Setting Fair Completion Criteria in Service Contracts

When a client hires a service provider, they do it for a reason. They are not buying "SEO" or "consulting" for its own sake. They want a specific result: more income, more stability, less risk, more time.

That ultimate desired outcome matters. It should be named honestly and early. But it should almost never be the completion criterion for a service contract.

From SEO to Income: The Real Goal Behind the Brief

Take a common example.

A client hires an SEO specialist. On the surface, the goal sounds like "more traffic" or "better rankings." But if you follow the chain honestly, it looks more like this:

• Better SEO is meant to produce more clicks.
• More clicks are meant to produce more sales.
• More sales are meant to produce more income.

The ultimate desired outcome (UDO) is not "better SEO" or "more clicks." It is more income.

That UDO should still be surfaced and understood. If the real concern is income, the scope of work may need to include more than technical SEO: pricing, positioning, landing page clarity, offer structure. Otherwise you are tuning a narrow input while ignoring a weak product or a broken sales process.

But that does not mean the SEO provider should accept "more income" as the standard for success.

Correlation, Causation, and Spheres of Control

The problem is not that SEO does nothing. It can be a real driver of sales. The problem is that it is only one driver among many.

In practice, income depends on:

• the quality and appeal of the product itself;
• recent events and news cycles;
• cultural shifts and habits;
• seasonality and weather;
• the strength and behaviour of competitors;
• internal execution on sales and support.

SEO lives in a sphere of influence, not a sphere of control. It can increase the chance that people find and buy the product. It cannot guarantee that they will, at any particular level.

Correlation does not imply control. You might implement excellent SEO and still see no change in income because the limiting factor sits elsewhere. In that world, using "more income" as the completion criterion for SEO work is not just unfair; it is conceptually wrong.

Completion criteria have to sit closer to what the provider can actually deliver and stand behind.

How Larger Organizations Bridge the Gap

In larger organizations, professional managers recognise this problem and try to bridge the gap explicitly.

They do it with a formal Statement of Work (SoW):

• The SoW acknowledges the UDO (for example, "grow online revenue").
• It then defines a standard of delivery for the service being commissioned that lives within the provider's sphere of control.

For an SEO engagement, that might include:

• specific on-page optimisation work across agreed pages;
• a defined approach to link-building that meets quality thresholds;
• implementation and configuration of analytics;
• reporting frequency and metrics to be tracked;
• agreed timelines and review points.

The SoW does not pretend the provider owns "income." It says: These are the concrete tasks, artefacts, and standards we are buying from you. We will judge you on these.

That allows the service to be judged fairly. If analytics were never installed, or key pages were never optimised as specified, the client can point to a clear failure. If all agreed work was delivered to the stated standard, it is far harder to argue bad faith simply because income did not rise.

Smaller companies often lack a project management function, so this bridge never gets built. Expectations stay at the UDO level, and both sides are exposed.

Lessons for Clients and Providers

For clients, the discipline is this:

• Start by naming your ultimate desired outcome honestly.
• Then force yourself to translate it into concrete tasks, goals, and responsibilities that sit within the provider's sphere of control.
• Write those into the contract (or SoW) as the success and completion criteria.

If the provider fails to do what was clearly specified, you have a legitimate basis to insist on performance or remedies. You are not left arguing about broad notions of "more income" that no one could reasonably guarantee from a narrow service.

For providers, the discipline is the mirror image:

• Treat it as an unacceptable risk to accept the client's UDO as the completion criterion when your work only influences that outcome.
• Insist that completion criteria be tied to deliverables, standards, and behaviours you can directly control, with minimal dependence on unseen forces.
• Keep genuine external shocks (earthquakes, war, regulatory bans) in a narrow force majeure clause, not buried inside the definition of success.

If a client wants to judge you solely on their income, and refuses to break that down into controllable obligations, they are effectively asking you to underwrite their entire business context. That is not a service contract; it is an uncapped bet.

Clear completion criteria do not ignore the client's real goal. They respect it, and then draw a fair line between what the provider can promise and what the world will actually do. That line is where good service contracts live. It is also where clarity and integrity start to protect both sides.