My guess based on what you said.
1. SEO consists of 2 parts – on-page and off-page. If you’re paying them money to do SEO, they must be doing some off-page SEO. I can’t tell you exactly what they are doing, only they can. This involves building backlinks to your website – there are many ways to do it from black hat tactics (against search engine policies) or white hat tactics (recommended by search engines). If they are writing articles on your website (blog), then it’s good white hat tactic to create content relevant to your keywords. A lot of lower quality SEO firms will engage in some less than white hat tactics. Sometimes it works, but eventually search engines catch up with it and it hurts the website.
2. There’s nothing in WordPress you have to check keywords really. Usually SEO firms do research using third-party tools to find good keywords to help their clients rank for those keywords. It’s not something you just pull out of your WordPress website.
There’s really easy way to check if what they are doing and reporting is true. Go to Google and type in one of your keywords. Are you ranking in the position SEO firm reported?
You can pay a bit more money for a third-party SEO rank tracking tool to track keywords SEO firm is reporting on to you, to see if their reporting is consistent with your reporting.
Remember this. You have full right to demand from SEO firm a list of tactics they engage in to help your wife’s website rank for keywords.
Usually clients with more SEO knowledge know to stay away from black hat tactics, which some SEO firms engage in. I’m not saying your SEO firm does it, but you never know in this industry.
Things that should be considered as red flags:
– paid links (they paid for them)
– forum links (they create forum profiles to link back to your website)
– article databases/directories (they submit low quality articles to websites that collect articles)
– comment spam (they submit comment spam to blogs)
– bookmarking (they bookmark your website on dozens of spammy sites)
These are just a few black hat tactics everyone should stay away from.
I tried to keep this as simple as possible since you don’t have much knowledge in this, but there’s much more to SEO than what I described.
As Victor said. If you have success with your seo firms and never get slap all this time from Google animals it means they are doing their job.
But the question is how long you have been ranking top list in google?
it is very important.
Also website owner you must educate yourself bit for seo. I don’t mean to learn and do it yourself, but to ask proper question to the people you are paying for seo.
– May I know the list of jobs has been done for this month? is #1
– What kind of link building strategy you are using for my website?is #2
– is there any article submission involved? If it so can I have a look to see where my articles are? # 3
– Roughly how many backlinks you create per month? #4 (if they reply thousands stay away from it) also ask what platform they use to create backlinks as well.
Look lists goes on and on.
If you really concerning about the firm charges you for the work done or not just go to ‘ http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer” and play around bit and you will see limited results up to date.
or just type in Google search bar “Site: wwww.yourdomain.com
then you will see all the sites of yours and others related to your sites. that will give you a bid idea
But SEO is not easy task unless you study and practise to do it yourself.
Good luck.
