Every SEO team has that one project. The one that's been "almost there" for months, still eating hours because nobody wants to be the person who calls it.
TL;DR: Search Engine Land contributor Tim Kraft makes the case for kill criteria: conditions you agree on before an SEO project starts that tell you when to stop or pivot. They keep work from running on hope, and they make it much easier to explain why you're moving budget somewhere else.
🛑 SEO Projects Rarely Die On Their Own
Knowing when to quit an SEO tactic is hard. The data is fuzzy, results take months to show up, and rankings bounce around with every algorithm update. So the work keeps going, because it might pay off eventually.
Kraft points out what makes SEO different from paid search. A paid campaign eventually runs into its budget cap. SEO never does — there's always another article to write, another round of internal links to rework, another technical fix to try next quarter.
That's how the sunk cost trap works. The more time you've already put into something, the harder it feels to walk away, even when the evidence says you should.
"Kill criteria" are predetermined conditions that tell a team when to pivot.
The key word there is predetermined. You set the rules before the work starts, not halfway through when a project is struggling and everyone is looking for a reason to give it one more quarter.
📏 Six Checkpoints Decide Whether A Project Keeps Its Budget
Kraft lists six things every meaningful SEO project should be judged on:
Delivery time: Did it ship on schedule? A migration planned for one sprint that slips across three because of dependencies should get flagged.
Measurement: Can you actually see the result you predicted, like more organic clicks or a lower customer acquisition cost, within the timeline?
Indicators: SEO is slow, but there should still be early signs of life, like a set share of new pages getting indexed by a certain date.
Outcomes: Tie the work to real business value — revenue, qualified leads, subscriptions — not vanity growth.
Thresholds: The payoff should beat what it costs to build and maintain. Breaking even isn't the goal.
Comparative value: Is it outperforming the ideas still sitting in your backlog?
A Real Plan Has Numbers Attached
Kraft's example is a project to publish 500 product pages, with one month to launch. Here's what the kill criteria look like:
70% of the pages indexed within eight weeks of launch
20% earning nonbrand impressions within 12 weeks
Revenue from those pages beating production cost within six months
Nonbrand impressions just means people finding those pages by searching for the product, not your company name. If the numbers miss, expansion pauses — but only if there's a better opportunity waiting in the backlog. That last part matters most, because kill criteria aren't about quitting, they're about moving resources to something with better odds.
"The question stops being 'could this still work?' and becomes 'does this deserve the next dollar?'"
🛠️ What To Do Before Your Next SEO Project Starts
Write The Stopping Point Into The Plan
Before you start anything big — a content program, a site migration, a batch of location pages — write down what "working" looks like at a few checkpoints. Something like eight weeks, 12 weeks, and six months is a reasonable starting shape.
Then get whoever approves the budget to agree to those numbers up front. Base them on what you've actually seen before, like how fast your last batch of pages got indexed, not on hopeful guesses.
Separate Early Signals From Final Results
Revenue might take six months to show up. Indexing and impressions show up much sooner. If those early signals aren't moving, you don't need to wait half a year to know something's off.
For most sites, Search Console covers this. The Pages report shows indexing, and filtering out branded queries in the Performance report shows your nonbrand impressions.
Keep A Record Of What You Stopped
Kraft suggests logging every kill decision: the expected results, dates, costs, and thresholds. That record keeps the same idea from getting pitched again 18 months later with nothing meaningfully changed.
It works the other way too. A project that failed might make sense later if search behavior shifts, your product improves, or a blocker gets removed — and your second attempt starts with real data instead of a blank page.
Hit reply
What's one SEO project you kept funding longer than you should have — and what finally made you pull the plug?
One thing I'm thinking about: most SEO credibility problems aren't really about results. They're about vague expectations. When nobody defined what "working" looks like, every outcome turns into a debate.
Kill criteria fix that before it starts. You can't promise rankings, because Google's systems and your competitors' budgets aren't yours to control. What you can promise is to measure honestly and act on what you find, and that's a promise you can actually keep.
Till next time,
