Srsly? SEO Expectations, realistic expectations
Often time business SEO stakeholders are not SEO savvy, and therefore might have unrealistic expectations. Education is the key, and relating the SEO efforts is quality reporting.
Stakeholders often look for immediate results in rankings, and that they will maintain a steady curve increase. This isn't the case, report on the incoming traffic, and not the rankings. SEO will increase the organic inbound traffic, and stakeholders can understand this if it's communicated to them.
Stakeholders also often feel that since the research was done on a keyword, the site should rank on that keyword. Certain keywords are more difficult to rank on than others, and the process of the search engine crawling the site varies. There are also a lot of other variables that factor in, and it's not a 100% process. No business process is 100%.
When stakeholders see numbers it sets an unrealistic expectation. The numbers, the rankings and the analytics often set a false sense that the entire process is as sharp, defined and quantitative as the numbers. This isn't the case. I like to relate it to the stock market, it's up and down, but there is a trend. This analogy resonates with a lot of stakeholders.
