SEO Goals, KPI’s & Managing Client Expectations – Part 2

This is part 2 of a series of posts looking at SEO Goals, KPI’s & Managing Client Expectations – if you didn’t catch the first post, you might want to go and have a look at part 1 first.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Whilst the goal of nearly all campaigns is ultimately to get it making money, at a decent ROI, there are many measures that clients use to keep of how they perceive a campaign is performing.

An aside here – What an SEO Manager and a Client perceive as the nature of a successful campaign can be very different. As an SEO, you can look at individual measures of a campaigns success with one set of eyes, whilst I client can see them very differently, or even just be indifferent to these measures. Again, what a client ultimately wants from working with an SEO Agency is a return on that investment, and making that as soon as possible.

Ultimately the success of any SEO campaign will be measured by their perception of a campaigns performance – not yours. It’s important to relay to clients your successes that lead to them generating business as and when it happens – it’s your responsibility to keep them informed of what more you are doing to achieve their business goals.

It’s also your responsibility to make sure that they perceive what has been achieved, as steps to these goals and KPIs that have been set. If you don’t communicate these items to a client until many months down the line when you are fighting to retain their business – if goals have only been half met, then it’s too late.

Communication is also key – It’s happened to me that clients change the specific KPIs that they are measuring by without them telling you, and it’s important to communicate effectively and regularly with your clients to continually re-assess how they perceive that a campaign is performing.

Perception of results and clear and concise communication between campaign manager and client are essential to ensure the smooth running of a relationship. When this is done properly it can run into long lasting partnerships.

A lot of my skills in talking to clients, listening to their concerns and queries, and providing them with the best possible customer service ultimately come from having a background in retail – and you have to give a client good customer service, as this is a major part of what forms their perception of how successful a campaign has been.

Many times when I work on a client that has previously worked with an SEO Company, quality of work wasn’t always the reason that they stopped working with that particular company – more often than not, the things that had been achieved on a campaign hadn’t been effectively enough communicated to them, for them to understand exactly what had been achieved.

So, what are some of the metrics that have been set as KPI’s for some of the campaigns that I have worked on:

1. PageRank
2. Page Views – Whilst these aren’t important to everyone, for some sites they are essential.
3. Bounce Rates
4. Link Popularity / Number of Links
5. Rankings
6. Search Engine Traffic (direct targeted keywords)
7. Search Engine Traffic (additionally generated by the long tail)
8. Conversion Rates

There are reasons to track all of these metrics, but the one that ultimately matters is conversion, and the revenue that a website takes – something that at times SEOs can struggle to influence as much as they would like, as they don’t have full control of those sites, to ensure prominent calls to action are properly in place and whether or not the marketing copy is compelling enough.

What other things have other folks been measured by – lets hear some particularly outlandish ones?

Look out for part 3 of this series, looking at managing client expectations next week…