What does an SEO company actually do?

An SEO company makes a website easier for Google to find, understand and rank, then measures whether that brought the business anything. In practice the work has five parts: technical fixes so the site is indexed and fast, pages that answer the searches people make, the Google Business Profile and reviews for local results, mentions from sites Google trusts, and reading Search Console every month to decide what next.

The five parts, month to month

Technical work is first because it makes the rest possible: Search Console's Pages report against the sitemap, PageSpeed on a phone, titles, redirects, structured data. On most sites we audit this is where the biggest problem sits, and it is the least visible to the owner. An air-conditioning company had 53 product pages missing from Google's index and did not know.

Content work is one page a month, chosen from the query report: the searches the site already appears for at positions 5 to 20 are the cheapest gains, so the month's page is a service page rewritten to answer that search properly, or a new page for a search no page owns. It is written after a conversation with the business, because the specifics that make a page rank (what the job involves, what changes the price) are things only the business knows.

Local work is the Google Business Profile and reviews: category, services, hours, photographs, and a routine that asks every customer. This decides the map pack, and it moves within weeks. Authority work is mentions from sites Google already trusts in the sector, two or three a month, never bought. Measurement is the person reading Search Console and writing down what changed, what was left alone and why, and what happens next month.

What it is not

• It is not buying links, buying reviews or writing town pages on a template. Each is a policy breach and each has ended accounts we later cleaned up.
• It is not a ranking guarantee. Nobody controls Google's results; a company controls the work and shows the numbers.
• It is not a one-off. The profile drifts, competitors move, Google changes. A single fix followed by nothing is the commonest reason a site that once ranked stopped.

How to tell whether your SEO company is doing these

Ask for Search Console access and open it. Pages indexed should hold or rise. The query report should show impressions rising for the searches named in the proposal. The monthly report should list what was done with URLs, and it should name next month's work. If the report is forty pages of charts and none of those things are in it, the company is doing something, but it is not the five things above.