Do you really need SEO?
Been asked that one before? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO for short) is often talked about as an inscrutable mystery, something accessible to only the wisest of SEO experts, who hold the keys to deciphering and then harnessing its awesome power.
In truth, it’s a lot simpler than you think. Yes, it’s a process that takes time and perhaps an outside investment but as a business or website owner, you shouldn’t feel dependent on your SEO provider to tell you if things are working as predicted or promised!
The ultimate promise of SEO is that more people will arrive at your site organically (that is, without you paying for their visit) and then go on to buy from you. So how can you tell if your search engine optimisation efforts are working? Or, if you haven’t implemented any SEO yet, whether you could benefit from some?
Here are some ways you can if your SEO is working well, ranging from spotchecks to more in-depth methods. Some of these you can do as you read this!
Is your business website ranking on Google?
The first port of call when looking into your site’s SEO should always be the search engines: after all, it’s literally in the name ‘Search Engine Optimisation’! As of January 2025, 90% of search traffic happens on Google, so this will inevitably be the platform you’ll spend most time optimising for and where you’ll want to check if you’re ranking.
There are several checks to see whether your website is being indexed (stored by the search engine and used in search results) and ranking (appearing in searches) on Google.
Search for your business
To start with, you can simply search for ‘[your business name]’. Does your website come up first? If you’re not the only ‘[your business name]’ online, try searching ‘[your business name] + [location]’ to see if local searchers can find you. (There are at least 11 ‘Oh My Cod’ chippies in the UK – no one wants to visit one that’s a three-hour drive away!)

If you still can’t find yourself, you might need to confirm whether you’re being indexed at all. More on that below. If you do come up, but below other businesses: that could be a sign you need to do more work to raise your brand awareness.
Search for your website using the special operator site:
To check that your website is indexed in the first place, you can use the special operator site:
in your search. This will refine the results to include only those that are on the specified site.

Now you’re here, it’s worth checking that all the pages you want customers to see can appear in searches. Your homepage, any product or service pages, promotional pages etc. If any aren’t there, the next step is to figure out why they aren’t being indexed: maybe they have a ‘noindex’ tag, or Google hasn’t found them yet, as they’re not linked to from any other page.
You’ll also want to ensure that there are no pages ranking that you don’t want to rank. SEO isn’t just about getting every possible page onto Google: there are some pages you only want prospective customers to reach after they’ve already spent time on your website.
Can you see any Download or Thank you pages that shouldn’t be accessible to anyone until they fill out a form? Are there any pages still under construction, product pages for discontinued items, or duplicate pages that are meant for specific paid campaigns visible in the search results?
If you spot any of these pages, consider adding a ‘noindex’ tag. You can remove the tag later if the content becomes relevant in the future, or, in the case of a defunct page, you can use a 301 redirect to point visitors to a more relevant page on your site.
Search for your target keywords
By now, you’ve confirmed your website is on Google. But that won’t count for much if you’re not appearing for the queries your customers are searching for.
Try typing in some searches that you’d like to rank for – which queries would you like to come up in Google’s results for? For instance, if you run a graphic design agency, you might be looking to appear to people searching for “design consultancy”, “brand design for small businesses” or even “who does graphic design near me”.
Longer, more detailed searches might benefit you here: would a London-based company that offers cyber security solutions rather rank for ‘cyber security’ or ‘cyber security provider uk’? The latter query may have fewer searches, but the people who search it are more likely to be looking for, and ready to buy from, a cyber security company.
Optimising for ‘long-tail’ keywords like this is often an SEO best practice, so don’t be afraid to add more detail. There’s nothing wrong with knowing your niche and being specific!
With that in mind, try some keywords and search a few variations of them. See if you can spot your business. You might discover you rank better for some niches in your industry than others – you might want to capitalise on that by making more content tailored to those particular customers. If you aren’t appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) at all, it might be time to optimise your pages or create new content that targets these desired keywords.
It may also be the case that the target keywords you have in mind aren’t what your audience is actually searching for. If you and your customers aren’t speaking the same language, you might want to do some keyword research before you move onto optimisation.
Look at your rankings on Google Search Console
Looking on search engines as you would when you’re searching is a great way to spot check whether you’re visible to organic traffic. If you want to know exactly how you’re doing and where you’re ranking, you’ll be best off going to the source and using Google’s data for more information.
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free platform from Google that opens the lid on how your site is performing on Google Search results. It’s a fairly straightforward task to set GSC up, and you won’t regret doing so: being able to monitor and troubleshoot how each webpage is doing can be invaluable, especially if you only have a few minutes per day to spend on SEO.
Once you’re up and running, have a look at the Performance and Pages tabs to check on your website’s search engine visibility.
Check which pages are indexed on the Pages tab
Under the Pages tab, you can see which of your pages are indexed on Google and which are not.
You don’t need to see a 100% index rate here. Earlier we discussed reasons you may not necessarily want certain pages to show up on Google, and it’s likely that search engines will crawl and report on URLs that aren’t even part of your website (such as versions of your pages that use “http://” instead of “https://”, or misspellings of your URLs that other websites accidentally link to).
Instead, much like when checking the SERPs, what’s important is that the pages you want to be indexed are indexed, and the pages you don’t want to be indexed aren’t indexed.
On the Pages tab, expand the rows beneath “Why pages aren’t indexed”, or click on “View data about indexed pages” to see what is and isn’t being included in the index. Take note of any URLs that are in the wrong category and take the appropriate steps to address that.
If everything’s looking like it’s in the right spot here, then you’re good to move on.

Review what queries you’re ranking for on the Performance tab
So far, we’ve been focusing on whether your site is visible at all on search engines like Google. By using GSC’s Performance report you can assess how visible your pages are.
When you open the Performance tab, you’re presented with a line chart of the number of impressions and clicks your website has received on Google. Below that you’ve got a selection of tables that you can use to break down the different dimensions: queries, specific pages, countries, devices and more.
Looking at ‘Average Position’
At the top of the page, tick the ‘Average Position’ box to include that metric on both the chart and table.
For a query, the Average Position is a measure of how ‘high’ your website has ranked on average for that particular search; for an individual web page, the Average Position is how high Google typically places that page in search results for the queries it’s decided the page is relevant for.
An average position of 1 is the highest possible result and means that your website always ranks in the first organic position for that query.

Think of it this way. Adobe’s Photoshop product page ranks for hundreds of variations on keywords like “photoshop”, “photo editing” and “graphic design software”. How highly it ranks differs depending on how relevant the product page is to the searcher: you can expect it to rank first for “buy photoshop”, but perhaps lower when someone is looking for “alternatives to photoshop”.
The average position for the query “buy photoshop” is going to be close to, if not exactly, 1. The average position of the URL, however, will reflect the average ranking for all those different queries and therefore be significantly lower.
Looking at the average position of your pages and queries
As you’ve probably guessed by now, the closer your average position is to 1 for pages and for queries (particularly queries that include your target keywords), the better!
Besides the average position, it’s good to look at how many impressions and clicks you’re receiving to get an idea of which pages are performing best organically, as well as the keywords that you’re receiving traffic from.
If the queries you perform best for aren’t that relevant to your offering, or your average positions mostly have you on page 2 or beyond in the search results (as a rough rule of thumb, Google’s results pages show 10 results per page, so we’re talking average ranks of 11+), then your SEO optimisation should focus on technical aspects to improve your visibility to Google’s crawler bots, or on content: reworking pages or writing new copy that readers find more valuable.
Using SEO tools for even more SERP information
(I know, it’s a lot of acronyms to keep track of. I promise we’re done… at least for this section.)
Google Search Console is a fantastic tool for keeping an eye on your search engine performance, but when you’re really trying to understand the value of optimising for different keywords and making sure your SEO efforts are well placed, you can use SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs to get an even better insight on the available data.

With this kind of tool, you can monitor:
- Your website’s ranking for target keywords
- How your competitors’ websites rank for the same keywords: and what other keywords they’re ranking for
- The monthly search volume and keyword difficulty (an estimation of how much work is needed to rank for a certain keyword) of different keywords you may want to rank for
- The search intent of different keywords (that is, what type of content searchers want to find when they look up different queries: be that informational, transactional or something else)
- What other opportunities there are to appear on the SERPs, aside from a vanilla search result, such as a Featured Snippet or People Also Ask section
There’s so much you can keep track of with tools like these, but for now let’s focus on a) what keywords you rank for, and b) how popular these keywords are. If you see your pages aren’t ranking highly for highly searched target keywords, that could be a good sign to review your SEO.
Track your organic traffic using Google Analytics
Many think SEO starts and ends with keywords and rankings on search engines like Google: indeed, it’s in the name, and it’s practically all I’ve talked about until now.
But SERP visibility is not the be-all and end-all in SEO: the ultimate goal should always be not just to attract visitors to your website, but to attract converting visitors. When your website generates leads or sales, do you know where that conversion came from: whether the user found your website from one of your ads, from a social post, or from Google?
Use Google Analytics to view traffic, conversions, and more
Google Analytics (GA) is the second easy to set up, free, must-have service provided by Google that you can use to monitor your website. As a platform, it records and reports on all activity on your website, so you can analyse which content is working well in the customer journey and contributing to sales, and which pages aren’t as attractive to visitors.
Viewing traffic
You can check your SEO strength using Google Analytics by filtering traffic to display only organic traffic. If you look at the last 12 months of sessions/entrances, is the organic traffic increasing, or decreasing over time?

When it works well, SEO is a slow series of incremental gains, so activity and results are typically measured over months, not weeks or days. That said, if things have been static or declining for the past 3-6 months, that could be a sign your current SEO strategy needs a boost.
Measuring conversions
You’ll need a little more set-up to measure conversions: you need to define what they are so Google Analytics knows what to record.
You can create events for GA on the platform, then mark them as key events so that they are differentiated from other events you may be tracking, like scroll percentage or link clicks. Some examples of key events might be submitting a contact form, making a purchase, or downloading a file.
If you want to set up more fine-grained events, you can use Google Tag Manager, but for now Google Analytics should be plenty useful for checking in on your SEO performance.
Once you’re tracking these conversion events, you can view your conversions over time, and once again filter it to display only those conversions that came from organic traffic. You may want to compare this or the conversion rate against paid or other traffic using GA’s Comparison feature.
Is a good percentage of your organic traffic converting? If not, it might be that you’re appearing on search engines to people who aren’t your target audience, and a content audit would help identify where exactly that’s going wrong.
Bonus tip: check mobile friendliness and site speed with PageSpeed Insights
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool won’t give you any information on your rankings or website traffic: however, since Google themselves state that mobile-friendly sites are ranked higher in search results, this is a check you won’t want to skip.
Input a handful of URLs from different sections of your website for a quick overview of your performance on mobile and desktop. It might be the case that you or your dev team could make some small changes with a pretty big impact on user experience.
Remember that nobody has a perfect website! Any change that contributes to a better customer journey can help – here’s one that I picked up recently on my own website!
I uploaded an image to one of my pages that loaded fine for desktop users, but was much too big for a mobile display, slowing the page speed down considerably. Reducing the size of the image took a couple of minutes at most, but more than halved the time taken for that page to load.


If you’re not seeing the rankings you’d expect from the SEO-focused content you’ve produced, it’s worth checking that your technical SEO is up to scratch. Tools like PageSpeed Insights are your friend for picking up errors like these.
Think you need an SEO deep dive? Drop me a message!
There you have it! A handful of ways you can quickly check whether your SEO is working the way you want it to, to make sure you’re attracting organic, converting traffic to your website. If you aren’t ranking as well as you’d hoped, or you’re not seeing the increases in organic traffic that good SEO should get you: I’d be happy to take a look at it for you.
Get in touch with me at [email protected] and we can set up a free one-hour consultation to go over any and all SEO concerns.