SEO Agencies Survey: How the Way We Measure Success Damages the Results We Deliver?

Among 40 agencies that participated in this survey, the majority (70%) are small enterprises, with an employee headcount ranging from 5 to 10 employees. The rest 30 percent is gradually distributed among larger companies:

• agencies with 10-25 employees (15%);
• agencies with 26-50 employees (10%);
• agencies with over 50 employees (5%).

When it comes to the set of services provided by our respondents’ agencies, the Top-3 positions are On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Technical SEO with 27%, 26%, and 23% respectively. Rather novel services like Voice Search SEO, as well as non-directly SEO-related services like Content and PPC, are equally represented at an approximate rate of 8%.

The top-3 positions are presented by agencies from the US (37.5%), Germany (12.5%), and the UK (10%). The rest of the results are distributed across Europe (20%), North America (10%), Asia (7.5%), and Oceania (2.5%).

This section provides deeper insights into the client companies’ headcount, the industries they operate within, as well as the approach agencies, use to generate leads and sales.

Top-3 positions in clients’ company size are Small (10-49 employees), Medium (50-249) and Large (250+) enterprises with 32.5%, 30% and 22.5% respectively.

Agencies that provide services to the microenterprise segment (1-9 employees) and individuals are presented by 10% and 5% respectively.

Top-3 positions in the clients’ industry are IT, E-commerce, and B2B, represented by 20.6%, 11.8%, and 10.8% respectively. The next two positions are shared between Tech and Healthcare (7.8% each), followed by Fashion and SaaS (5.9%).

Retail, Education, Marketing, and Food&Bev clients together account for another 29.4% of agencies’ clients.

Half of the respondents have mentioned they do not have a fully functioning sales department. Among the other half, 19 agencies have mentioned they have their sales needs met by an in-house team and only a single agency representative told them they outsource their sales processes.

More than half (60%) of respondents told that inbound channels have performed better than Outbound in 2021. 27.5% have evaluated both channels’ performance equally, while only 12.5% have marked Outbound as the best performing channel.

This section is a deeper dive into the work aspects that stand behind the SEO campaigns, provided by respondents’ agencies. Do they prioritize Global SEO over Local? How does their performance match the budgets? What ranking factors are worth the attention most?

When asked about how agencies allocate their resources when delivering their campaigns, we have seen close to equal distribution with:

• 37.5% of agencies focusing on Global SEO
• 32.5% focusing on Local SEO
• 30% mentioning they allocate resources to both of these vectors equally

During our survey, we have noticed a slight inequality between the results delivered to clients during SEO campaigns and the budgets, spent on SEO:

When it comes to the resource allocation during an SEO campaign, we have noticed a stronger correlation between the time spent and the metrics agencies use to measure success, than there is between resource spending and ranking factors.

Basically, agencies spend more time improving the measurement metrics they present to their client, than metrics they believe influence most on website ranking.

For instance, ¼ of respondents have marked content freshness as the most influential ranking factor, while only 6.8% of respondents admitted to spending most of their time on On-page SEO endeavors.

While 19.4% stated Domain age and authority are major ranking factors, only 7.6% spend most of their resources on Technical SEO improvements.

Moreover, 18.5% of agencies believe that Mobile-friendliness is a crucial ranking factor, only 6.8% combined spend big or moderate amounts of time on Mobile SEO (2% spending most of their time, 4.8% spend moderate amounts).

As mentioned above, we have seen a much clearer correlation between time spending and the core success metrics agencies use.

With over 43% using keyword rankings as a measure of campaign success, 14.8% of respondents combined spend most or moderate amounts of time on Keyword research.
With over 27% marking Conversion and goal events, only slightly above 9% spend their time on Audience research and almost 7% on Local SEO.

Using the right toolset is one of the ultimate features of a highly-skilled SEO professional. It’s all about what kind of data one gets and how one can use it to improve performance. In this section, we are trying to determine an ideal SEO tool for agencies.

A staggering majority of 80% of agencies have admitted they are using more than 3 SEO tools to meet their goals.

Among the core criteria when choosing a suitable SEO tool, agencies have marked Data Accuracy and Feature Variety to be the most important (26.8% and 21.5% respectively).

Among others, we can see that Versatility and Data Volume are sharing 3rd position with 12.5% percent of respondents.

UX, Teamwork availability, and Price are placed in the last 3 positions, with 10.7%, 8.9%, and 7.1% respectively.

What was the most challenging in 2021? Will the most recent major updates influence the competition in the SEO niche? To what extent are agencies ready for innovation?

Among the major challenges in 2021, agencies have outlined 4 major ones:

• Scaling processes (19,4%);
• Lack of resources (19,4%);
• Budget cuts (19,4%);
• Pandemic-related issues (17,7%).

When it comes to the changes that agencies perceive to be potentially harmful to their performance, the Google Page Experience update was chosen by 37.5% of respondents.

Almost 60% of respondents are sure that the Google Page Experience update is going to have a significant impact on the SEO services market, while 35% believe that the changes are going to be drastic.

While 25% of respondents believe Zero-click SERPs are going to be a major performance threat in the future, only 27.5% are implementing some strategies to adapt to this change. Another 22.5% are developing a Zero-click SERP strategy soon, but don’t have any yet.

40% of respondents have admitted they haven’t started working on it, yet they are planning to do it soon.

While intent satisfaction was mentioned neither in last year’s challenges nor in potential productivity threats, almost half of respondents have mentioned they have developed an intent satisfaction improvement strategy and are currently implementing it.

85% of respondents believe that E-A-T content principles are going to become even more influential in 2022, with 32.5% believing the changes are going to be drastic.

However, according to our experts, this update is not equally important for every niche. Some content categories are going to be affected more than others, while Google is taking action to verify content creators’ trustworthiness.

Serpstat is a go-to SEO platform, trusted by 400,000 users worldwide, from freelance SEO consultants to corporate SEO teams, including Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, Rakuten Viber, Philips, ESET, and Samsung.

We take pride in how versatile and multi-faceted our platform is. It fulfills SEO specialists’ needs including competitor analysis, keyword research for both organic and paid traffic, tracking rank positions, and backlinks of any website, anytime.

In addition, Serpstat provides a set of more than 30 tools for link building, text analytics, clustering, website error detection, and fixes, boosted by our recommendations section.

We pay special attention to agencies among our clients, providing better solutions for:

• lead generation and campaign pitching,
• projects maintenance and reporting,
• workload management and teamwork.

Despite SEO mechanics undergoing major changes and potentially threatening agencies’ performance, SEO specialists have a tight grip on what’s going on and are proactively searching for potential solutions.


However, both in the work process and adaptation to the future, there is a clear inconsistency. Agencies tend to focus on improving the metrics they can showcase to the clients while ignoring the activities that will actually improve website rankings. At the same time, while seeing clear threats in the Google Page Experience update, agencies seem to allocate more resources adapting to Zero-click SERPs and intent satisfaction.

We are not stating these decisions are wrong, however. There is no one-fits-all solution and according to our experts, all of those changes “will be a factor until all sites adopt it, and then it'll just be an even playfield for everyone. The same thing happened with HTTPS as a ranking factor”.

With a mixture of the right tools and a client-oriented approach — agencies will be able to adapt to all the changes and thrive on “an even playfield for everyone”.