Nothing beats a good retainer, both from a financial perspective and the ability to plan for the long-term.

I'm not surprised to see retainers drop slightly from the year prior. While it's certainly our preferred way to work, the economic climate has contributed to many clients leaning towards project-based work. Fortunately many of those do turn into retainers for us, but there is more of an appetite to kick off with a project before committing to the longer term, ongoing investment.

The largest growing responses compared to last year are the one-off, fixed fee followed by optional or mandatory retainers for implementation. Anecdotally, we've also seen an increase in clients asking for highly specific case studies or proof of concepts before starting a retainer. Both of these trends point to clients guarding their budgets and being a little more discerning about external partnerships.

Establishing an ongoing retainer for technical SEO work right from the project's onset is crucial, as SEO tasks are rarely one-off. This ensures continuous monitoring, addressing new issues, and ongoing improvement. However, for websites with a large volume of pages, agencies may initially seek one-off technical SEO support before transitioning to a monthly retainer for continuous assistance.

This is an interesting move from last year with fixed and value gaining more traction. Seems like many are looking into productising their audits. Obviously, there are pros and cons to all three models. Time will always play a part in some way. The question is how you present that to the client when pitching.

Time and material based pricing is still the main pricing model I've witnessed, although clients nowadays often wish to know what they get for that time. The more budgets are scrutinised, perhaps value- or delivery-based pricing will become more and more common.

In my opinion, time based pricing is a great model for technical SEO. Many of you will know what sometimes diagnosing technical issues can take longer than planned, and agencies/freelancers should charge for their time.

Technical SEO tasks can indeed contribute significantly to performance improvement, especially in terms of website visibility, user experience, and overall search engine rankings. However, tying technical SEO tasks directly to individual performance improvement can present some challenges due to the nature of these tasks.

This is a wide running theme we've seen across the agency world in the last 12 months. Clients are tightening their belts and want to see strong ROI, which is something technical SEOs as a whole struggle with.

The secret is to ensure we're getting buy-in from all levels of the organisation and that those with control over the purse strings understand what it is we do as SEOs.

It's certainly a mixed bag right now. Fortunately, many companies still see the need to invest in SEO for the long-term and budget cuts I've seen have often been specific (such as bringing content production in-house or cutting out link building because they weren't feeling it had as direct of an impact on revenue as other work). With all the turbulence we're seeing in the organic search landscape (and the world in general) it will be more important than ever to demonstrate SEO's impact on business metrics, not just rankings and traffic, so we don't see the number of budget cuts increase.

I think many agency owners and freelancers will be happy to know that they're not alone with clients cutting budgets. Being clever with pricing, reducing the anxiety of long-term retainers and diversifying not only revenue streams but also services will be key in recovering.

These results demonstrate that the current economic conditions and difficulties we're facing aren't going away anytime soon.

We don't quite know how the industry will look for the next 12 months, but continuing to focus on value and impact will help see us through.

During economic slowdowns, marketing budgets, particularly for SEO, are often impacted first. However, many businesses, especially in the B2B sector, recognize the significance of maintaining or boosting their SEO budgets to secure top positions in organic search results.

I think there's been a huge disparity in the number of In house and agencies that have or have not interacted with AI. Sometimes, it's a cultural thing, where SEOs are afraid of incorporating something new into their day-today.

Getting on top of new AI developments is vital. We know that AI is going to undoubtedly change the industry, so we all need to ensure we have the skills to use AI, otherwise we risk being left behind.

It feels like the SEO industry as a whole is starting to come to some consensus about how we should adjust our roadmaps and workflows based on AI developments. Most folks I talk to seem to feel that at least cautious adoption of new tools is the biggest change to be made.

It's crucial to acknowledge that AI in SEO is still in its early stages and often requires human review and refinement for optimal outcomes. It's reassuring to see that the majority of the community isn't hastily altering their roadmaps, recognizing the limitations of current AI capabilities in this domain.

There are only a few percent of the broader community who express significant concerns about job security. In spite of AI advancements, many of us remain confident that human expertise and adaptability remain crucial to navigating these changes.

We have so many clients asking us for our perspectives and recommendations related to AI developments that it's hard to feel worried about job security.

If anything, I think I'm more confident that this will not impact my job security than I was at the start of 2023 when advances in generative AI really took off. Will it change how I do my job? Of course. But it's become clear that while tools like ChatGPT are incredible tools, they should remain as that — tools to help us do our jobs better, not as replacements, and that getting the most out of this powerful actually takes a new skillset that few have really mastered yet.

Agencies are often at the forefront of industry developments, which can provide reassurance to their teams too when it comes to embracing AI and not seeing it as a thread. The more it's being used and talked about, the better for all teams.

This can be very frustrating for agency teams, where the performance and work quality is great, but something outside of anyone's control is impacting the client's ability to invest. But empathy is key here, and flexibility is crucial with agency/client relationships.

This isn't unexpected considering that budget tightens during economic pressures, and SEO can unfortunately be one of the first areas to be sacrificed.

However, the long-term value of SEO as a marketing strategy shouldn't be underestimated. As an industry, we need to work harder to educate clients on this fact.

Many respondents reported that clients cited these challenges when discussing budgets, which is not surprising. Our engagements with clients have become increasingly dependent on adapting to these economic circumstances and finding ways to navigate them effectively.

It's encouraging to see reactive handling of issues at the bottom of this list as well, since that suggests clients are invested in getting their SEO partners involved in website changes before they become issues to fix.

It would be interesting to see how much of this examination is an audit and how much is spent on ad hoc troubleshooting. We find that the initial audit (and subsequent fuller checks) take time but once that is done it takes much less time. Then it's about incremental improvements and levelling up the UX.

If SEOs are doing their jobs by working proactively and working in line with Google's guidelines, there should be little need to take a reactive approach and handle issues resulting from updates.

Analysing the site regularly is extremely important, regular crawls, traffic checks and other ad hoc checks are an essential part of an SEO's role day-to-day.

Something is still broken if changes take 12+ months. Either the change requested was not important to start with or the impact/benefit has not been communicated. There is still work that needs to be done, obviously, when it comes to aligning agencies with in-house devs. Yes we might never be as effective as in-house teams who have more personal relationships but it's our responsibility to get the job done not just to recommend changes.

Where's the option for "still waiting?"

While this is certainly a frustrating part of the job, it's on us as agency partners to demonstrate the potential impact of our work as well as to match the client's way of working as best as we can. The more you can learn about their product roadmap, opportunities to integrate SEO priorities with their priorities and the best way to communicate SEO needs and requirements to their tech team, the more these timelines decrease.

An excel/google sheet structure is great because it can help highlight all the issues in one place, where multiple stakeholders can view and understand.

It's interesting that in house often use Jira to organise tasks, but it's possible to use multiple formats depending on the stakeholder you're speaking with.

That being said, keeping these documents up to date is one of the most important things, you want to keep visibility of technical issues across the business.

I'm surprised to see email still as a popular way of communicating tech SEO recommendations. Perhaps this is one of the reasons there are long wait times on implementation?

No surprises here. Sheets are definitely a great way to present tech recommendations. Many companies also keep their SEO recommendations separate from their other dev tasks, so no access to dev tickets directly. The key is to get the devs invited into the sheets once the tasks have been approved. It's a great place to open up a dialog around the best solutions.

Slides and Sheets forever! I mean, really, I use all of these methods, but nothing beats some more formal documentation that can be easily shared amongst team members. We've put more and more focus on clearly articulating priority and expected impact of our recommendations and Slides and Sheets are often the best way to do this.

We mainly communicate with our clients via Slack, which seems to be the most common method of communication internally in client organisations too. It's nice to be able to integrate your agency within internal processes. Emails do have their place of course, especially in the onboarding stage and when negotiating contracts.

It's interesting to see Slack gaining traction from last year's report. We found that there can be pushback on opening channels - both from the agency side and the dev side. Immediate communication can be scary. You can "sit" on an email but there is much less hiding on Slack. Personally, I love it when communication is taken to Slack but it comes with it's own set of challenges both for the client and the agency.

Many of these priority reasons should overlap. For instance, a technical change with an expected impact on KPIs is likely to be good for users too.

It really depends on the issue. Some are easy to implement - for example, changes to robot.txt. Others are like pushing a boulder up a hill - eg. changes to site architecture. It really is nuanced. This is why it's important to also look at it from an effort-impact perspective. And use this to make it clear to the client and the dev why something is with the effort.

As agencies, we're often tied to a specific scope, approach or service for each client. Which can be a challenge when trying to achieve specific targets. Also internal hierarchies and red tape can get in the way of executing SEO strategies. In an ideal world we'd be an extension of our client's internal team, and therefore would attain the acceptance and authority to get a wide spectrum of recommendations implemented.

The challenge of getting SEO recommendations implemented resonates with many in the field. This struggle is particularly pronounced in organizations with centralized tech teams or product-focused structures, where SEO recommendations may stuck in implementation pipelines for extended periods.

Data analysis prevails again as the most important skill to advance as a technical SEO! This is a timeless skillset grounded in research methodology, data hygiene, basic statistics, and critical thinking. Often we point new or aspiring entrants to the field towards SEO-specific trainings. To excel in our field, the SEO knowledge base has to be complemented by experience and comfort with the techniques of extracting reliable insights from raw data.

I respectfully disagree. I will prioritize logfile analysis and regex over commercial awareness about profit loss/gain and content strategy. While these are important for business growth, in terms of Tech SEO tasks/processes, I would prefer to analyze log files and use regex instead!

Not surprising when time is spent mostly on finding issues. To detect what the problem is you need to be able to read the data. The problem arises when this translates to: our conversions have dropped this week can you check what's going on? Spending hours digging around statistically irrelevant drops is a real struggle both in-house and agency side.

We find that it's super useful for us to understand the client's revenue streams and overall business goals, especially when it comes to forecasting performance. We need to know how their partnership with us fits into their larger financial picture so that we can present them with a compelling ROI that makes sense for them.

I'd love to see more focus being put on commercial awareness. While this certainly varies depending on your role, SEOs as a whole don't put enough focus on this and is one of the reasons we typically get much smaller budgets than other channels.