If you're new to SEOmoz, or you've been in a coma the past couple weeks you may not have seen the Search Engine Ranking Factors study, which polled some of the leading minds in SEO on what they feel are the most and least important factors in regards to the SERPs.  Their top five factors can be seen below:

I found myself in pretty close agreement with what was being said by the SEO creme de la creme...but it led me to the question, "How would this compare to what the average Joe thinks about Google's ability to magically organize the world's information?"  At first the thought made me laugh, but the more I considered it I realized that the implications could be very interesting.  Particularly when it comes to explaining the value of SEO services or properly communicating and setting expectations with clients it will be important to know where some of these gaps are.

So, with some modifications we developed a survey and bounced it around between some professionals we know (this is by no means a scientifically perfect random sample, so don't bother asking) to see what their thoughts were.  The only stipulation was that they not have done any SEO work themselves. We knew that we would have to change the questions a bit so our Joes could understand them, so it's not precisely an apples to apples comparison, either.  But we tried to cover our bases as well as we could.  Despite our best efforts, based on the questions we got from some participants (such as, "I'm not sure what some of these things are...does that make me stupid?") a few may have been in over their heads.  But nonetheless we had 34 people complete the survey, and our results show a mixed bag compared to the Pros' picks.  The Joes' top five factors:

The most glaring difference here is that on page factors weigh heavily on the minds of our average Joes, in stark contrast to the Pros.  I notice this a lot in casual conversations with people when I discuss what I do for a living.  A lot of our Joes acknowledge some level of understanding of SEO, but they often phrase loose interest by saying things like, "Yeah, we need to do some work on our site so it ranks better."  Obviously, the first step in the SEO toolbag is to do your on site work, but I think this demonstrates the importance of setting expectations with prospects from the outset.  I can say that only once in my life has simply doing on site work made a huge splash in a company's bottom line (and not surprisingly this was for an incredibly niche product).

So when you're starting the conversation, or when your sales team starts it, make sure they make it clear that the real factors in better rankings are only fractionally due to what you "do" to the site from a coding, and to some degree, content perspective. 

The full results of our Joes can be found here.