SEO is easy to sell vaguely and genuinely hard for a non-specialist to audit from the outside. Here are practical signs worth checking for.
You can't name a single concrete change from recent months
A genuine retainer should produce describable work: a technical fix, a new piece of content, a structural change. If you've been paying for months and can't point to anything specific, that's worth questioning directly.
Reports are all numbers, no explanation
A monthly report showing traffic and ranking figures is easy to generate automatically. It should also explain why those numbers moved and what's planned next, based on that. Reports that are purely numbers, with no context, often reflect work that's equally hollow.
You've never spoken to whoever actually does the work
At many agencies, the person who sold the contract and the person doing the day-to-day work are different, often several people removed from each other. This isn't automatically a problem, but each handoff is a chance for context and quality to get diluted.
Keyword targets don't reflect your actual catalogue
If the keywords you're supposedly ranking for don't match what your customers genuinely search for, either too generic or mismatched to your specific products, that points to a strategy that wasn't built around your actual business.
Nothing has ever required your input
Good SEO work occasionally needs something from you: approving content, confirming product details, providing genuine photos. If your agency operates entirely without ever needing anything from you, the work may be generic enough that it doesn't require real knowledge of your specific catalogue.