Ecommerce marketing managers keep inheriting the same problem. An SEO agency has been on retainer for a year, the monthly reports are green, and someone above you finally asks the question the reports never answer: is this working? You are not an SEO specialist and you do not need to be. Verifying work done by an SEO agency takes three steps, all free, all readable by anyone willing to spend an afternoon.
This is the checklist exactly as I give it to the marketing managers we work with. It assumes nothing except access to Google and to your own Search Console, which, as I have written before, is the first thing to fix if you do not have it.
MageCloud Verification Note
The Three Steps
STEP ONE
Demand the backlink list
Ask the agency for the list of backlinks they have built. You should be able to see clearly which resources they are using. The list itself is the first test: an agency that resists producing it has answered the question already.
STEP TWO
Test the pages in Google’s index
For each linking page, search Google for site: followed by that page’s URL. If the page is not in Google’s index, the link on it is likely useless. Links from pages Google ignores pass nothing.
STEP THREE
Read brand-filtered trends in GSC
Filter out brand keywords, remove blog traffic, and look at the clicks and impressions trend for what remains. No positive movement means you need an audit: either the site has issues, or the work is not driving results.
Paul Ryazanov · MageCloud · verification any marketing manager can run alone
What the Backlink List Tells You Before You Check a Single URL
Link building is usually the largest invisible line item in an SEO retainer, which makes it the right place to start. Ask for the complete list of backlinks the agency has acquired: URLs of the linking pages, dates, and the pages they point to. The response tells you almost everything. A confident agency sends a spreadsheet the same day, because they keep one. An agency that stalls, sends a sample, or offers a dashboard screenshot instead of the raw list is managing your perception of the work rather than showing you the work.
When the list arrives, read it like a human before you test it like an auditor. Do the linking sites look like places a real person would visit? Are they topically anywhere near your industry? A list full of unrelated directories, comment pages, and sites with names like keyword-mashups is telling you what tier of work the retainer has been buying. You do not need a tool to smell it.
The Site: Search That Separates Real Links From Filler
Step two is the one almost nobody knows, and it is devastatingly simple. Take each linking page from the list, go to Google, and type site: followed by the page’s full URL. The result is binary. Either Google shows the page, meaning it is in the index, or it shows nothing, meaning Google does not consider that page worth remembering.
A link only carries value if the page it lives on is crawled and indexed. A backlink sitting on a page Google has never indexed, or has thrown out of the index, is a tree falling in a forest with no crawler around to hear it. Run the site: check across the agency’s list and score it. If a meaningful share of the linking pages are not in the index, the engagement has been billing for links that do not exist as far as Google is concerned. Ten minutes of typing, and you know.
Reading the Only Chart That Cannot Be Spun
The third step moves from the work to the results. Open Google Search Console and build the honest view. Filter out brand-related keywords, because brand traffic is earned by your brand, not your agency. Remove traffic going to blog pages, or whatever your content section is called, if the engagement is supposed to be driving commercial pages; blog clicks are nice and they are not why you are paying. Then look at the trend of clicks and impressions for what remains.
That filtered trend is the actual report card, and it is remarkable how rarely it appears in the reports the agency sends. Rising impressions mean Google is showing your commercial pages for more non-brand searches, which is the engine starting. Rising clicks mean the searches are turning into visitors, which is the engine working. A flat or falling line over two or three quarters means one of two things: your site has issues blocking the work, or the work is not driving results. Both are audit triggers, and an independent hour of verification will tell you which one you are looking at.
What to Do With What You Find
Be fair with the results. SEO genuinely takes time, and a young engagement with a clean link list and slowly building impressions deserves patience. The verification is not a tool for ambushing your agency. It is a tool for replacing belief with evidence in a relationship that usually runs on belief. Share what you checked and what you found. A good agency will engage with it, and the conversation that follows will be the most productive one you have had with them, because it happens on the level of verifiable work rather than presentation.
And if the list will not come, the pages are not indexed, and the filtered trend has been flat for a year, you have your answer, documented, in systems the agency does not control. If you want a second pair of eyes on what you found before you act on it, get in touch. I read these three artefacts for a living, and the reading rarely takes an hour.
Related reading: The SEO Boost That Came From Ignoring the Advice. The strangest verified result in the file: five vendors flat, one instinct up and to the right.