Why This Is Hard to Evaluate
Technical SEO results are genuinely slower and less linear than paid advertising. Unlike a Google Ads campaign where you can see cost-per-click and conversion data in real time, technical SEO works over weeks and months. Rankings fluctuate. Algorithm updates introduce noise. The relationship between a specific fix and a specific ranking improvement isn’t always direct.
Good providers use this complexity honestly — to set accurate expectations and explain what the data means. Bad providers use it as cover — to obscure lack of progress, attribute unrelated external factors to their work, or delay accountability indefinitely.
The checks below cut through both the complexity and the noise.
11 Ways to Evaluate Your Technical SEO Provider
1. Can They Tell You Specifically What They Fixed Last Month?
This is the most direct test. Ask your provider: “What specific technical issues did you identify and fix on our site last month?”
What a good answer looks like: A named list of specific actions — “We fixed a canonical misconfiguration on your WooCommerce product variant URLs affecting 340 pages. We removed 180 redirected URLs from your sitemap and resubmitted it to GSC. We added FAQPage schema to 12 blog posts and validated them in the Rich Results Test.”
What a bad answer looks like: “We continued our ongoing SEO work, monitoring your rankings and making optimisations across the site.” This is not a description of work. It’s a description of having a retainer.
If your provider can’t name specific actions taken on specific pages or URL groups in a given month, the work either isn’t being done or isn’t being tracked well enough to account for.
2. Is Your Indexed Page Count Stable or Growing?
Open Google Search Console → Pages report. Look at the “Indexed” count over the past 3–6 months. For a site producing new content and receiving technical SEO attention, this number should be stable or growing.
Green flag: Indexed page count is growing proportionally with content published. Previously non-indexed pages are moving to indexed status over time. The “Not indexed” bucket is shrinking.
Red flag: Indexed page count is flat or declining despite new content being published. Large numbers of pages remain stuck in “Crawled – currently not indexed” month after month without movement. Your provider cannot explain why.
A technical SEO provider who isn’t monitoring your GSC Pages report and actively working to improve your indexation health is not doing technical SEO — they’re doing something else and calling it technical SEO.
3. Are Crawl Errors Getting Resolved — or Just Reported?
Every month, new crawl errors appear: broken links, redirect issues, coverage warnings. A good provider resolves them. A less accountable provider reports them.
Check your GSC Coverage report. Look at the trend line for errors over time. If you’ve been on a retainer for 6 months and the error count is roughly the same as when you started — or higher — your provider is monitoring but not fixing.
What to ask: “Can you show me the GSC error count when we started versus today, and walk me through what was fixed?”
Real example: A professional services firm had been with an SEO agency for 8 months. Their monthly reports included a section called “Technical Health” with a list of crawl errors. When they finally opened GSC themselves, they found the same 47 errors that had appeared in month 1’s report were still present in month 8 — never resolved. The agency had been reporting the errors, not fixing them.
4. Do They Have Access to Your Google Search Console?
This should not need to be said — but it does. If your technical SEO provider does not have verified access to your Google Search Console account, they cannot be doing real technical SEO. GSC is the primary tool for monitoring indexation, crawl health, Core Web Vitals, schema errors, and manual actions.
How to check: GSC → Settings → Users and permissions. Your provider should appear with at minimum “Full” access (not “Restricted”).
If they’re not in your GSC, ask why immediately. Any legitimate technical SEO response requires GSC data. Working without it means they’re operating from surface-level tools — Semrush, Ahrefs — which don’t have the depth needed for proper technical diagnosis.
5. Are Your Core Web Vitals Improving?
Google Search Console → Core Web Vitals report. Filter by Mobile (more important for rankings). Look at the “Good URLs” count over time.
For a site receiving active Core Web Vitals attention, the “Good” count should be increasing and the “Poor” count decreasing over time. This is a direct, measurable output of technical performance work.
What to ask if scores aren’t improving: “Can you show us the LCP, INP, and CLS scores for our key landing pages from when we started versus now — and what specifically was done to improve them?”
A provider who can’t answer this hasn’t been working on page experience. See our guides on improving LCP, INP, and CLS and Core Web Vitals and page experience for what genuine CWV work looks like.
6. Do Their Reports Show Before-and-After Data — Not Just Current State?
A report that shows “your site currently has 12 crawl errors” tells you the current state. A report that shows “your site had 47 crawl errors when we started — we’ve resolved 35, here’s what remains and why” tells you about the work.
Good technical SEO reporting is change-tracking, not status reporting. If every monthly report looks like a fresh snapshot with no reference to previous states, your provider isn’t measuring their own impact.
What to look for: Reports that include baseline metrics from the start of the engagement, current metrics, and a delta. At minimum: indexed pages (baseline vs current), Core Web Vitals pass rate (baseline vs current), sitemap health (baseline vs current), crawl error count (baseline vs current).
7. Can They Explain What Googlebot Currently Sees on Your Site?
Ask your provider: “Can you show me what Googlebot currently sees when it crawls our homepage?”
This is answerable in under 2 minutes using GSC URL Inspection → View Crawled Page → Screenshot. A provider doing active technical SEO work will know this instantly. More importantly, they’ll be able to describe any gaps between what Google sees and what a user sees — which is the core diagnostic question in technical SEO.
If they can’t answer this — or need to “check and get back to you” — it raises a real question about how closely they’re monitoring your site’s rendering health. This is especially critical if you’re on a JavaScript framework. See our Next.js SEO guide for what correct rendering looks like on JS-heavy sites.
8. Has Your Schema Markup Been Implemented and Validated?
Structured data is a concrete, verifiable deliverable. Either the schema is on the page, valid, and eligible for rich results — or it isn’t.
Run your key pages through Google’s Rich Results Test (search.google.com/test/rich-results). For a site that’s received technical SEO work, you should see valid FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList, or other relevant schema on your most important pages.
Green flag: Clean schema validation on key pages. GSC Enhancements report shows rich result eligible pages.
Red flag: No schema present on pages that clearly warrant it. Schema present but returning validation errors. GSC Enhancements report showing warnings that have persisted for months.
Our guides on structured data implementation and advanced schema markup give you a benchmark for what properly implemented schema looks like.
9. Are They Platform-Specific in Their Recommendations?
Generic technical SEO advice sounds like: “improve your page speed,” “fix duplicate content,” “add schema markup.”
Platform-specific technical SEO advice sounds like: “Your WooCommerce store is generating 14,000 indexable filter URLs from your attribute combinations — we need to implement canonical tags on the filtered URLs via your theme’s functions.php and update your robots.txt to block the `?orderby=` parameter pattern.”
The difference matters enormously. Generic recommendations can be copy-pasted to any client. Platform-specific recommendations require hands-on knowledge of how WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, or your specific framework behaves.
What to test: Ask your provider to name one technical SEO limitation specific to your platform — something non-obvious that requires platform experience to know. A genuinely technical provider answers immediately with something specific. See our WordPress technical SEO audit guide and Shopify SEO services guide for what platform-specific knowledge actually looks like.
10. Do Rankings and Traffic Trends Align With the Work Being Done?
Rankings alone are a poor measure of technical SEO — they’re influenced by algorithm updates, competitor activity, seasonality, and many factors outside your provider’s control. But a sustained pattern matters.
After 6–12 months of technical SEO work on a site where significant issues existed, you should expect to see:
- More pages indexed than when you started
- Organic impressions growing (visible in GSC Performance → Impressions)
- Core Web Vitals improving
- Crawl errors declining
- New content getting indexed faster than it did before
If none of these secondary metrics are moving after 6+ months — and your provider can’t explain why with specific data — that’s a meaningful signal.
Important caveat: If your site was technically clean when the engagement started and the provider has been doing content and link work, the metrics to track are different. Technical SEO has the most impact on sites with significant technical debt. On a clean site, the marginal impact of ongoing technical work is smaller.
11. Do They Tell You When Something Isn’t Working?
This is a trust signal more than a technical check — but it’s one of the clearest indicators of a good provider.
Good technical SEO agencies tell you when a fix didn’t produce the expected result, when an algorithm update has affected your site negatively, and when a problem they identified turned out to be more complex than anticipated. They bring problems to you proactively — not after you’ve already noticed them in your own analytics.
Poor providers only report good news. Every month, something is “improving.” Every setback has an external explanation. The narrative is always positive regardless of what the data actually shows.
How to test this retroactively: Think about the last time your organic traffic dropped — even briefly. Did your provider contact you proactively to explain what happened and what they were doing about it? Or did you have to bring it up?
What to Do If You’re Not Satisfied With the Answers
If these checks reveal your provider is falling short, you have three options:
Option 1 — Have a direct conversation. Bring the specific gaps to your provider with the data. Ask for a structured account review where they show you GSC before/after data and a specific list of what was fixed. Good agencies respond to this kind of accountability. The response to this conversation will tell you a lot.
Option 2 — Request a third-party audit. A fresh technical SEO audit from an independent agency gives you an objective view of your site’s current technical health — and makes it immediately clear whether the work your provider claims to have done is reflected in your site’s actual state.
Option 3 — Change provider. If the conversation in Option 1 doesn’t result in concrete commitments with measurable timelines, and the audit in Option 2 reveals significant unresolved issues, you have your answer. Not all technical SEO agencies deliver the same standard of work. The right technical SEO agency should welcome accountability — because their work is verifiable.
A Quick Self-Audit Checklist
Run through these right now — each takes under 5 minutes:
If you’re flagging 3 or more of these, your technical SEO engagement deserves a closer look.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should I give a new technical SEO provider before evaluating results? For a site with significant technical issues, you should see measurable improvements in indexation and crawl health within 60–90 days. Not rankings necessarily — but GSC data should start moving. If after 90 days you can’t see any difference in indexed page counts, crawl error trends, or Core Web Vitals, ask for a specific explanation.
My provider shows me keyword ranking reports every month. Is that enough? No — not for technical SEO specifically. Rankings are an outcome metric influenced by dozens of factors outside a provider’s control. Technical SEO accountability should be measured in technical health metrics: indexation, crawl errors resolved, CWV pass rates, schema validity. Rankings can and should improve over time — but they’re the result, not the measure of the work.
What if my provider says traffic is down because of a Google algorithm update? Algorithm updates are real and do affect rankings. But this explanation should come with data — specifically, does the traffic drop pattern match the update’s known impact areas? Did competitors in your niche drop too? Is there GSC data showing which queries and pages were affected? A provider invoking an algorithm update as an explanation owes you the data that supports that explanation.
Should I have access to all the tools my provider uses? At minimum you should have full access to your own Google Search Console and Google Analytics. You should also have access to any SEO platform (Semrush, Ahrefs) account being managed for your site. You own your data regardless of who manages it. Any provider who resists giving you access to your own analytics and GSC accounts is a significant red flag.
Is it reasonable to switch providers mid-contract if I’m unhappy? Review your contract terms — most have a notice period. But before switching, have the direct conversation (Option 1 above) and request a formal account review. Switching providers mid-way through addressing technical issues can sometimes create disruption. Make sure a new provider does a thorough baseline audit before starting work so you have a clear before/after baseline from day one.
If you want an independent assessment of whether your current technical SEO work is actually being done — and done correctly — our technical SEO team offers audit services that give you an objective, GSC-backed view of your site’s real technical health.
