I stop looking at rankings and traffic early on, because those are lagging. The stuff that moves first is in Search Console. Impressions and average position on your long-tail queries start shifting weeks before clicks do, that is your earliest real signal. Watch the number of distinct queries you rank for climbing too, even at page 3 or 4, it means Google is starting to trust the pages.
Other early tells: index coverage growing (are new pages actually getting indexed and staying), and crawl frequency picking up in your logs or the GSC crawl stats. If Google is crawling you more often, it has decided you are worth revisiting.
If impressions and indexed pages are climbing, you are moving in the right direction even while traffic is flat. If they are dead after a month, something is wrong regardless of what your rank tracker says.
