How to Scale Your SEO Business Without Losing Control

The challenge of growing your SEO agency as the business gets more sophisticated boils down to two things:

• Acquiring clients.
• Keeping the churn rate low.

Even more important, behind those business chunks are your two main assets – people and time, the crucial unit economics you have as an agency, and tricky resources to measure.

Although everyone knows the old business adage that what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get done, there is a lot of complexity to handle: new clients, current clients, project teams, departments, hours and revenue, etc.

And the harsh reality is that growth may come in bursts that can leave your agency understaffed or push your current team to burnout.

But an abstract, complex environment can be simplified with the right processes in place.

That’s why setting KPIs and creating operational flows to keep you accountable becomes a competitive advantage and a sure way to achieve those business targets for you and your clients:

• You’ll know how your qualifying process is actually faring.
• You’ll be able to assess the agency’s growth and future potential.
• You’ll know when it’s time to hire new people or refresh the tool stack.

To stay in control of your agency’s growth journey and know exactly what’s the next step, here are crucial points to consider, as seen from our in-depth talk with Petar Jovetic, Head of SEO at Impression.

Measure Your Client Portfolio Performance

The agency business model implies working with a retainer and maintaining clients satisfied so they don’t leave for another agency.

But what does retention translate to?

One way to look at it is in terms of the client’s business health:

• Sessions and conversions achieved due to your SEO efforts.
• Engagement metrics from each monthly reporting meeting.
• How the SEO objective looks (progress tracked) since the beginning of your collaboration.

Jovetic highlights the importance of developing a measurement plan for each client that is agreed upon from the beginning and evaluated against the set business and SEO objectives. This is part of a bigger client management process that Impression uses, which implies:

• A Brand & Channel strategic document that is “a living thing” and takes into account the client’s industry, targets, users, etc.
• Monthly reviews to track progress and adjust tactics if needed: looking at simple and efficient KPIs (CTRs, conversions, organic traffic growth, and, of course, revenue).
• Quarterly business reviews which offer the chance to review the initial 12 months roadmap and even discuss additional budget (depending on further growth opportunities and the speed of progress towards the objective timeframes set) – “There is a segment for creative thinking,” Jovetic adds, where the agency can get proactive with spotted opportunities.

Then, a simple and effective metric to evaluate is the monthly recurring revenue (MRR), tied to each client and tracked against their health. You need to be able to answer such questions as:

• Is their campaign on the right track?
• Is the SEO objective on track or at risk?
• How would their churn affect the agency’s revenue?

SEOmonitor’s agency dashboard allows you to segment your client portfolio by MRR and zoom into it at a campaign level, so you know which clients are in good, average, or bad health – a feature that Jovetic considers to support the consistency of monitoring and evaluating your agency’s KPIs.