If you see yourself discussing SEO in public and getting all confused reactions. People geek out about 404’s, redirects, backlinks, spiders, canonicals, and indexing. Instead, when you discuss these elements in public, you get a plain blank look.
This is a very reasonable thing. But if you get the same reaction from your boss or decision-makers in your company, that seems like a problem for an SEO.
SEO is an essential factor of any business success. But many small business owners are not that comfortable diving into SEO. They are aware that they need SEO, but due to lack of knowledge they do not understand the time and commitment involved.
Whether you work in-house or an agency, try to convince executives to bolster their SEO budget. These are a few simple tricks that will help you communicate the importance of SEO.
1. Help them understand the terminology
Every field has its own jargon. Same goes with SEO. But every layman will fail to recognize these jargons. So help yourself with learning to explain all the tech stuff in plain and straightforward language.
Explain your audience about basic SEO. Clarify and define relevant metrics can be handy in helping your audience get a better grasp about your work.
2. Explain the action
SEO involves a whole lot of work that happens behind the scenes and yields results after a while.
Many people have a hard time trusting an SEO as they have expectations of seeing instant results. But SEO is not an immediate result strategy. It long hard procedure. SEO works for a long time and reaps the fruits of his work in the long run. It is like growing a plant you sow the seeds, nurture the tree and wait for the flower to fruit.
So when you explain to your client or boss about any SEO strategy, show them the big picture. Explain to them why you made individual decisions. Explain to them details about what you are doing and why you are doing it.
Example- You have discovered a duplicate content on the companies site. You can set to re-write the duplicate content. You can also re-direct unneeded pages. But chances are a layman boss may question your decision.
As an SEO professional, you know the reasons for removing the duplicate content. So you need to explain the client or boss that Google hates duplicate content. Explain to him how the same content will compete with each other on Google and all other crawl reasons.
3. Craft the right explanation for the audience
As your organization grows, you will have regular meetings with a variety of audiences. Ranging from people from the IT department to executive officers will have queries about what’s going on and why SEO is essential.
People in IT will need technical details and any bug that needs to be fixed. The marketing department will require information on how SEO is attracting the right audience to the website. The executive leaders will be only concerned about you boosting the site.
To execute the right SEO plan, you need to know your audience and format a presentation that “speaks their language.” Example- A meeting with some IT person needs to be made for technical implementations that will make the site mobile friendly. A similar meeting with leadership may involve discussions about time and resource that your SEO plan will need. You can attain the desired ROI with the implementation of a successful strategy.
4. Build credibility
At initial stages, it can be challenging to choose the power of SEO. It can be difficult for you to be taken seriously. It is a challenge to take all the SEO techniques seriously.
Build your own credibility so that higher authority listens to you.
You can do so by showing some leadership qualities by writing articles on behalf of the company, answer all the questions customers may have on behalf of the content. Provide some how-to-guides.
As mentioned above you need a document to show how your SEO efforts help in contributing to the company. You can accomplish this by following this:
Show conversion data from organic search traffic and equate those numbers to revenue-
Set up your website with Google Analytics and Google Search Console so you can monitor income from contact forms and e-commerce. The results will speak to your management or clients.
Show your sites position as compared to competitors-
Have a list of 5-10 competitors who are ahead of your company for 10 keywords and show the average monthly search volume of these keywords. Show these opportunities to convince your management. You will surely get that SEO support.
Conclusion
The best way to deal with this is to show some key performance indicators before the campaign starts. Know your audience provide a valuable SEO technique and always use data to back-up the success of your strategy.
Supporting an SEO initiative is difficult. It can be frustrating to communicate and explain them everything. As these people are a layman and may take time to understand your strategy. But communication will make you a successful SEO.