In most cases that would be very common and it wouldn't be a problem, but what if the person that was giving you that confused look was the person that makes the decisions for your company? That is when it starts to become more frustrating and difficult to encourage this new marketing channel for investment.
SEO has become one of the most important aspects for any business that is looking to grow and become more visible organically in search engines. However, many small business owners and CEOs alike are sometimes unaware of what SEO is or are too sceptical to invest.
In some cases, they know that SEO in their business is necessary and would be very beneficial to introduce in their work project, but they don't know how it works or barely understands the great value and commitment towards the channel.
By now your task should be to convince executives to increase the companies SEO budget but it clearly won't be easy. However, there are many tips that you can use to achieve better communication with them and explain the importance of SEO while giving your reasoning behind your choices and tactics in order to convince them.
1. Increase your personal and your SEO credibility.
It may be out of your comfort zone to discuss these large decisions with senior member’s of the company, however, you’re the individual with the knowledge and they’d want to be offered the option/decision rather than you getting the blame for not acting in the future. However, how can you truly build your own credibility so that leadership listens to what you have to say?
One of the easier ways is by being a leader in your department so your word starts to have some value. Start by writing content on the companies behalf, make sure that you take care of the customers and their questions on your website content and always provide valuable resources.
The easier way to achieve this is by documenting everything that we previously mentioned to show how the SEO efforts were truly beneficial when increasing the company’s bottom line, for this to work is important that you try the following:
Report your progress compared to the ones of your competitors
Make sure to make a list of the top 5 or 10 competitors to your company, make sure to include those who are currently beating your company for the top 10 keywords on SEO and include a report that shows the monthly average search volume on those specific keywords.
By showing them this and giving your reports, the executives should start seeing the lost chances they had and realise that it’s time to make a move to support your SEO efforts.
Record conversion data and equate those numbers to revenue
Try to get your hands on tracking software like Google’s search console and Google analytics in order to monitor the impact of your website visibility to back up your efforts.
2. Help your business understand terminology.
It is often common that every industry has its own form of terminology and SEO is not the exception, in most cases, there will always be someone who doesn't understand the terminology correctly, especially if they belong to a different department. Keep that in mind so that next time you talk about SEO you will be able to make a great starting point for everyone to understand.
Be patient and take your time to educate and teach your audience correctly about SEO and the basics of it. When you start giving the correct and easy to understand definitions, then discuss relevant metrics so your audience will have a better understanding of what you are doing and the reasons behind the actions.
3. Document everything.
Don't be surprised when you start to get a lot of blank stares and sarcastic remarks when you talk about SEO to those who don't understand it. That is the main reason why documenting everything and getting competent data for your SEO strategy, claims of success and reports are very important. Try and focus on the most business orientated metrics that you can find that are beneficial and interesting to keep your audience interested. Make it simple and don’t use complex words for those who don't know much about the subject.
4. Create and elaborate a correct explanation for your audience.
Meetings will become more regular no matter the size of your company. After all, people from other departments also require to know why SEO matters and what it is you are trying to achieve.
As an example - The marketing team will be interested in learning how SEO will attract the right audience; people from the IT department will want to know more about the technical details of SEO as well as different fixes and bugs that they might run into when working on it. As for the executive leadership, they most likely focus on the plan as long as it will boost the company’s revenue.
If you are looking for more valuable, higher support and buy-in of your SEO planning, it is essential to understand that you will have multiple different types of audiences, so it is crucial that you can switch your monologue for your presentations in a way that each can understand what you are talking about.
For the IT team, you will want to make sure you entail how certain the technical implementations are going to be required in order to make the website more mobile and user-friendly.
Very similar to meetings with the leadership of your company, you will want to involve discussions about the time and resources that your SEO planning and strategy will require. As well as all the opportunities that SEO will bring to the company, and the potential return on investment that will be the result if the plan is proven successful.
5. Explain thoroughly why is it necessary to take a certain course of action.
Like any other strategy, SEO requires a lot of work that often happens behind the scene of things, and it does not always give instant results.
One of the main reasons why some companies stay away from SEO is simply because they don't think it delivers the results they expect in a specific timeframe. Convincing your boss of your course of action will be a very difficult task, especially if there is no solid benchmarks that can back it up and no timeframes being set.
It is essential to try and keep in mind that you need to explain the reason why you are doing something or why you’ve proposed a certain decision.
Keep the bigger picture and goal in mind when explaining to your audience to keep their interest sparked and explain the reasons why and what you are doing.
Let’s say that for example, you start finding duplicate content on your companies site, and you make the decision that you need to either rewrite the content or redirect the links to the ones that require the most focus.
At this point, your boss might start questioning you and ask why not just leave them be if more content would just give more exposure to the site even if it was duplicated content.
However, duplicated content is never a good idea, and explaining to your boss that Google hates duplicated content just won't do. You need to come up with a clever response that satisfies your boss’s need for information.
Try to explain correctly and shortly how Google works exactly, how the duplicated content would just start fighting each other on the race to the top spot in search engines and everything else that explains more than just a simple Google doesn't like it.
By doing this you can be sure that your boss will start asking fewer questions and understand better when giving them the correct answers.