If you're paying for SEO every month and couldn't quite say what you got for it, this is for you. It's one page you can print and keep next to your desk: what should show up, what a real deliverable looks like next to a filler one, and the red flags that mean you're getting motion instead of work.
Enter your email and I'll send you straight to the download — no pitch, no drip sequence. Just the PDF.
One page, three sections — enough to hold next month's report up against and know within a minute whether you're getting work or getting filler.
The four artifacts of a real engagement: a technical change log that names pages and reasons, content you can actually open, a performance summary tied to leads or calls rather than vanity metrics, and a next-month plan you never had to ask for.
Technical, content, and performance — each shown twice, once done properly and once as filler. A rank screenshot and a paragraph of real analysis take the same three seconds to skim, so this puts them next to each other where the gap is obvious.
Rank screenshots with no narrative. Monthly emails that could apply to any client. No visibility into current work. Deliverables that arrive late or not at all. Every month looking suspiciously identical regardless of what happened.
SEO is one of the few things people buy where the work is invisible and the results lag by months. That combination is why so many people paying for it every month can't say what they're getting — and it's not paranoia, it's a structural problem with how the work gets reported. Most checklists out there are written for the person doing the SEO. This one is written for the person paying for it.
The standard is simpler than it looks: real deliverables are specific (they name things), narrated (a person explains them), and honest (they admit what didn't move). Charts and tool exports aren't the enemy — charts instead of a narrative are. One page is deliberate: this should live next to your desk and get used, not get filed. If you want the full reasoning behind each item, the full guide walks through all of it.
The checklist is the condensed version — the one you print. The full post walks through why each deliverable matters, what a good one actually looks like, and how the format legitimately changes depending on whether you bought an audit, a retainer, or a project.
This checklist is for judging work you're already receiving. If you're still choosing — with two or three quotes on your desk and no idea how to tell them apart — the free Pricing Comparison Worksheet puts them side by side on scope, terms, and price, with a red-flag checklist for what to ask before you sign.