Posted by Marta Turek

‘How high is your SEO staff turnover rate?’ – It may not be something that everyone would think to ask a potential SEO firm, but perhaps it should be one of the first questions posed when commissioning SEO services.

If a company has a high turnover rate, this has serious implications for both the client as well as the team that remains and constantly has to absorb employees leaving and new members coming on board.

SEO Team Dropping Like Flies?
The SEO industry is in a unique position in this worldwide recession. In many parts of the world, SEO services are in very high demand, competition is rife and SEO businesses continue to spring up. (Perhaps not at the rate of mushrooms like in the social media industry, but growth remains).

This means that if staff is not happy in their current company, leaving, may still be an option, unlike in many other industries in which people are clinging to their jobs. In SEO the hours are long, the work can be thankless and self-appointed directors, hungry for growth in their personal enterprise can be relentless and unforgiving.

So in an industry in which employees still have options, one could say there is a close correlation between job satisfaction and the decision to leave. It could almost be described as an inversely proportional relationship, in that the lower one’s job satisfaction, the higher the propensity to leave.

Constantly losing employees and gaining new team members is a very high cost activity because the business constantly needs to recruit and then cover the learning, lower productivity and risk costs of the new employees. There is simply no way that a new employee can match the productivity of the existing team and in turn, the new member weighs down on the team because they must teach the new player the ropes.

A Domino Effect
Even though in-house, losing team members has a profound effect on workload and team morale, from a value perspective it is the client who feels the strain of this loss most keenly. If an account manager or first point of contact is leaving the company, this creates a great deal of work and frustration for the client.

With a new account manager a relationship needs to be developed, the project rediscussed in detail and more focus & energy reallocated to something that may have been running smoothly for months.

All those things that just ‘clicked’ and worked with the previous account manager are in the past. In many ways it is like starting from square one with the agency, and for some clients it may be drastic enough to change SEO companies – particularly if things had not been going that well!

Big Shoes to Fill
Sometimes when people leave a company, they also leave big shoes to fill. The first point of contact on any project is the key link between the in-house team and the client.

It is very easy for the director or business development manager to make all kinds of promises to the client, but it is the operational team, who handle the daily ins and outs of the project that will differentiate one agency from another.

The truth is, people expect to be swept off their feet by the business development manager. Through a combination of rapport, client business understanding and a solid business proposal, clients quickly sift through the list to come down to their top picks. The real clincher and indicator of agency professionalism is how the project takes off once the SEO company has taken the client’s money.

You cannot have a solid agency with a well-orchestrated team if it has a staff turnover rate akin to the hospitality industry. It is simply not possible to meet client objectives when those objectives become increasingly diluted via a constant knowledge transferral to new account managers. The client objectives start to sound like a bad game of ‘broken telephone’.

Furthermore, newly appointed account managers may be less experienced and possess a poorer business acumen to correctly interpret your company’s vision and goals. If this is the case or the handover process was not properly implemented, this may create knowledge gaps that will ultimately affect the quality and implementation of the project.

If you are thinking of working with an SEO agency, ask them about their staff turnover rate before considering their services. This may save you hours of frustration and unnecessarily dancing on thin ice as you constantly have to explain company objectives and project goals to new account managers who may just not get it; and fall through the cracks!

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 8:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Marta Turek has been involved in the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry since 2007. She spent her first 2 years working at an SEM agency in Melbourne, Australia. It was in that time, working closely with clients that her passion developed for educating people and helping them gain a broader understanding of SEM. An advocate of SEO standards, she shares her perspective on her blog: http://semstreetcred.com.