profile isn’t a phone book entry anymore. It’s a trust page, and people are reading it like one. We covered exactly what to check and why it matters in Your Google Business Profile Is a Trust Page Now.
More people are using AI tools when they search now, and Google has started surfacing data on this too. If you want a clear-headed look at what AI search actually means for local businesses, we went through it in Does AI Search Replace Google for Local Service Businesses?
You don’t need to become an expert in AI search. But it’s a reasonable sign if the person handling your SEO is already paying attention to it. The fundamentals that help you show up in AI-generated answers are the same ones that have always mattered: being clear, useful, and genuinely the expert in what you do.
None of these checks require you to be technical. They just require you to ask honest questions and actually look at the answers.
If you run all five and feel good about what you find, brilliant. Your spend is in safe hands. If a few of them made you wince, now is exactly the right time to do something about it.
Back to the plumber: by the time we finished that first call, he’d already worked out the answer for himself. Nothing had changed on his website in over a year. There were no ranking reports he could access. The enquiries he could trace back to Google in that whole period were, as far as he could tell, zero.
He wasn’t angry. He was just relieved to finally know what he was looking at.
If you’d like a second set of eyes on your SEO, I’m happy to take a look. Book a free 15-minute chat and we’ll go through it together, no jargon, no pressure.
Karen Dauncey has been working in SEO since 2003 and is a recognised expert in Local SEO for professional and service-based businesses across Australia.
She is the founder of Blue Cherry Online Marketing, a Local SEO and Google Ads agency she established in 2008. Through Blue Cherry, Karen has optimised over 1,000 websites and managed millions of dollars in Google Ads spend, giving her a deep understanding of what drives visibility and enquiries for service businesses in a constantly evolving search landscape. Over the past two decades, she has worked with a wide range of local service businesses including trades, allied health, psychologists, childcare centres, naturopaths, accountants, lawyers and many more.
Karen is also the creator of The SEO School, an online SEO course designed to teach business owners how to take control of their own SEO. She regularly delivers educational programs for Local, State and Federal Government and was an advisor for the ASBAS Digital Solutions Program. Her passion for making SEO accessible drives everything she does, from free resources to hands-on training.
Karen has attended search engine conferences in London, Stockholm, Adelaide and Sydney, and was invited to attend a pilot Business Coaching Course at Google's Head Office. She holds a Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK.
She is also the co-owner of the Digital Experts Directory, an online directory for female service-based businesses.
To keep up to date with the latest in SEO, join her Facebook group The SEO School Community or follow her on Facebook or LinkedIn.
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