How do you know your SEO is actually working?
Most SEO reporting cannot answer that question. It shows effort, or it shows numbers that would have moved anyway. Proof of work is the harder thing: evidence that a particular change caused a particular result, with the background movement taken out and the failures left in.
What proof of work means in SEO
Proof of work in SEO is evidence that a specific change caused a specific result. It needs four things: a record of what was changed and when, a measurement of the same page before and after, an adjustment for what the rest of the site did over the same period, and the losses reported alongside the wins. Without the adjustment, a report is showing you the season. Without the losses, it is showing you a highlight reel.
Five things a report has to show.
These are questions to put to any SEO provider, including us. If a report cannot answer all five, it is describing work rather than proving it.
A dated record of every change
What was changed, on which page, on what date, and who approved it. If the work cannot be listed, it cannot be checked. Ask to see the log, not the summary.
The same page measured before and after
Not sitewide traffic. The page that was changed, on the keyword it was changed for, with a reading from before the work and a reading after it.
The site-wide trend stripped out
If everything you own rose 12% in a month, a page that rose 12% did nothing. Real proof subtracts the background movement before claiming the lift.
Enough time for the change to count
A verdict read three days after a publish is noise. Search results reshuffle for weeks. A provider who reports a win the same week is reporting weather.
The changes that did not work
Some changes do nothing and some make things worse. A report with no losses in it has either been filtered, or nothing has been measured properly.
Four things that look like proof and are not.
Each of these is worth having. None of them, on its own, shows that the work caused the result.
The single most useful question you can ask a provider is "which change produced that?". The answer is either specific or it is not.
A rankings screenshot
Shows position on a day. Says nothing about what caused it, and nothing about the fifty other pages that moved on their own that week.
A traffic graph going up
Sitewide traffic moves with your season, your ads, your PR and Google's own updates. Attributing it to last month's meta descriptions is a guess.
A list of tasks completed
Forty tasks done is an invoice, not a result. It tells you effort was spent, not that anything improved.
An audit score out of 100
A score measures the checklist, not the customer. Sites with poor scores rank well every day, and vice versa.
Measured on your page, adjusted for your trend, losses included.
We built the platform around the checklist above, because it is the part of SEO that is easiest to skip and hardest to fake.
Every change is logged as it happens
Each published change is recorded with the page, the date, who approved it and which channel applied it. That log is the client's to read, not an internal one.
Before and after, on the exact page
We take a reading of the page and keyword before the change and again once the result has had time to settle, so the comparison is like for like.
Your own trend removed
The whole-site movement over the same period is subtracted, so what is left is the change working rather than a good month.
We check the change is really live
After publishing we fetch the live page and confirm it is actually there. If it is not, we say so and raise it rather than counting it as done.
One click puts it back
The page is snapshotted before we touch it, so any change can be rolled back to the previous version. On a repo-hosted site that arrives as a revert pull request.
The losses are shown too
Changes that did nothing, and changes that went backwards, appear in the same place as the wins. That is the part that makes the wins worth reading.
“We show you what worked and what didn't. No smoke and mirrors, just real results.”
Related: how changes reach your site and what the reporting shows.
Proof of work, answered.
What does proof of work mean in SEO?
It means evidence that a specific change caused a specific result: a dated record of what was changed, a measurement of the same page before and after, an adjustment that removes the trend of the rest of the site, and the changes that did not work reported alongside the ones that did.
How do I know if my SEO is actually working?
Ask for the change log and the per-page before-and-after that goes with it. Sitewide traffic and a rankings screenshot cannot tell you whether the work caused the movement. If a provider cannot show you which change produced which result, nobody knows whether it is working, including them.
How long before an SEO change can be judged?
Weeks, not days. Search results keep reshuffling after a change lands, so a verdict read a few days later is measuring noise. Anyone reporting a confirmed win the same week is reporting normal fluctuation.
Why does the site-wide trend need to be removed?
Because if every page you own rose over the same period, a page that rose with them did not necessarily improve. Subtracting the background movement is what separates the change working from the season, the algorithm or an ad campaign running at the same time.
Should an SEO report ever show bad results?
Yes. Some changes do nothing and some make things worse, so a report containing only wins has either been filtered or has not measured anything properly. Losses in the report are a sign the measurement is real.
What should I ask an SEO provider for?
Three things: the dated list of changes they made, the before-and-after for the pages they changed, and the ones that did not work. If any of the three is missing, the reporting cannot support the claims being made from it.
See the proof on your own site.
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