Justify Investing in SEO
You might know that SEO has the power to drive traffic and sales to your company’s website, but can you convince your boss? Switching that PPC mindset for a more organic approach can be difficult for some, which is why it’s essential to justify investing in SEO intelligently. With this in mind, here’s how to pitch SEO to your boss without sending them running back to paid ads and shutting you down completely. Good luck!
Why Bother Convincing Your Boss?
Explaining SEO to a tech-savvy boss is one thing. But if you see glazed eyes and a yawn at the very mention of ‘keyword research tools’ or ‘SERPs,’ it might be time for a different approach. But don’t give up. SEO has many benefits after all and is another way to increase the searchability and visibility of your brand, without spending a fortune.
Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year. The average person conducts between three and four searches each day. So, being highly visible and a trusted Google resource is likely to work in a brand’s favour.
SEO also goes a long way to building trust and credibility with consumers. After all, one of the many goals of any SEO practitioner is to create a website that’s beautifully presented and enhances the consumer experience no matter where they are along the sales funnel. Search engines like Google are constantly striving to deliver the very best content for a search query and therefore optimising for SEO and meeting the ever-complicated need of Google’s algorithms will help you create even better content.
Continuing your quest to invest in SEO is also worth it considering how local search has now become a fundamental part of small and medium-sized businesses’ success. If your website isn’t optimised for local search, you’ll probably miss out big time, and this is something that’ll niggle away at you unless you bring up the all-important SEO issue at a higher level. Go on, be brave.
How to Convince Your Boss to Invest in SEO
Pitching the need for an SEO strategy might be a no-brainer for you, but you need to help your boss ‘see the light’ in a way they can understand. Remember, they’re not an SEO marketer like you are. They probably don’t give two hoots about the details in all honesty. But they might care if you start mentioning the bottom line, so always keep this in mind (as well as meeting essential business goals) when framing your argument. So here’s a step-by-step approach.
Step 1: Pitch the Outcome
Don’t rabbit on about the importance of keyword optimisation or the benefits of long-form content. Forget mentioning page rank authority or seeking quality backlinks and instead pitch the outcome rather than the process. Put simply, keep the following sentence in mind.
“By investing in SEO, we can achieve (outcome) in (timeframe).”
This gets straight to the point and avoids waffle. But make sure you tie in the outcome with essential business goals. And remember ‘increasing traffic’ will mean absolutely nothing to a boss that isn’t concerned with the details of digital strategy. Your conversation could go something like this.
“By investing in SEO, we can decrease our ad spend by £10,000 per month, replacing paid traffic with organic traffic.”
Be as specific as possible. If your boss starts delving into the SEO world with a bunch of questions about organic search and how it can save so much money, you can then start to put together more pieces of the puzzle. But don’t make things overly complicated or you run the risk of making the task seem complex, scary and not worth any time or investment.
Step 2: Explain Your Logic
When pitching a desirable outcome, it’s only natural for your boss to look at you like you’re from a different planet – particularly if SEO has never featured in the company strategy and a paid approach has always been preferred. Change is never easy and therefore you’ll need to run through the logic behind your ‘madness.’
When it comes to explaining yourself to the big-wigs, data is definitely you friend. Do your research and make sure you have numbers to back up your plan. For example, you know that the company is currently bidding on a wide array of keywords in Google Ads to the tune of £10,000 per month. According to Google Analytics data, you see that this traffic is responsible for £20,000 per month in sales. If you can explain that ranking organically for these keywords with SEO will get you that traffic for free, you might be onto a winner.
One of the best ways to emphasise this point to those at the top is by using specific SEO tools such as Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. This allows you to plug in the top-ranking page for each of your target keywords in order to check the Traffic Value metric. This is the estimate value of the page’s monthly organic search traffic.
Presenting key data is a good way to show the benefits of SEO in a professional manner, rather than simply banging on about how great SEO is without any facts.
Top tip: Arrange a proper meeting with your boss and any others that want to find out the benefits of a potential SEO investment. This will give you time to explain your logic in detail without feeling rushed, pressured or unheard. With so much going on in a business environment, your boss will appreciate that you’ve taken the time to organise things properly and is less likely to be stressed or irritated by your suggestions.
Step 3: Create a Roadmap
The first thing to do is to create a roadmap for yourself, so that you know exactly what is required to pull off a decent SEO strategy and get the results you deserve. For this, you might dig deep into all the essential Google algorithm ranking factors from fixing duplicate content, broken links and redirects to populating your site with authoritative and informative content. You may also assess your Core Web Vitals (Learn more about Core Web Vitals here) to see how you can improve the load speed and visibility of your site or think about optimising to create a streamlined mobile-first experience that’ll satisfy Google’s mobile-first priorities.
As an SEO, this will all make sense. But remember, your boss has a lot on their plate and probably won’t understand what Web Core Vitals are, let alone want to hear about them in detail. So with this in mind, avoid SEO jargon as best you can and stay focussed on the bigger picture. This is a skill in itself for someone who loves the SEO details, but it’ll do your pitch a favour if you can see things from an outsider’s perspective too.
You could state that the content on your site is not as informative as it could be and therefore you’ve designed a strategy to help make the platform more appealing. Or you could show them the Health Score of your site and how it compares unfavourably with competitors. The main two things you need to communicate are:
- What you’re going to do and why (keep it high level and backed up by data at all times) but don’t drag your boss into the technicalities.
- What resources you’ll need. This is crucial, as, with limited funding and staff, you won’t get the SEO results you need, and this could harm any future chance of SEO investment from the company – even if you identify the reasons for certain failures. To highlight everything you need from the start, be it an in-house team of writers, and link builders or a company to whom you can outsource technical efforts. Be open and honest and don’t try and cut corners as this could harm your efforts.
Step 4: Talk About the Figures
This is often the most difficult part. Bosses that don’t understand anything about SEO often think it happens overnight – or is free. While it’s obvious to SEO experts that this isn’t the case, it’s your job to explain that SEO isn’t a quick win, but a long-term strategy that can continue to bear fruit long after a particular project has come to an end.
When it comes to figures, start by pricing up all necessary resources in a spreadsheet. Remember that most SEO tools and software have public pricing pages, so this should be easy enough. Simply choose a plan you think will be right for you, but be realistic and don’t try to scrimp and save unnecessarily. You’ll then need to throw in the cost of in-house employees and/or freelancers. You can check out job searches in your area for competitive job role rates or take a look at the hourly rates offered by freelance platforms such as Upwork.
The overall figure for your SEO investment might seem scary and you might be nervous about presenting it, especially if your boss is renowned for penny-pinching. Those at the top care about ROI, so you need to show when you’ll break even. A projected break-even point might go something like this:
The projected cost of your project is £6,000 per month. SEO takes time so there may not be any revenue increase for half a year, but this will gradually increase to £20,000, reducing the need for ad spend by month 12. You won’t be picking numbers or projections out of the sky here. Data will guide you and help you to make informed decisions. The most important thing to remember is to be a little conservative with the numbers as this will give you some wiggle room if something doesn’t quite go to plan.
Step 5: Dispel Myths and Concerns about SEO
Your boss may have unfortunately heard of Black Hat SEO techniques and believe SEO to be spammy and dodgy. They may have also heard about Google algorithm changes knocking sites off the top spots in SERPs. So it’s up to you to dispel myths and concerns that are thrown your way. First things first, it’s important to make sure your boss understands what SEO actually is; the process of influencing known Google ranking factors to help pages rank higher in the search results, and that it’s a legitimate tactic when done correctly. Tell them that algorithm changes do occur all the time as it’s Google’s way of making sure the best content is presented. But reassure them that so long as your content is of good quality and you keep up with the latest demands, these updates shouldn’t have a large impact.
Another thing that’ll work in your favour is social proof. Many companies now rely on SEO as a tried and tested way to boost brand awareness and page hits. For example, you can show that 60% of marketers say inbound marketing practices such as SEO are their highest quality source of leads.[1] Or that 70% of online marketers say that SEO is better than PPC for generating sales.[2] Furthermore, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, showing how important it is to rank organically where possible for branded and brand-related keywords.[3] Essentially, your boss needs to feel like they’re not the only one in the industry ‘taking risks.’ In fact, they should be left feeling like they are being left behind if they don’t take the plunge into the SEO realm.
If your boss is worried that SEO will ‘take too long,’ reassure them that while it is a long-term strategy, it’s better to get the ball rolling now than to wait even longer and to fall further behind companies who already have a strategy in place. Again, you can use Traffic Value data from competitors to hammer this point home. Tell your boss that’ll you’ll be closely monitoring the process, keeping track of keyword performance and making tweaks to the strategy as and when is necessary. But don’t shy away from the fact that yes, SEO does take time as you need to set realistic expectations.
Convincing your boss to invest in SEO can be difficult, but with the right approach, it’s perfectly possible. The benefits of SEO are often extremely impressive, with content marketing agencies like Whitefish Marketing helping to deliver tailored strategies for brands.
[1] https://inter-growth.co/seo-stats/
[2] https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
[3] https://inter-growth.co/seo-stats/
