Managing SEO Expectations, Part 1: What Your Agency Should Tell You (2019 Archive)

Recorded in July 2019 and published as part of a dated historical record. It reflects how search worked then, not current advice.

What should your SEO expectations be?

Let's go back a few steps and talk about what your expectations in terms of SEO should be. This is something we talk about with clients a lot. Somebody will come to me with a really, really competitive keyword — I'll take an example: we had somebody come to us recently trying to rank worldwide for a keyword in the data industry, a computer-related data issue, and they were up against people like Microsoft and Amazon. You've got to ask yourself: are you going to get past those guys? Unless you want to spend probably millions of pounds doing it, you need to set your expectations differently.

The reason you want to do that is you want to find the traffic that converts. I've had a lot of people come to me wanting vanity — by that I mean they want to be the one that ranks for that keyword. You might be able to rank locally for it, which can be good; an SEO strategy aimed at specific locations can work really well. But if you want to rank nationally for a keyword with a lot of competition and you're not already ranking — well, if you're in the first twenty or thirty on Google it's probably relatively easy to push you onto the first page and into the top three. If you're not ranking at all, and you've got no real weight of site and you're not an authority site already, you'll have to look at a different set of KPIs and different targets.

Why is commitment the hard part?

Google is a moveable feast. You can rank for competitive terms quite quickly depending on the effort you're going to put in. The hard part is having the commitment and the strategy — and actually believing someone when they say "this could literally take a year". Committing to an SEO programme that could take a year is a big ask for a lot of people.

So what we do is take people into what the volumes are. We look at the keywords, the long-tail keywords, the phrases, and the intent — and I've talked a lot about that; intent matters massively. We want quality traffic, not traffic that comes just to look and never converts into business. We look for keywords where there's search volume, and at the competition level and how hard it's going to be to rank. A lot of that, honestly, is a feeling — my personal experience, looking at all the factors around a brand, a phrase, the market, the competition, what link profiles they've got, what they're doing on social media, whether they're producing video. It's not an exact science. There are probably at least 200 key factors Google is considering when it tries to rank your page.

Why did I turn down £15,000 a month?

The one thing I hate: some agencies will lie. They'll just say "yeah, we'll rank you for that". They're not being realistic. You've got to be realistic with your targets, look at your competition, and focus on the traffic — the quality of the traffic, and the return on investment. We're always talking to people in those terms: you're going to put this much in, this is the traffic we'll achieve from it, this number of sales, this number of new customers. We assign a value to the sale and a value to the new customer, and then you can get to a return on investment. My background, originally — before the web started, before I got into building websites and SEO — I was an accountant. I love the data; everything I do is built off the back of it.

Don't let your SEO agency tell you it's not their fault, it's Google's fault. They should be transparent. If they're not talking to you honestly and you don't feel you're getting anywhere in search, it's probably the case that you're up against too much competition on a particular keyword.

I turned down, believe it or not, a piece of SEO business recently that I could have sold at £15,000 a month. I went to the client and said: this is not the strategy you want to employ. They had the money to spend. Maybe I'm mad, but I'm principled — we should not take money off people if we can't achieve the results. I then said to them: there's a different strategy here, it'll cost you a couple of grand a month, and this is the way forward. Once you start ranking for these keywords, then we can look at the ones that are more important. Often, creating a new term and a new set of phrases, promoting them and getting them into use around your brand, will be far more valuable than going after a keyword that's already saturated with three or four massive players in it.

Look — if you've got a big keyword, people could be paying £10, £15, £20 a click, sometimes more, to be in the ad positions, and spending tens of thousands a month on SEO to be in the organic ones. Your best case is to get onto the first page — and even if the volume is hundreds of thousands a month, the majority gets soaked up by the top seven or eight places. If you've not got a realistic chance of getting in there, be honest: you will not achieve it. Find the other terms and phrases you can rank for, and the other methods — video, questions and answers, social. Use all of those tools to get the traffic, rather than an SEO strategy where in six months' time an agency is telling you "we've tried, we're getting there, we'll get there next month, Google's changed the algorithm" — or they've locked you into a long contract. I meet a lot of people who've had their fingers burned on SEO and feel it's like piracy. There are SEO companies out there that don't do a lot more than the on-page work and a bit of link building, and they're not being honest with their customers.

How do you work backwards from sales?

Think about what you want to achieve. Set a set of KPIs in terms of sales, work backwards from that, and speak to someone who'll tell you how to drive it. Picking the right keywords is key, and that's a research piece — and to be fair, you shouldn't be charged for it. An initial couple of hours going through where the volumes are, what the phrases are, and getting to know someone's business should be free as far as I'm concerned. That bit of advice has saved many, many companies tens of thousands of pounds of wasted SEO money — just by spending a couple of hours with them and setting the strategy in the right direction in the first place.