How do we measure success?
This is one hard question to ask yourself as an SEO agency.
With a complex business model, including multiple departments, clients, and projects to align, and a monthly recurring revenue to secure, setting measurable objectives and keeping yourself accountable as an agency may sound like a herculean task.
As you need to drive value to your clients, it’s usually their objectives that make the agenda first.
Yet, a fully designed strategic process from point 0 also means improved efficiency and better strategic results – you know what you want to measure and how to go about it to achieve it.
That’s where the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework comes in handy.
Derived from the Management by Objectives legacy (Peter Drucker) and fully developed at Intel in the 1970s, the management methodology became a favorite of tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Uber to set ambitious goals and make them happen in a systematic way.
After all, it was John Doerr, one of the key persons in designing the Google OKR process, who said: “Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”
And, to ensure proper execution for your agency, whether you’re just getting started or you want to try OKRs in a different way, here’s what you need to know:
The OKR Process in Action
As with any good framework, there’s a simple theory behind it and a lot of practice to do, to customize it for your business context:
- Objectives represent what the company wants to accomplish in a given timeframe – they need to be ambitious, qualitative, and focused on bringing value to the business.
- Key results represent how you’ll accomplish those objectives in a specific, concrete, measurable way – they’re also trackable.
Based on Doerr’s formula “I will (Objective) as measured by (Key Results),” you can go ahead and start developing them:
- You need to set 3-5 company objectives for the year and/or for each quarter with your leadership team.
- Then each department sets 3-5 objectives that tie-in to the company objectives set by the leadership team.
- The final tier is the individual 3-5 objectives set between managers and their teams that contribute to each department and the company objectives.
- Each objective has a set of 2-5 key results – that always include numbers.
“What I’ve seen work best with agencies and setting up OKRs, is making sure that the business goals drive what the OKRs are,” says Michelle McCourt, PR Manager at 15five. “These direct and keep people on course, but structure from leadership is needed to encourage people to perform at peak productivity. So, if your company’s goals include growing your client base and being a successful partner for your clients, build your OKR structure to fit that in. For example, grow client base by XX%, or retain XX% of clients. Then, everyone’s personal OKRs can ladder up.”
Or, as Christina Wodtke highlights in Radical Focus, you need to balance the three main ingredients:
- Setting inspiring and measurable goals.
- Making sure that the team is progressing towards desired goals.
- Setting a cadence for these goals.
How to Use the Objective & Key Results Framework for Your Agency
Let’s dive deeper and see how agencies we’ve talked with use the process.
You’ll see there are different ways to make it work for you, all having their various merits: treating your agency as the client and measuring accordingly, keeping your agency accountable with client OKRs or using OKRs to drive innovation for a specific branch of your agency business.
Treat Your Agency as a Client and Set OKRs in Line With Your Vision
If you want to effectively define what success looks like for your agency, then treat yourself as a client and set up your environment accordingly, as Aaron Dicks, Managing Director for Impression Digital, advises.
That can mean creating goals for your marketing and business development teams, with key results such as increasing discovery calls by 20% or delivering x no. of discovery calls this quarter to more focused ones like monthly performance of targeted agency keywords or link building performance based on your PR endeavors.
“Determine how you want to measure yourself as an agency and what success means for you and then measure against it,” Impression’s Director adds. Having a benchmark to aim for focuses your team on the quality of actions and results, while delivering structure to your business processes.
Maybe you want to develop a certain client vertical or rank in the top 3 for agency keywords in your region – whatever you set to achieve, you now have something measurable and trackable.
Plus, as Dicks adds, setting quarterly OKRs, you have enough time to make a difference, but it doesn’t interact directly with the annual strategy, leaving room for experiments and lessons learned from one cycle to the next.
The OKRs process encourages that after all – so learning from failed key results and objectives is crucial to scaling your efforts.
It’s also something to get comfortable with, as Luke Fitzgerald, Founder of RightFitz, mentions: “In a scoring system from 0.1 to 1, a 0.3 score can be OK. Although it’s sometimes hard to explain it to the team, if you nail your goals every time, it means you aren’t aiming high enough to challenge you.”
Measurable Objectives & Accountability for Your Client Portfolio
“I will start every customer conversation with the question, ‘What are your objectives?’”, Jeff Lizik, CEO of Redshift, argues when explaining how he adopted the OKRs methodology for the agency’s client portfolio, after discovering it years before in a Google-referencing material.
Starting with the client’s business objectives offers a good foundation to set measurable goals and key results, while keeping the team accountable. It also “ties the strategic to the tactical”, as Lizik adds, creating a roadmap for each client campaign, that is measurable step by step.
As an agency, they go further into the process and create OKRs based on the Annual Planning meetings set with their clients – these OKRs are then owned by each account manager in the team.
Let’s say a client wants to get back on track in 2021, after the pandemic disruption. But what does that mean?
Key results may include optimizing landing page conversions, increasing leads by x% or achieving top 3 positions for local keywords in specific product/services categories. Yet, you may want to include an overarching KPI for this stretch objective and measure revenue as well as a proper indicator for the business getting back on track.
Sometimes, it can be a struggle to formulate measurable goals in the sales phase. Yet business objectives can be “reverse-engineered” and, as an agency, you can be consultative and help your clients identify the right ones for them and connect your SEO performance directly.
To make sure you start with the right benchmarks, a reliable forecasting methodology provides the means to set SEO objectives you can measure against – thus tracking SEO wins and business results (sessions and conversions) all the way.
