Manage expectations

If your company decides to embrace SEO to augment its marketing efforts, managing expectations among key players will be fundamental to success. Everyone with a stake in improving and maintaining the website needs to be on board during the planning stage and agree to the goals set forth. Some of the players to include in SEO improvement planning are executives responsible for the overall business outcome, marketing staff and content developers, the webmaster/programmer, and the web designer.
Whatever changes you make to your site will not occur overnight. This message must be understood by the SEO team to avoid confusion and misunderstandings later. SEO is a long-term project implemented and tweaked over time and everyone on the team needs to agree they are in it for the long haul. The reason expectations must be managed is that, even with carefully laid out plans, you’ll be at the mercy of search engine crawlers coming to your site in their own sweet time to pick up on the enhancements and improvements you’ve made. There are a lot of variables you can improve, but there are a lot of variables simply out of your hands.
Developing benchmarks as the basis for the SEO plan will help the improvement team understand your site’s current level of performance and will create a starting point for developing realistic goals to measure.