The phrase ‘SEO’ covers an enormous amount of ground, and SEO companies vary so widely in what they actually deliver that the question ‘what does an SEO company actually do’ is a fair one to ask. The honest answer is that a competent SEO company does five or six concrete things — technical work on the site, on-page optimisation, content production, link and authority building, AI citation engineering for the new answer-engine surfaces, and reporting that ties activity to outcomes — and a less competent one does fewer of these well, more of them in a vague ‘we are doing SEO’ way, and tends to lean on activity reports rather than business-outcome reports.
This article walks through the actual deliverable categories an SEO company should be producing each month, what real work looks like inside each category, and how to evaluate from the outside whether the agency you have hired is doing the work or is filling the monthly report with busywork. The goal is to give you the language to ask sharper questions and the criteria to read the answers honestly.
Key Takeaways
- A competent SEO company delivers across five or six categories: technical SEO, on-page optimisation, content strategy and production, link building and authority, AI citation engineering, and reporting that ties work to outcomes.
- AI citation engineering (AEO/GEO work) is the newer category — entity work, schema, direct-answer formatting, multi-LLM measurement — that targets being cited inside AI-generated answers rather than just ranked in the classical SERP.
- The honest test of whether your SEO company is doing real work: ask for the deliverable inventory each month, the rationale, and the connection to a measurable outcome. If the answers are vague or activity-only, the work probably is too.
Technical SEO: the foundation underneath everything
Technical SEO is the work that ensures a website is crawlable, indexable, fast, and structurally sound enough for search engines to read and rank it. It is the unglamorous half of the discipline and the half that most matters when something is broken — a site with technical problems will not rank no matter how good the content is, because the content is not reaching the index in a usable form.
The concrete deliverables: site architecture review (URL structure, internal linking depth, hub-and-spoke organisation), indexing audits (which pages are in Google’s index, which are not, and why), Core Web Vitals work (LCP, INP, CLS — the page-experience metrics Google uses as ranking signals), schema markup implementation (Article, Product, FAQPage, Organization schema that gives search engines structured signals about page content), canonical and hreflang setup (for sites with international or duplicate-content concerns), XML sitemap and robots.txt configuration, and ongoing crawl-error monitoring.
An SEO company doing technical work well will produce a technical audit at engagement start that lists prioritised issues with severity ratings, fix them in collaboration with the development team, and re-audit on a regular cadence (quarterly is typical) to catch regressions. If your monthly report contains no technical work and no technical issues, either the site is genuinely flawless (rare) or no one is looking — both worth understanding.
On-page optimisation: turning the foundation into ranking-ready pages
On-page optimisation is the page-level work that makes individual URLs competitive for the queries they target. It sits on top of the technical foundation and feeds the content production work — every page that goes live should have on-page choices made deliberately, not as afterthoughts.
The concrete deliverables: title tag optimisation (writing titles that contain the primary query, are within the display character limit, and make sense to humans), meta description writing (the snippet that appears in search results, written to earn clicks), heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3 structure that maps to the page’s semantic outline), internal linking (which pages link to which, with what anchor text, building topical authority and distributing link equity), URL structure (clean, readable URLs that contain the primary keyword), image optimisation (alt text, file naming, compression), and content formatting choices (paragraph length, list structure, table use) that affect both readability and feature-snippet eligibility.
The work shows up in monthly reports as ‘pages optimised’ counts and the before-and-after of specific page-level metrics — ranking changes, click-through rate from search results, time on page. A SEO company that says ‘we did on-page optimisation’ without naming which pages, what changed, and what moved is not giving you enough to evaluate the work.
Content strategy and production: the bulk of visible output
Content production is where most SEO budget visibly goes — the articles, landing pages, hub pages, and resource pieces that get written each month and published to the site. The strategy that sits behind it determines whether the content compounds into rankings or gets buried as undifferentiated noise.
The concrete deliverables: keyword research and prioritisation (which queries to target, in what order, with what content type), content briefs (the structured plan for each piece — primary keyword, secondary keywords, target word count, sections required, sources to reference), the writing itself (in-house writers, contract writers, or some combination — the SEO company should be transparent about who is writing), editorial review and SEO formatting, publishing and indexing follow-up, and refresh work on existing content (updating older pieces to maintain relevance and rankings).
Real content strategy targets keyword clusters with intent and depth — not the 1,500-word generic article that says nothing concrete. A pattern that signals competence: the content briefs identify primary keyword, search intent, the questions the page must answer, the entities it must mention, and the structural choices (FAQ section, comparison table, step-by-step list) that match the query type. A pattern that signals bulk-content fulfilment: ‘we publish four articles per month’ with no visible briefs, no rationale for topic selection, and no measurable rank movement.
Link building, authority, and AI citation engineering
The trust layer of SEO has two components in 2026: classical link building (the earned and editorial backlinks that signal authority to search engines) and AI citation engineering (the newer work that targets being cited inside AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews).
Classical link building deliverables: digital PR (pitching original research, data, or commentary to publications that link back), guest posting on credible industry sites, broken-link reclamation, unlinked-mention conversion (turning brand mentions into links), and partnership content with adjacent businesses. The honest version of this work is slow and expensive — five high-quality earned links in a month is good output for most niches; thirty ‘links’ that turn out to be private blog network placements or spammy directories is bad output disguised as productive activity.
AI citation engineering — sometimes called AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) or GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) — is the parallel discipline that targets the AI surfaces. The deliverables: entity discipline (consistent naming and structured data for the brand, products, and concepts the site covers), direct-answer content formatting (FAQ sections, summary leads, citation-grade structure), schema markup that AI extractors can read, and ongoing multi-LLM citation tracking using tools like Profound, Otterly, or AthenaHQ to measure how often the brand appears across AI-generated answers. A SEO company that has not added this category to its 2026 deliverable mix is operating with a 2022 service definition and will leave AI citation real estate to whichever competitor is doing the work.
Reporting: the test of whether the work connects to outcomes
Reporting is where the rest of the work either justifies itself or does not. A monthly SEO report should answer three questions clearly: what was delivered this month, what moved as a result, and what is happening next month and why.
The deliverables a competent monthly report contains: deliverable inventory (the concrete list of what was produced — pages optimised, articles published, links earned, technical fixes shipped), ranking changes by query category (commercial head terms, long-tail informational, branded — broken out so you can read the trends rather than averaging them into meaninglessness), organic traffic and conversion contribution (sessions from organic, conversions attributed to organic, the trend across months), AI citation tracking where applicable (citation count and share of voice across the answer engines), technical issues identified and resolved (the operational maintenance), and next-cycle priorities with rationale (what is being worked on next month and why that is the right priority).
The red flags to read for: vanity metrics presented in isolation (impressions up 40% means nothing if traffic and conversions are flat), keyword-rank lists that select for the easy wins and hide the commercial losses, opaque deliverable summaries (‘we did SEO work this month’), and reports that do not connect activity to a business outcome. If you cannot read your monthly report and understand what was bought, what moved, and why, the report is failing its job — and the work behind it might be too.
How to evaluate from the outside: the questions that surface real work
If you have an SEO company already and want to evaluate whether the work is real, ask the questions that force concreteness. Vague answers are the diagnostic.
The questions worth asking: ‘Show me the deliverable inventory for last month — which pages were optimised, which articles were published, which links were earned, which technical fixes shipped.’ ‘For the top three commercial keywords we care about, what is the rank trend over the last six months and what is driving it?’ ‘Which of our pages are not in Google’s index, and why?’ ‘How are we showing up in AI Overviews and Perplexity for our category queries — what is being measured and what is the trend?’ ‘Walk me through next month’s plan — what is the priority and why is that the priority?’
Competent SEO companies answer these specifically and quickly because the answers are the work they are already doing. Less competent companies pivot to general claims about ‘SEO is a long-term game’ or ‘we are seeing improvements across the board’ without the specifics. The pattern is consistent enough to be diagnostic. SEO is concrete work — site changes, content published, links earned, ranks moved — and the people doing it well can show their work in detail. The people who cannot show their work in detail are usually not doing it.
Conclusion
What an SEO company actually does, when it is doing the work well, is six concrete things in parallel: technical SEO, on-page optimisation, content production, link and authority building, AI citation engineering, and reporting that ties the activity to outcomes. The work is concrete, it shows up in deliverable inventories and measurable changes, and a competent agency can describe what it is doing in specifics rather than slogans.
The honest test for any SEO engagement is whether you can read the monthly report and understand what was bought, what moved, and what is happening next. If you can, the work is probably real. If you cannot, that is the diagnostic — ask the sharper questions, and read the answers for whether they get more specific or stay vague.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does an SEO company actually do day-to-day?
How do I know if my SEO company is actually doing work?
What should an SEO company produce in the first 90 days?
Should an SEO company also do AI SEO (AEO/GEO) work in 2026?
What is the difference between SEO and content marketing?
How much technical SEO should an SEO company be doing each month?
How do I know if the rankings my SEO company shows me are meaningful?
For deeper coverage on agency evaluation criteria, what to ask when hiring, and how to read SEO reports honestly, see further reading on this site, or enquire now.
