How to Explain the Value of SEO So Your Boss Gets It

Reading Time: 9 minutes
Emma Gasko
By Emma Gasko

December 13, 2018

It’s not as rare as you might think: marketing teams know that an organic search strategy can help their organization achieve its growth goals, but the leadership team has no idea what SEO is. More importantly, they don’t understand how it adds value.

If you are in this situation your main goal is to get your CEO or executive decision-makers to see the value in partnering with a top SEO agency to help your company hit its revenue targets. This article will give you the tips necessary for getting your boss to see the value in SEO. After you put these tips to use in your next conversation with him / her, you will have the green light to go ahead and start vetting SEO agencies in Los Angeles to New York City.

LA SEO

Take the Right Approach

The approach you take in your conversation will be everything. Remember, most leadership teams don’t want to know the fine details surrounding how something works, they want high-level facts that point to why something is valuable. This means you want to avoid getting in the weeds around algorithms and links. Instead, segment the high-value talking points your CEO cares about into the answers to his burning questions. These typically include:

  • How will this make the company money?
  • How will this save us money?
  • How will it keep us competitive?
  • Can its effectiveness be measured?

Since most agencies have contracts that extend for six months to a year at a time, be sure that after covering these points with your boss you remind him that the commitment from a contractual side of things is limited thus giving the SEO agency enough time to prove their value without your company facing a big risk.

SEO companies

How SEO Helps Companies Hit their Revenue Goals

If your customers search for your industry’s products and services online, SEO will help unite buyers with your products. According to Blue Corona, 93 percent of the online experience begins with the search engine, and almost 90 percent of midsize to large businesses invested in SEO in 2018. Explain to your boss that other spaces and even your competitors see the value in SEO, and are investing in it as a way to generate sales.

Before we dive into “the how”, be sure to let your boss know that SEO is a process that takes time before sales come through. The last thing you want to do is set unrealistic expectations that will only position you and your SEO agency to fail.

Now for the how. You will want to break down the process of SEO into these steps:

  • SEO Agency will run an audit on your website looking for improvement opportunities
  • Optimization recommendations will be identified, and executed upon approval
  • Web page content will be optimized to accommodate the SEO strategy
  • Content strategy will roll out in which the site’s domain authority and ranking will begin going up
  • Once the site ranks on page one of Google for keywords that convert into paying customers, conversion rate optimization strategies will roll out

Let your boss know that you will see some customers filter in through organic traffic before you rank on page one of Google, but the big surge of sales will definitely happen when you rank for the right content, read by the right customers. And this is exactly what a good, modern SEO strategy does going into 2019.

SEO help

SEO Saves Companies Money

Explain to your CEO that SEO will eventually save money while making money. The big drop in the investment hat will be working through the process to get maximum visibility on page one of Google, but once you are ranking well, your CPC (cost-per-click) will be dirt cheap as opposed to an expensive paid media campaign. Also, once you are ranking well your SEO agency will work to maintain your position and ensure that a monthly ROI rolls in while staying on pace to hit the long-term high-revenue annual targets.

If your boss likes metaphors explain this to him in the terms of a short mortgage. You may be paying an agency monthly for a set amount of time without any direct revenue from organic search just as one makes mortgage payments on their home. But once you rank on page one of Google and the sales more than triple your marketing investment, you are essentially paying nothing to make a profit just as one enjoys living in a home that is free of mortgage payments.

SEO teams

Companies Stay Competitive with an SEO Strategy

Tell your boss that SEO will keep your company competitive by ranking content for relevant, current topics your customers care about while running on a strategy to outperform your direct competitors.

There are a number of tools used by the best SEO agencies to spy on competitor data, one of which is SpyFu. SpyFu does allow a number of free competitor overviews before they ask for a paid membership. You can use this tool to pull up competitor data ranging from how much they spend in PPC to the number of organic keywords they rank for, as well as tons of other useful metrics. This alone will likely impress your boss, and once you let leadership know that you would find an SEO agency that builds custom strategies around competitor data to keep your brand relevant and even make it a leader in your space, your boss will likely get on board.

seo la

SEO can be Measured for Effectiveness

Yes, but not in the traditional sense. Let your boss know that a monthly report will show user engagement data and ranking data with month-over-month growth analytics. Remember, the first stage is the long haul of actually building site authority and rank power. And this aspect can be measured through Google Analytics.

The report will also let you know how many goal completions and even how much revenue was brought in by organic, but the source of the specific pages will be unknown. However, if it makes sense based on your sales cycle, product price point, and a few other factors, the best SEO agencies can mesh an organic search strategy into some other strategies and tools to create a custom Growth Stack run from a powerful CRM that will in fact show finer details regarding how your customers converted, as well as the identities of your leads and the companies they work for. And when added to an SEO strategy, Growth Stacks help CEOs improve their bottom line reporting  through advanced data collection that leads to significant strategic improvements.

Cover these main talking points regarding growth marketing and organic traffic generation with your boss while creating value in a relationship with an SEO agency. It has to make sense from his or her seat, so be sure to use language and logic that makes sense for them.

Download our FREE Guide on the Modern Approach to SEO

If your boss wants more information, download this guide to running a modern SEO strategy and let him know you already found an agency that can get your company well on its way to crushing it in 2019 with sales from organic traffic!
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