Christopher Mollard — founder of J4G Design, a Fulham web & SEO studio (15+ years across UX, brand and search).
Last updated 16 September 2026
You know your SEO is working when the one number tied to your revenue is going up — enquiries, bookings or sales from search — rather than when a rankings chart wiggles, and that is the test we come back to on every account, because the honest question is whether search is bringing in more of the customers you actually want, so while positions, impressions and traffic all matter, they matter only insofar as they feed that number, which is the one we watch first and the one we report on.
We start with the metric that becomes money
The number we anchor to is the single action on your site that turns into revenue — a form submission, a booked call, a purchase — counted specifically from organic search each month, because it sits one step from money, it can’t be gamed by vanity figures, and it tells you plainly whether the work is paying for itself, so that when that number is trending up your SEO is working whatever the rankings happen to say on any given day, which is why we would always rather talk about it than about a position on a chart.
The chain we watch: rankings, then clicks, then enquiries
SEO moves in a sequence, so we read it in order — first your pages rank higher for the terms that matter, higher rankings earn more clicks so organic visits rise, and more of the right visits produce more enquiries — and when rankings and clicks are climbing but enquiries are not, we take that as a sign the problem is on the page rather than in search, because the traffic is arriving and the page isn’t converting it, so reading the chain in order tells us exactly where to look.
How long before you can really tell?
We would give it time before judging it, since new or reworked pages typically take a few weeks to be re-crawled and start gathering impressions, one to two months to move on clicks, and three to six months to settle into a stable ranking, so judging SEO after three weeks is a little like weighing yourself the morning after your first trip to the gym — we look at the trend across quarters rather than the noise from week to week.
What “not working” actually looks like
In our view SEO isn’t working when, across a full quarter, the pages you have invested in aren’t gaining impressions or clicks and the enquiries from search are flat or falling, and that is the point at which we would change the approach — different keywords, better content, technical fixes — rather than panic after a slow fortnight, because the mistake we see most often is reacting to weekly wobble when the discipline that actually pays is holding the course and measuring against the one number that matters.
If you’d like a plain monthly read on whether your SEO is genuinely earning its keep, get in touch — we report on the number tied to your revenue, not vanity metrics.