How to tell if your SEO is actually working
Traffic is flat and you cannot tell whether the plan is wrong or simply early.
Count the queries you appear for, not the clicks
A growing set of distinct queries producing impressions is the earliest real signal. It moves months before clicks do, and it means the engine is finding more reasons to show you.
Watch average position on your target queries specifically
Site-wide average position is a blend and it worsens as you rank for more marginal things, which looks like decline and is not. Track the ten queries you care about individually.
Check whether new pages get indexed faster than old ones did
Shortening time-to-index is the clearest sign a site is gaining standing, and it costs nothing to observe.
Then be patient about clicks, deliberately
Set the threshold before you look: what size of change, sustained over how long, would make you act. Deciding after the fact is how noise becomes a strategy.
Impressions move first
The order is impressions, then positions, then clicks, then revenue, and the lag between the first and the third is measured in months. If you judge by clicks alone you will kill working strategies at the point where they were about to pay. Watch non-brand impressions weekly. It is the earliest honest signal available.
The 90-day comparison
Compare trailing 90 days against the previous 90, on non-brand queries only, and look at three things: total clicks, number of distinct queries producing at least one click, and number of pages producing at least one click. The second and third are the ones that reveal whether the site is broadening or whether one page got lucky.
Measured, not asserted
This site's clicks went 31, 346, 1,131, 2,052, 4,409, 7,115, 8,068, 16,410 across eight months. In the fifth month it shipped nothing at all and grew 61%.
Free tool for this: Noise or Signal. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 15 and Chapter 14 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.