How do you measure SEO progress?

Your SEO Agency Says It Is Laying the Groundwork — But Can You Measure It?

When you employ an SEO agency, commission a website redesign or prepare to launch an entirely new website, there is an important question that is often overlooked: How will you know whether the website is actually developing in the right direction? For an existing website, rankings may take time to improve, traffic can fluctuate and leads and sales may take even longer to respond. For a new website, the problem is even more fundamental because there may be no historical rankings, traffic or search performance to use as a meaningful benchmark. Yet decisions are already being made about site architecture, categories, content, internal links and which pages will represent the organisation’s most important products, services and subjects.

That is why the foundation needs to come first. It gives you a defined starting point from which you can track how the website develops, rather than relying solely on analytics results that may not explain what is actually changing within the website.

What Does “Laying the Groundwork” Actually Mean?

A recent article in Lancashire Business View raised an interesting question about businesses paying SEO retainers while being told that the agency is still “laying the groundwork”. There is nothing unusual about SEO taking time. Structural changes, new content and improvements to important pages may take time to be crawled, interpreted and reflected in search results. But the phrase “laying the groundwork” raises a useful management question: What groundwork is being laid, and how will we know whether it has changed anything? This is not simply a question for businesses employing SEO agencies. The same problem exists when redesigning an existing website or launching an entirely new one.

Start With What the Business Wants the Website to Achieve

Before measuring SEO progress, it helps to establish what progress is supposed to mean. A business may have hundreds or thousands of pages, but they are unlikely to be equally important. Some represent principal services, products, categories or subjects around which the organisation wants to build search visibility. The starting point is therefore not necessarily keywords or traffic. It is identifying the pages and subjects that matter to the organisation and asking whether the website itself is structured to support them.

• Which pages are strategically important?
• Which products or services need greater search visibility?
• Which subjects should the website establish authority around?
• Which searches should the important pages compete for?
• Which supporting pages should reinforce those priorities?

These questions provide a clearer foundation against which later SEO work can be measured.

A Website Is More Than a Collection of Pages

Search systems do not encounter pages in isolation. Pages are connected through navigation, categories, contextual links and other internal relationships. Together those relationships create a network. Using graph theory, Markov chains and probability, that network can be examined to see where structural authority is concentrated, how it moves through the website and whether supporting content reinforces the pages considered important to the business. This creates another form of SEO measurement. Instead of looking only at whether rankings or traffic changed, we can also examine whether the underlying website changed.

Measure the Starting Position

For an existing website, the first measurement establishes a baseline. It can show which areas currently receive the strongest structural reinforcement, how much movement reaches the Authority Core and whether supporting content transfers attention towards those important pages or continues circulating predominantly among other supporting content. This matters because the pages management considers important are not necessarily the pages the website itself reinforces as important.

A website can contain thousands of internal links and substantial amounts of content while still concentrating much of its structural authority in areas that are not central to the organisation’s search objectives. Once that starting position has been measured, later changes have something meaningful to be compared against.

For a New Website, Define the Foundation Before Launch

A new website provides a different opportunity. Instead of inheriting years of accumulated pages, categories and internal linking decisions, its intended structure can be considered before launch. The organisation can identify its principal subjects, products, services and strategically important pages before deciding how supporting content, categories and internal relationships should be organised around them. You would not normally construct a building and decide afterwards what its foundations were supposed to support. The same principle can be applied to a website.

Once the new website is launched, its structure can be measured. That creates a baseline from which future development can be tracked as new pages are introduced, content expands and SEO work continues.

Measure What Changed Within the Website

SEO reports often describe activity: pages created, articles published, technical problems corrected, internal links added, titles changed or categories reorganised. These are useful records of work completed, but they do not necessarily show what changed within the website as a result. For example, adding 200 internal links is measurable activity, but the number alone does not tell us whether those links strengthened the pages the business considers important. Publishing 30 supporting articles increases the amount of content, but it does not tell us whether those articles reinforce the intended Authority Core or predominantly reinforce one another.

Structural measurements can therefore be compared over time, including Authority Core capture, Supporting → Authority transfer, Supporting → Supporting retention and the distribution of structural equilibrium across the website. A single measurement provides a snapshot. Repeated measurement begins to show direction.

Then Measure What Happens in Search

Structural measurement should not replace traditional page and keyword monitoring. The two answer different questions. If a business has identified a strategically important page and the searches that page is intended to compete for, its search position can be monitored over time. This allows changes within the website to be considered alongside changes in actual search performance.

For example, if supporting content is increasingly reinforcing an important page, we can measure that structural change and then monitor whether the same page begins to improve, remain unchanged or decline for the search terms associated with it. If the structure improves but the page does not respond in search, that is useful information too. It indicates that structural reinforcement alone may not explain the problem and that other factors may need to be investigated. Page and keyword monitoring measures what is happening in search. Structural measurement helps show what is changing within the website.

Connect the Work to the Result

This creates a more useful sequence for measuring SEO:

1. Define the objective — identify the pages, subjects and searches that matter to the business.
2. Measure the foundation — establish how the website currently reinforces those priorities.
3. Make the changes — allow the SEO agency, web developer or internal team to implement the work.
4. Measure the website again — determine whether the underlying structural relationships have changed.
5. Monitor pages and keywords — track what happens to the important pages in search.
6. Compare the evidence — determine whether the website and its search performance are developing in the intended direction.

This does not mean that every structural improvement should produce an immediate ranking increase. Search rankings are influenced by many factors, and no external model can reproduce the private ranking systems used by Google, Bing or AI search systems. What can be measured is the website those systems encounter, how its pages relate to one another and whether those relationships are changing over time.

Measuring Change Rather Than Just Activity

The distinction is important because activity and progress are not necessarily the same thing. An SEO agency may legitimately complete a substantial amount of work during a month. A web developer may successfully implement every requested structural change. An internal marketing team may publish all the planned content. The next question should not simply be: “Was the work completed?” It should also be: “What changed as a result?”

If the important pages are receiving greater structural reinforcement, Supporting → Authority transfer is increasing and those pages are beginning to move for their intended searches, several different measurements are beginning to tell a related story. If those things are not happening, the measurements provide a reason to investigate rather than simply waiting for another month’s analytics report.

Watch How the Website Changes Over Time

Websites rarely remain as they were originally designed. New content is published, products are introduced, services change, categories expand, campaigns create new landing pages and internal links accumulate. Over time, the structure experienced by search systems can become quite different from the structure originally intended by the business. This is why repeated measurement matters. It allows the organisation to examine not only whether rankings changed, but whether the website itself is continuing to reinforce its strategic priorities.

The question therefore becomes broader than “Are our rankings improving?” It becomes: “Is the website changing in the direction we intended, and are the pages that matter responding in search?”

Establishing a Measurable Foundation

A Strategic Search Authority Review can be used to establish this starting position by examining how the website is structured, where authority is concentrated and whether the pages considered important to the business are being reinforced by the wider website. For an existing website, this provides a baseline against which later structural changes can be compared. For a new website, the same approach can help establish the intended structural priorities before launch.

The purpose is not to replace the work of an SEO agency, web developer or internal marketing team. It is to provide a measurable foundation they can work from and that the organisation can continue to monitor. Define what matters. Measure the starting point. Make the changes. Measure again. Then watch whether the important pages respond in search.