What evidence shows that SEO work was completed?

An invoice for SEO by the hour proves one thing: somebody billed you for hours. Whether anything changed on your website is a separate question, and the invoice is silent on it.

You can fix that with one blank record. Each line ties a promised task to the page it touched, the date it changed, the evidence you can check yourself, and the next thing to watch. Hand it to any provider, hourly or retainer, and the work either shows up in it or it does not. It also keeps apart two things most reports blend: work that was done, and search results that may or may not follow.

Paying for SEO by the hour buys effort, so ask for the record

Google has already written the question for you. Its page "Do you need an SEO?", last updated on 5 June 2026, lists what to ask before hiring one, including "Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site?" The same page asks for "detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them." It also says, flatly, that "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."

Put those two lines side by side. Nobody can promise you the ranking. Somebody can show you the changes. So the changes are what you are buying, whatever the billing model says on top.

The billing model still matters, and I have argued elsewhere that an hourly SEO rate bills you for the wait while Google catches up. Hourly or monthly, the test is the same: can the provider hand you a dated list of what changed, on which page, and can you check it without taking their word for it?

I spent 33 years as an Ontario paralegal, and the habit that stuck is trusting a document by its date and its source. Put a month of SEO on trial and the changed page is Exhibit A.

Completed work and search results go in different columns

Completed work is a fact about your website. "The title tag on the wills page was rewritten on 3 October" is either true or false, and you can check it today. The title tag is the page's name in its code: the text in your browser tab, and often the headline Google shows in results. A search result is a fact about Google. "We now rank fifth for wills lawyer" depends on Google's crawl, its index, your competitors and what searchers did that week.

Blend the two in one report and each can hide behind the other. A good month of rankings covers for a month where nothing was done. A slow month gets blamed on Google.

Google's guide to title links says their generation "is completely automated" and that Google "may try to generate an improved title link from anchors, on-page text, or other sources." So a title tag can be changed correctly on your page and still not appear word for word in the results. The evidence of the change is on your page. Whether Google uses it is a later observation.

Outcomes still deserve a place, and the right ones are leads rather than traffic. That subject has its own article, the SEO metrics that matter and the 90-day playbook. This record is the layer underneath: proof the work exists before anyone argues about what it earned.

Your SEO deliverables checklist, as a blank record

Five columns, one row per task. Copy it into a spreadsheet, send it to your provider blank, and ask them to fill it in for last month.

The second column does most of the work. A full address turns "we optimized your service pages" into a list you can open line by line. If a provider cannot name the pages, the task did not touch any.

The third column separates doing from thinking about doing. Research is real work and may be billed honestly, but it goes on the record as research, with what it produced (a keyword map, an audit file) attached, and stays out of the changes column.

The fifth column keeps the record honest about time. A change made on 3 October will not show in Google on the 4th, so the record says when to look again.

What counts as proof of SEO work

Proof of SEO work is anything you can open and check without the provider standing beside you.

The page itself

Open the page the record names. If the task was new content or a rewritten heading, read it. For the parts you cannot see, such as the title tag or the meta description, open the page source in your browser (usually listed as View Page Source) and search for the text the record says is there. If the old title is still in the source, you have a finding.

Google Search Console

Search Console is Google's free tool for site owners, and you should own the account. If an SEO offers to do an audit, Google's hiring page says to "only grant read access to Search Console" and, at that stage, not write access. Google's URL Inspection tool shows when Google last crawled a page (visited it) and whether it is indexed (stored and eligible to appear in results). The help page is careful about one detail: the results come from the "most recently indexed version of a page, not the live version on the web." That makes it the right tool for the fifth column. Your page changed on the 3rd. Has Google been back since?

The code's own history

If your site's code is kept in version control, every change carries a date and an author. We hand clients the code and the server keys on the more than 40 sites we have built, so nobody needs our permission to look.

What does not count is anything that only proves activity. Hours. A count of "pages optimized" with no addresses. A ranking screenshot with no date. A traffic graph on its own. A report built mostly from a traffic graph is the SEO version of a witness who answers every question with "it went well." Vague monthly packages are the usual source of this, and what SEO on autopilot actually buys goes through what they leave out.

Where the first column should come from

The task list should come from an audit, ranked by what affects your enquiries first. Otherwise the record fills with whatever was quickest, and quick fixes to pages nobody visits look busy on paper. How to triage an SEO audit and decide what to fix first covers that ordering.

Google's question about "the reasoning behind" each recommendation fits here. Add a short note to each task saying why it was chosen. "The contact page had no title tag" is a reason. "Best practice" is not one.

Monthly SEO reporting you can check yourself

Monthly SEO reporting works best when the record arrives first and the charts second. Here is the routine I would hand a lawyer, a paralegal, a dentist, a doctor, an accountant or a vet with no wish to learn SEO:

1. Ask for the record before the invoice is paid, every month.
2. Pick two or three rows at random.
3. Open each page address and check the change, using the page source if you need to.
4. For changes older than a few weeks, ask the provider for the URL Inspection result, or run it yourself if you own the Search Console account.
5. Ask about anything that does not match.

A provider doing real work will usually welcome this. If the record is empty and the invoice is not, you have learned something useful, and it cost you less than another month of retainer.

Common questions

What is proof of SEO work?

Proof of SEO work is a dated change on a named page that you can check yourself. That means the page address, what was changed, the date it went live and where to see it: the page, its source code, Google Search Console or the site's code history. Hours, activity counts and ranking screenshots show effort or outcomes, never a specific change.

Should I pay for SEO by the hour?

You can, but hours measure effort rather than changes to your site. Whether you pay hourly or monthly, ask for a record that ties each task to a page, a dated change and evidence you can check. Google's own hiring guidance suggests asking any SEO to share all the changes they make to your site, along with the reasoning behind their recommendations.

What should a monthly SEO report include?

A monthly SEO report should start with the work: each task, the page addresses it touched, what changed, the date it went live, and where you can check it. Results such as enquiries, leads and Search Console data come after, kept separate from the work. A report that is mostly a traffic graph tells you about Google's month, not your provider's.

Can an SEO guarantee first place on Google?

No. Google's page on hiring an SEO says plainly that no one can guarantee a number one ranking on Google. What a provider can promise is specific work: named pages changed on stated dates, with evidence you can check. Treat a ranking guarantee as a reason to ask harder questions before you sign anything.

How do I check if my title tag changed?

Open the page in a browser and view its source, usually listed as View Page Source. Search the source for the word "title" and read the text between the title tags. Compare it with what your provider's record says. If the page still shows the old wording, the change has not gone live, whatever the report says.

Why doesn't Google show my new page title?

Google may not have crawled the page since the change, or it may have chosen different wording. Google's title link documentation says the process is completely automated and can draw on headings, link text and other sources. Check your page source to confirm the change exists, then use URL Inspection in Search Console to see when Google last crawled the page.

If you already pay someone for SEO and want a second pair of eyes on the record, or on the lack of one, book a conversation and bring last month's report. We will go through it line by line and tell you which entries you can check and which you cannot.