What a Real Search Engine Optimisation Company Actually Does
A client came through once having paid another company for six months of SEO. They had a monthly report full of graphs, a few blog posts, and no real change in where they ranked. When we looked under the bonnet, the technical foundation was a mess. Crawl errors everywhere, duplicate content Google had quietly ignored, and page speed so poor that most mobile visitors had already left before the page finished loading. The reports looked busy. The actual work had barely started.
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The Reports Are Not the Work
A lot of SEO companies sell the report. It arrives every month, there are charts in it, keyword positions are listed, and it feels like something is happening. Sometimes it is. Often, though, the report is the most polished thing they produce.
Real SEO work is quieter than that. It happens inside your site’s code, inside Google Search Console, inside your server configuration. Most of it is not visible to anyone but the person doing it, and a good chunk of it needs to happen before any content strategy is worth thinking about.
What the Technical Side Actually Looks Like
Before anything else, a serious search engine optimisation company looks at what Google can actually read. That means crawling the site the same way Googlebot does, checking for pages that return errors, spotting redirect chains that silently waste crawl budget, and making sure the pages that matter are indexed properly.
Core Web Vitals come next. Google uses real-world load data to judge how a site performs, and a page that takes four seconds to become interactive on a phone is already at a disadvantage. Fixing that usually means compressing images properly, sorting out render-blocking scripts, and often going deeper into how the theme or page builder is generating code. It is not glamorous work. It takes time.
Canonical tags, hreflang, structured data, internal link architecture, robots.txt rules. Each of these is a small decision that compounds over months. Get them wrong and Google misreads the site. Get them right and you stop fighting your own pages for the same rankings. A thorough audit usually turns up a handful of these quietly working against the site, and fixing them is where a lot of the early effort goes. For a sense of how involved that can get, our step-by-step SEO process covers how that work is sequenced.
On-Page Work: More Than Swapping Keywords
Most people have heard of keywords. Fewer understand how title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure and content depth all interact. Stuffing a keyword in five times does nothing useful. What matters is whether a page clearly answers the question a searcher typed, and whether Google can tell that at a glance.
Good on-page SEO means reading a page the way an algorithm does, spotting thin sections, tightening up structure, and making sure the most important content is not buried three scrolls down. It also means looking at what is already ranking for a given term and being honest about whether this page genuinely covers the topic as well. Sometimes the answer is no, and the page needs proper work before any ranking will stick.
If you want to see what that looks like for product pages specifically, the post on writing product page copy that ranks is worth a read.
The Honest Truth About Timelines
This is where a lot of clients get frustrated, and fair enough. Google takes time to re-crawl, re-index, and re-evaluate a site after changes. Three months is usually the minimum before technical fixes show up clearly in ranking data. Six months is more realistic for competitive terms.
A search engine optimisation company that promises first-page results in thirty days is either targeting searches with almost no competition or telling you what you want to hear. Neither is particularly useful. The ones worth working with set honest expectations and get on with the work quietly, checking in when something meaningful has changed rather than just to send a report.
What actually matters at the six-month mark is not a screenshot of rankings. It is whether organic traffic is growing, whether the right pages are picking up impressions for relevant queries, and whether any of that is turning into real enquiries. Those numbers take time to build, but they do build if the foundations are solid.
What You Should Actually Ask For
Ask to see the site audit before any work starts. A company that cannot show you what they found and why it matters is probably not doing much finding. Ask what specific technical issues they plan to fix in the first month, not just what content they plan to write.
Ask how they measure progress. If the answer is keyword position only, push back. Impressions in Search Console, crawl coverage, page speed scores and click-through rates all tell you more about what is actually happening than a ranking number in a third-party tool.
And if something does not make sense in what they are telling you, ask again. Good technical SEO work is explainable in plain English. If the explanation sounds like a way of changing the subject, that is worth noting. You can also get a clearer picture of how SEO companies actually spend their time, which helps when you are trying to judge whether you are getting value for money.