: How to check SEO progress So I've been in the process of transferring to a new site for around 5 months now (old host slowed down the process as much as possible). I'm now in a situation

@Sue5673885

It's absolutely possible to do SEO work on a site before it goes live. It is not only possible, but a common practice to make changes to, build, or even completely re-build an entire site before any of the changes or any of the site goes live. Some methods used to accomplish this are front facing maintenance pages, or even working on a local development site which is later deployed to the remote server. All instances where this scenario is necessary, is not possible to list, but some reasons include:


already live sites with active traffic that have to make changes in a development environment before passing these changes to the live site to avoid visitor disruption and minimize any visitor confusion
a development environment (not live), enables for the testing of changes before passing these changes to the live site.


As far as SEO alone taking 5 months to complete, depends on the size of your site (ie. amount of pages) and the commitment from the developer ie...working on your site full-time vs. part-time vs....it also depends on what type of SEO work he agreed to do. It depends on the depth of SEO work done. Did he just go through and optimize each page with correct keyword placement and meta data, or internal/external linking, changing content, testing and re-testing and making changes until it was perfect?

Unless you know code enough to view any possible changes he made or, know someone who can do it for you, you won't be able to tell if he is telling the truth, at least not for a while, until the site starts to show the benefits from it. But this alone is not even a good indicator, because he could have worked on your SEO the entire time, but it doesn't mean the site will show any tangible results. (For examples sake only) He could be horrible at SEO, doesn't mean he didn't work on it.(And I'm not saying he would have to be bad at it to not see any results, results even when done perfectly take time, multiple passes of changes and testing, and re-testing over a long period of time to achieve the best results...) SEO is an an ongoing task, not something done once and then forgotten. It is alive and organic and constantly moving, mutating, and growing.

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@Chiappetta492

It depends on what you pay for, but I'm assuming that they get your site to the current standards.

This simply takes time. After updating an site, you have to wait till the changes are pick up. This can not go on command, you'll have to wait. Moving up in the search results takes time and patience. It's possible to move up in the results, it's not possible to be guaranteed position one.

They're not working on your site for 5 months (unless you're site is huge). Simply ask for a small summery of what they've done. This will give you (or someone else with the skillset) a good estimate of their SEO skills .

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@Connie744

As Matt Cutts from Google often says, if you are paying for SEO, you're paying too much. (Or words to that effect.)

It's possible they are doing SEO work based on the old site or doing work based on the new site using whatever you may have given them in anticipation of when the site goes live.

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