Most firms we speak to have paid for SEO before. Ask them what it changed and you get a monthly report: keywords, a graph, an invoice. What you do not get is the one thing that matters, a plain statement that this work was done on this date and this is what happened to that page afterwards.
Without that, good work and no work look identical, and after a year most firms decide SEO is not worth it for a business like theirs. They are right to stop paying for something they cannot check. The fault rarely lies with the people who did the work. The work and the measurement sat in different tools, with different people, and only met once a month in a slide.
Measuring SEO results: one record for the work and the outcome
Growth is the work we do on a site after it is live. It runs on Orbit, our own website growth platform. We built it because no tool we tried kept an action and its outcome in the same place.
Orbit watches the site: how people find it, what they do when they arrive, and what is holding it back. Twice a week it turns that into a short list of work worth doing. We agree the month's priorities with you and carry them out, and nothing goes live on your site without approval.
Then comes the part most retainers skip. When a piece of work starts, the number it is meant to move is recorded. Weeks later the same number is read again and placed next to the work, whether it moved or not. You can open that record yourself whenever you want, and nobody has to summarise it for you.
SEO results on three sites, measured
2 Stream produces livestreams and webinars for companies. In the last ninety days its site received 865 clicks from Google, against 542 in the ninety days before. That is 60 percent more, and impressions rose from 20,535 to 31,605 over the same period. One comparison article on streaming software took "wirecast vs obs" from position nine to position four and "vmix vs wirecast" from seven to five.
Imediaal runs Meta advertising for home improvement companies. Google showed its site 33,629 times between 4 May and 7 October, against 2,132 in the equally long period before, and clicks went from 60 to 175. One article on lead reactivation ranks second for "home builder lead reactivation", up from fifth three months earlier, and holds a top-five position for six related searches. For the Belgian search "meta ads bureau" the site's average position moved from 67 to 18. In total, 29 searches that do not contain the company's name now put Imediaal on Google's first page.
The same record shows what is still open. Six enquiries came in through the contact form in those months and none of those visitors had read an article first, so we take no credit for them. Turning first-page positions into enquiries is the next job.
Forest Forward helps companies turn sustainability goals into forest projects in Belgium. Its school forest page moved from position six to position three for "schoolbos", and its forest compensation page from ten to seven for "boscompensatie". The school forest page is also the site's best converter, with 37 conversions from 690 visitors in ninety days.
That page is where the record earned its keep. Orbit flagged that the English version received 102 visitors in the same period and converted none of them. The cause was simple once someone looked: the information documents offered on the Dutch page were missing from the English one. Forest Forward's own marketer is adding them, and the card stays open until the number moves. Meanwhile ChatGPT named Forest Forward in seven of the last eight weekly scans, for questions a buyer would ask without knowing the company.
What we do not promise
We do not promise a ranking, a number of leads or a date. Search results and AI answers are not ours to control, and a guaranteed figure would be a guess. What we do promise is that every piece of work has a before and an after you can read yourself, including the ones that changed nothing.
So is SEO worth it for your firm? After three months on this record you will know, and you will not need our opinion to decide.
If you have paid for SEO before and could not tell what it did, book a call. We will open your site together and show you what we would do first and how you would check it.
