Check whether organic sessions are growing month on month, not just in total. A flat or falling line while you are supposedly paying for SEO is a red flag. Month on month growth, even small, means the work is compounding the way it should.

Look at which towns or areas the organic traffic is coming from. If you serve Galway, Athlone and Roscommon but 90 percent of your organic visitors are from somewhere you never work, the targeting is wrong and needs fixing before anything else.

Separate traffic landing on your homepage from traffic landing on service pages or location pages. Healthy local SEO sends people straight to the page for the job they need, not always the front door. If every organic visitor hits the homepage first, you are probably missing location-specific pages.

Check your rankings for your core service plus your main town, for example ‘electrician Dublin’ or ‘boiler service Cork’. These high-intent searches are where the booked jobs come from. If you are on page two or below, that is the priority to fix.

Look for impressions with low clicks, which usually means you are ranking on page one but your title or description is not convincing people to click. Rewriting the page title to include the job type and the town, with a clear reason to call you, typically lifts clicks without any ranking changes needed.

Spot any rankings you have picked up by accident for low-value or irrelevant searches. If you are a plumber ranking for DIY drain unblocking guides you are attracting people who will never call you. Those pages need to be rewritten or redirected toward customers who want someone to do the job.

Track whether your ranking positions are stable or jumping around week to week. Some movement is normal but if your position for a key search swings wildly it usually means your page is thin on content, you have slow site speed, or a competitor has recently pushed harder and you need to respond.

Check how many people called you directly from your Google Business Profile last month. Calls from the map pack are often the most ready-to-book enquiries you get. If that number is low, your profile photos, review count or category settings may be hurting your ranking in the local three-pack.

Look at the searches that triggered your profile to appear. You want to see job-specific searches like ’emergency plumber Limerick’ or ‘flat roof repair Waterford’ appearing in that list. Generic brand-name searches are fine but they should not be the only thing driving your profile views.

Check your direction requests and compare them to the postcodes or areas you actually want more work in. If direction requests are clustering far outside your ideal area it can mean your service area settings or your citations on other directories are pointing Google in the wrong direction.

Confirm that phone calls from organic search are being tracked, not just form submissions. Most local service businesses get the majority of their enquiries by phone. If your report only shows form fills you are missing most of the picture and cannot judge whether SEO is actually paying for itself.

Work out your cost per organic lead by dividing your monthly SEO spend by the number of tracked organic enquiries. Compare that to what you pay per lead on Google Ads. Organic leads should cost less over time as rankings build, but if they are costing more it is worth asking your SEO provider what the roadmap to improvement looks like and by when.

Check which service pages are generating the most conversions, not just the most traffic. A page about a high-value job like rewiring, attic conversion, or full bathroom fit-out that converts even a small amount of traffic is worth far more than a popular blog post that no one ever calls about.

Check that your site loads quickly on a mobile phone on a standard Irish 4G connection, not just on a fast office broadband. Most people searching for a tradesperson or local service are on their phone, often in a moment of need. A site that takes more than three seconds to load loses a significant share of those visitors before they ever see your number.

Look at Core Web Vitals and flag any pages marked as Poor, especially for Largest Contentful Paint or Cumulative Layout Shift. These are the metrics Google uses to judge page experience and a Poor rating on a key service page can actively suppress your ranking even if everything else is done right.

Check the Coverage report for any pages that are excluded, not indexed, or returning errors. If your location pages for individual towns are not indexed, Google cannot rank them, and that is a straightforward problem your provider should be fixing within the same reporting period it is spotted.

Ask your SEO provider to show you every piece of content published or updated in the last month and which searches it targets. A report that just says ‘blog posts written’ without showing the target keywords and whether those keywords relate to real jobs in your area is not a report, it is a filler.

Check whether new links to your site are coming from relevant local sources like supplier directories, local trade associations, county council approved contractor lists, or local news sites. A link from a Leitrim county council contractor list or the Irish Green Building Council carries far more weight for a local business than a link from a generic article farm that publishes on every topic under the sun.

Make sure your business name, address and phone number appear consistently on the main Irish directories including Golden Pages, Yelp Ireland, Yell, Hotfrog and any trade-specific directories relevant to your sector. Inconsistent NAP details across directories confuse Google about where you actually are and can quietly drag your map pack ranking down over time without any obvious single cause.