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10 questions your SEO agency should be able to answer this month

The short answer: if you are paying for SEO and your traffic has not moved, you do not need to become an SEO to find out why. You need ten questions and the willingness to ask them. A good agency answers every one of these in plain language, with a number, this week. An agency that goes quiet or changes the subject is telling you something too.

Why these ten

SEO work is easy to bill for and hard to see. Months pass, reports arrive full of words like "authority" and "optimization," and the one number you care about, people arriving at your site, sits still. These questions are built to be answered with a fact, not a feeling. Nine of them map to something AuditLamp checks for free or something already sitting in your own Google Search Console. You can verify most of the answers yourself.

The ten questions

1. Can Google and the AI engines actually crawl my site right now? This is not advanced. It is the front door. A single wrong line in your robots.txt can hide your whole site. Ask them to confirm it, then paste your URL into a free scan and confirm it yourself.

1. How many of my pages are actually indexed, and how many should be? Search Console tells you this exactly, under Pages. If half your pages are "Crawled, not indexed," that is a real problem with a real cause, and your agency should be able to name it.

1. What were my impressions and clicks 90 days ago versus today? Two numbers, from your own Search Console. Impressions is how often you showed up. Clicks is how often someone came. If impressions are up but clicks are flat, that is a specific, fixable story, and question 8 covers it.

1. Which pages are on page two, one good push from page one? These are your fastest wins. Every serious SEO tracks "striking distance" pages, positions 11 to 20, because moving one of those beats writing ten new pages. If they cannot name yours, they are not looking.

1. What have you actually changed on my site, and where can I see it? Not "we optimized your metadata." Which page, what did the title say before, what does it say now. Real work leaves a trail you can open in a browser.

1. Is my site marked up so AI answer engines can read my business? Structured data is how a machine knows your name, your hours, your reviews. It is a yes or no with a validator. AuditLamp checks it; so does Google's own Rich Results Test. There is no fog here to hide in.

1. What is my Core Web Vitals status on mobile, and is it passing? Google publishes this about your site. It is pass or fail. A slow site loses rankings and customers at the same time, and this is one of the few SEO numbers Google confirms it uses.

1. My rankings held but my clicks dropped. What happened? This is the signature of an AI Overview eating your click. Ahrefs measured the top result losing roughly 58% of its clicks when an AI Overview appears above it (Ahrefs, Dec 2025). It is not your agency's fault, but a good one will have noticed and told you before you asked.

1. What are we doing that compounds, versus what resets every month? Directories, structured data, earned mentions, and fixed technical faults stay fixed. Churning out thin blog posts to hit a quota does not compound. Ask them to sort their work into those two piles.

1. If I stopped paying you today, what would I keep? The kindest question and the most revealing. Real SEO leaves assets behind: a faster site, correct markup, pages that rank. If the honest answer is "nothing," you were renting activity, not buying results.

The honest caveat

A slow month is not proof of a bad agency. SEO genuinely takes time, some industries are brutally competitive, and no honest operator promises a ranking. These questions are not a trap. They are a way to tell patient, real work apart from expensive activity. A good agency will be glad you asked, because these are the questions they ask themselves.

Get an independent second opinion, free

Paste your URL into the free scan at auditlamp.com. It runs the on-page checks behind most of these questions, crawlability, indexing signals, structured data, mobile performance, AI-engine readiness, and names what is failing, worst first. It is not your agency and it is not selling you retainer hours. It is a blunt second opinion on your own site. The diagnosis is free, no email required.

We take our own medicine: today's fresh scan of auditlamp.com is report 514, scored 98/100 across 150 pages, public at auditlamp.com. Run the same check on yours.