A goal for any business is to generate more traffic and more leads for the business.
One great way to acquire quality leads is to optimize your website to be found on the search engines to generate traffic organically without using paid media.
However, when you approach an executive team with the concept of an SEO strategy, sometimes they will immediately shut you down. They say things like “I can’t see the value of generating content” or “ I can’t wait 12 months for a strategy to not give me any revenue”.
Now you find yourself in a situation that many inbound marketers and SEOs have to deal with. Communicating the value of SEO to executives.
There will always be push back but if you follow these ideas and practices in your presentation of your strategy below, you may have the chance of getting your executive team on board with a Search Engine Optimization strategy.
Explain SEO Using Language That is Relatable
Like most topics in SEO generally, the lingo associated with search engine optimization is hard to follow with all the acronyms and tech talk, especially for those outside of digital marketing.
As a professional, you are so invested in the space that you may forget that high-level executives are not close to digital marketing as you are. You might as well be speaking a foreign language especially if they are older or not tech-savvy.
Executives don’t have the time to keep up with the language of SEO and get lost when you are explaining terms and best practices to them. Words like “blackhat” and “white hat link building” would be completely new to them.
When presenting an SEO strategy to upper-level management, make sure you are explaining using relatable terms. For example, instead of labeling the tactics, you’ll be using as “whitehat”, you should be more relatable by saying “I’ll be using all the current best practices being used for search engine optimization or simply put “non-spam tactics”.
Technical SEO can be described as managing various web elements like titles, headers, sitemaps to allow search engines to better understand what your website is about.
If you mention metrics and reporting, break down how certain metrics are calculated like click-through rate or domain authority. Describe how they fit into the whole SEO picture.
Being relatable and simplifying the SEO lingo will make presenting to executives much easier.
Give Them Access To All SEO Reporting Tools
Another tactic you can use is giving executives access to tools like Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, or Google Search Console. You can teach them how to log on to these platforms and run the basic reports. This will give them an idea of how they can track the SEO strategy’s progress.
It is important for them to understand the current situation of the website. Have them take a look inside Google Search Console to see all the search queries, page rankings, impressions, and click-through rates. Let them browse Google Analytics to see bounces rates and the number of website visitors. Finally, let them take a look at Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush Magic Keyword Tool, or Keywords Everywhere to see search volumes for keywords related to your business.
Once they have a baseline knowledge of how the website is currently performing, you can then let them know how SEO will enhance metrics found on those tools and help the business overall.
Giving them access can help calm the concerns that SEO is not doing anything for the business. It’ll give them a hand in the process and will allow them to ask quality questions based on data that you can answer.
SEO Can Lead To Traffic That Snowballs
One of the biggest rebuttals about adopting an SEO strategy is that it takes too long before you see results. Executives cannot invest time and resources into a plan that doesn’t yield revenue right away.
That is absolutely understandable. But you have to communicate the value SEO has for the business beyond the initial return on investment.
If you use a content marketing strategy that features optimized content, you will be creating a lead magnet. The difficult part about a search optimized content strategy is putting in the work and time to get to that point. Initially, you won’t see many results as the search engines need time to learn more about your website.
You may get a click or two here and there. But as soon as your website matures, you will have the opportunity to rank very high in the search engine result pages driving in tons of traffic to your site and creating the opportunity for driving more leads for your business.
You have to remember that SEO efforts tend to snowball or ramp up with time if done properly. After 12 months, you might be getting 5,000 monthly visitors to your homepage. Beyond 18 months, you might be getting 150,000 monthly visitors who are searching for your business. Your investment into SEO will eventually pay for itself.
SEO can help your Paid Media Campaigns
One great thing about SEO is that it can pay dividends for your paid media campaigns, primarily Google ads.
Executives tend to like the paid media approach because you can see what you can get for your ad spend. You are able to say that 3,000 dollars will get you 1500 clicks or 10,000 impressions in a short period of time. This is a lot easier to plan for on the executive level compared to utilizing content marketing strategy writing optimized blog posts that may or may not get you substantial traffic for a period of time.
If you optimize your website for certain keywords, this will make your cost per click for Google Ads a little cheaper. Google Ads uses an algorithm that shows the best ads to Google audiences that are looking for a specific keyword. Quality ads contain compelling ad copy and landing pages related to the target keyword.
They use a criterion called “landing page score” to determine how well your landing page or website corresponds to the copy the ad is using. The higher the landing page score, the more relevant your landing page will be to the ad, making it cheaper for you to compete and have your ad shown to the audience.
Conclusion
Search Engine Optimization is a very powerful tactic that cannot be ignored. Senior executives have a hard time seeing the value of SEO because of the length of time for results to occur. As digital marketers or SEOs, it is your job to explain the importance of Search Engine Optimization in a manner that is relatable and transparent while also preaching the raw benefits to the business.
