SEO is not a secret. A former search engine engineer who built the analytics at Yahoo walks home-service owners through the eight numbers that tell you whether your SEO person is making the phone ring — or just emailing you an auto-generated report every month.
12.6
a typical “average position” — meaningless unless it’s on words that have volume and matter to your business
13 / 150
visits per searches/month at position 4 for one real term — that ratio is what’s valuable, not the rank alone
4,000
backlinks on one audited site — most with a domain rating of 0–2, driving no traffic and no rankings
A lot of people who do SEO love to wrap it in mystery. There is no mystery. Every SEO technique is publicly visible — there is no “black box” magic. The examples below come from a real audit of Mr. Clean Power Washing in Baltimore, and every check is one you can run yourself before you pay another monthly invoice.
Question The Average Position
When a report brags about an average Google position of 12.6, ask which words. Position only counts on terms that actually have search volume and that a paying customer would type. An average across hundreds of junk keywords tells you nothing about booked jobs.
Make Sure They Understand Their Tools
A monthly report does not mean monthly work. Many tools auto-generate the same dashboard whether anyone touched your site or not. Ask what actions were taken, not what the tool printed.
The common pattern: an SEO does real work in month one, gets the rankings up, then collects the same fee for months while the report stays flat. The report is the smokescreen.
RUN THIS YOURSELF
Pull the keyword report and sort by search volume. Cross out every term with a branded name or near-zero volume. Whatever rows survive are the only rankings worth paying for — and the only ones a young agency owner should ever report to a client.
Read The Real Search Terms
For Mr. Clean, “Baltimore power washing” sat in position four — three competitors ahead — pulling roughly 13 visits on 150 monthly searches. That is a concrete, valuable term. Branded searches do not count: when someone types your business name, they are navigating, not discovering you.
Know Where You Actually Rank
“We rank number one” means nothing until you ask where. Google shows web results, Maps, images, video, news, People Also Ask, and Local Service Ads — and you can rank in one while being invisible in another. For a local business, the map pack is more powerful than the blue links.
If you rank third in organic but nowhere in the top three of Maps, that is the problem to fix. If your SEO only ever shows you organic rankings, ask why the other surfaces are missing.
| What the report says | What to ask instead | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| “Average position 12.6” | On which high-volume terms? | Averages hide junk keywords |
| “We rank #1” | In Maps, images, or just web? | Map pack drives local calls |
| “4,000 backlinks” | How many have real DR and traffic? | Spam links can hurt you |
| “Ranks on 300 keywords” | Do they convert to calls? | Garbage keywords book no jobs |
Inspect The Pages And URLs
Open the pages that rank. If the headings just inject a keyword and a city name — “pressure washing in [City]” copied across town after town — the page was written for a search engine, not a customer. That tactic worked for twenty years; it is fragile now.
Many sites are built as duplicate SEO landing pages: same header, same look, swap “Baltimore residential” for “Baltimore commercial.” You can earn far more traffic by adding real SERP features and a mix of rich media — a tweet, a video, internal links that pass authority between pages.
Audit The Backlinks For Spam
One audited site showed 4,000 backlinks. Look closer and most had a domain rating of one, two, or zero — no traffic, no keyword value. Some pointed in from unrelated fake sites (“Lancaster Restorations,” “accident attorney Allentown”) built only to game Google.
Google reads those associations as spam and can drag your site down with them. This is the same risk that EEAT — experience, expertise, authority, trust is designed to protect against: real signals from real, related sites.
RUN THIS YOURSELF
In any backlink tool, sort referring domains by domain rating, ascending. If the bottom of the list is a wall of DR 0–2 sites with names unrelated to the client’s industry, flag them for a Google Search Console disavow. Showing an owner that list is the fastest way to prove their old SEO was buying spam.
Build Real Links And Real Content
Legitimate links come from authoritative, topically related sites. Write a guest post for a friend in the trade. Recap what you learned at an industry conference for an association or magazine. That is link building that survives every algorithm update.
Feed it with content that starts as video. Collect 15-second clips of your crew on real jobs and what the customer says afterward, turn each into a post, and distribute it to LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, Facebook, and X. SEO is just pouring authority from one cup to the next — and the local signals you send by linking to other real businesses in your area beat any fake network. The sequencing follows the MAA framework: measure the gap, analyze the cause, then act in order.
THE DELIVERABLE
Find Out What Your SEO Person Is Really Doing
We will pull your rankings, backlinks, and pages apart the same way we did for Mr. Clean — and tell you which numbers are real and which are smoke.
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is the CEO of Local Service Spotlight, a platform that amplifies the reputations of contractors and local service businesses using the Content Factory process. He is a former search engine engineer who has spent a billion dollars on Google and Facebook ads for Nike, Quiznos, Ashley Furniture, Red Bull, State Farm, and other brands.
Dennis has achieved 25% of his goal of creating a million digital marketing jobs by partnering with universities, professional organizations, and agencies. Through Local Service Spotlight, he teaches the Dollar a Day strategy and Content Factory training to help local service businesses enhance their existing local reputation and make the phone ring.
Dennis coaches young adult agency owners serving plumbers, AC technicians, landscapers, roofers, electricians, and believes there should be a standard in measuring local marketing efforts, much like doctors and plumbers must be certified.