The main power of SEO is to drive traffic and sales to your company’s website. If you’re like many eCommerce online businesses, you may be having difficulty using your website to drive high-value sales to support the organisation’s growth. Your website should be the most powerful tool in your arsenal, but if you don’t implement the correct supporting strategies to generate the visibility the site needs, customers will never see it and instead turn to your competitors for their products.
SEO isn’t only about driving additional Organic visitors to a website, it’s also about improving the User Experience which can improve the results of every other channel.
One example is that SEO may include the creation of additional Sub Category or Landing Pages to service new customer segments. These new pages can improve user metrics such as Pages Viewed & Time on Site but most importantly Conversion Rate which affects all traffic arriving on your page (and site).
For example, creating a page with content for your range of red midi dresses may help to rank in the organic results for the keyword “red midi dresses” but that same page can also serve as a landing page for campaigns featuring red midi dresses across Paid Ads, Email, Social and Display Ads.
How easy it would be to convince your management to invest in SEO if you’re working at a tech-forward company that understands the value and importance of SEO. But what if the situation is otherwise? Let’s discuss significant reasons for SEO investment and explain how SEO will bring your company higher revenue and help them reach their business goals.
Step 1. Show the outcome
Consider showing the intended result to the management. Make sure to connect your outcome to business goals.
Quote: “We can achieve [outcome] in [timeframe] by investing in SEO.”
Propose a specific outcome and don’t pull it out of thin air. It needs to be realistic.
Step 2. Explain the logic
The next step would be explaining how and why you believe investing in SEO will lead to the proposed outcome.
Using data at this stage is very important.
If you work in eCommerce, you dig into your Google Ads account and find that you’re bidding on 25 keywords for $15,000 per month. Google Analytics shows you traffic that is responsible for $50,000 per month in sales. And if you can rank organically for these keywords with SEO, you can get that traffic for ‘free’.
Most web pages that rank organically in the top 10 for a popular keyword also rank for 100 of other keywords, which is better because ranking organically will probably drive more sales than ads.
Prepare the top-ranking page for each of your target keywords and check the Traffic Value metric. You could estimate the potential revenue increase from investing in SEO — then present that to your boss.
Step 3. Create a roadmap
The success of the previous two steps brings you to this level – which is to understand how to achieve the promised results. It’s easy to get confused with SEO jargon here, so try to stay focused on the big picture.
Try to keep things simple.
Communicate two things here:
- What you’re going to do and why
- What will you need for resources (tools, employees, agencies)
Resources usually include freelancers, employees, freelancers or tools. In other words, anything you’ll need to execute your SEO plan.
It is also worth considering who will manage and train new employees and freelancers. Demonstrate to your management that you have everything planned and that your plan is realistic.
Step 4. Talk about the figures
There won’t be any green lights for a project that’s unlikely to generate a return on their investment. Now’s the time to answer that question.
It won’t be as effective to list a bunch of resources without showing their cost. The process is pretty straightforward: price up all the resources in a spreadsheet. SEO tools and software usually shows public pricing pages. Just pick one that’s right for you.
It is a good start, but it still doesn’t tell your boss anything about ROI. Check on how to calculate your ROI. It is harder to figure than it sounds because your SEO efforts will continue to develop after the initial project.
For example, the projected cost of your project is $6,000 per month. SEO takes time, and it is safer to be pessimistic and assume no revenue increase for the first six months before gradually increasing to $40,000 and eliminating the need for ad spend. Remember to use conservative numbers here.
Step 5. Face myths and dispel them
By this stage, you will probably still have a few questions and concerns.
Let’s look at a few of them.
“Doesn’t SEO take forever?”
Surely, SEO does take time. Rankings don’t happen overnight, and anyone that says otherwise is likely selling “snake oil.” We all know that there’s no silver bullet in marketing, so explaining that something takes time isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“What if we get a penalty from Google?”
Indeed, Google updates and penalties are scary and quite risky. But if you’re following “ethical” SEO best practices, manual penalties aren’t something you need to worry. Google does update its ranking algorithms multiple times a year. It can negatively impact your traffic, but they’re unlikely to wipe you out completely.
What makes the organic channel so attractive is the ROI you can get from a much smaller investment than paid campaigns. In paid campaigns, the price is dictated by the competition, and you pay for each click to your website. It detracts from the amount of revenue you can make and often leads to spending much money per conversion.
Although SEO is a long-term investment, it is a strategy worth considering as if you are ranking very well for your set of chosen phrases, you can explore reducing specific campaign budgets as you will essentially be getting those clicks for free. The investment with us will be fixed, will not change, and will quite often be much lower than your AdWords spend, so investing in SEO is a fantastic way to generate conversions and a strategic way to save money from other channels. Check out our SEO services page.
Book your strategy session with LION to determine how to make your organisation one of the most recognisable in the organic space.
