Aleyda Solis ran a super interesting poll on Twitter asking SEOs about their SEO project success rate. She asked "what percentage of the SEO Processes/Projects/Initiative that you work at end up having the "agreed/expected outcome" & are seen as a "success" by the client/stakeholders?"
As you can imagine, the results are pretty much all over the place. Only 14% said that 85% of their projects, in their client eyes, are considered a successful SEO outcome. 22.5% said less than 30% of their SEO projects are considered successful by their clients.
Here is the poll results:
SEOs: What percentage of the SEO Processes/Projects/Initiative that you work at end up having the "agreed/expected outcome" & are seen as a "success" by the client/stakeholders?
— Aleyda Solis 👩🏻💻 (@aleyda) August 4, 2021
If you're a consultant: Consider each client/project.
If you're in-house: consider each initiative.
I don't know - I mean, I don't do SEO and this is one reason why I don't. If I take on a project, I want to be able to 100% deliver on the results. With SEO, while I may know it super well, there is no way for me to guarantee the outcome because of all the variables associated with it. I know a lot of SEOs make sure the deliverables are measured in a way that they can control, but still.
SEOs deserve a lot of credit to be able to handle this type of stress. The stress of having a nice portion of your clients and projects not result in a "successful" result in the eyes of the person paying you for it.
Forum discussion at Twitter.