How to tell whether your web person is actually doing anything

This comes up more than anything else when I talk to business owners. They are paying somebody a few hundred a month, they have been for a while, and they genuinely cannot tell whether anything is happening.

Usually they feel awkward asking, because they do not know enough to know whether the answer is good. So here are questions that work even if you do not know the subject.

Ask what they did last month, itemised

Not what they are working on, what they did. A good answer is a list of specific things: two pages written, structured data added, eleven directory listings corrected, four Google profile posts.

A bad answer is a list of adjectives. "Ongoing optimisation." "Monitoring performance." "Content strategy." Those describe a category of work rather than any work.

You do not need to understand the items to tell the difference. You are listening for whether the answer contains nouns and numbers.

Ask to see the numbers, and specifically ask for Search Console

Google Search Console is free, it belongs to you, and it shows clicks and impressions from Google over time. If your web person cannot show you that, either they have not set it up or they do not want you looking at it.

Be a bit careful with traffic numbers on their own, because total visits can go up for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone's work. Clicks from search is the number that means something.

Ask who owns your accounts

Your domain, your hosting, your Google Business Profile, your Analytics. The correct answer is that you do, and that they have manager or editor access.

If the answer is vague, or "we manage all that for you", find out properly. This is the single thing most likely to hurt you later, because it is what turns leaving into a fight. It costs nothing to have it the right way round and it can cost you your website to have it wrong.

Look at your own homepage source

You can do this yourself in about a minute. Right click your homepage, choose View Page Source, and press Ctrl+F.

Search for LocalBusiness. If nothing comes up, you have no structured data, which is the block of code that tells Google and the AI assistants what your business is and where. 39% of the local businesses I scanned this year are missing it. It is a basic thing, it takes an hour, and if you have been paying someone monthly for a year it should be there.

Then look at the very top for <title>. If the text after it does not include the town you are in, you are not competing for local searches. 40% of the businesses I scanned had this wrong.

What a fair answer sounds like

Sometimes the honest answer is "not much this month, here is why". Algorithm updates happen, projects stall waiting on you for photos or approvals, and some months are genuinely quiet. Somebody telling you that plainly is a better sign than somebody who reports a triumph every single month.

What you are really testing for is whether they will tell you the truth when the truth is unimpressive. That is the whole thing.

If you would rather just have somebody look, I run a free audit that answers all of the above from the outside, and you can hand the report to your current person rather than to me. That is completely fine and it is still useful to you!