Now what can you do about it? Now, once again, there is no silver bullet. If you do all these things, I hope they can help you. These helped us to be able to get things understood, to be able to implement things, to be able to work with stakeholders, to be able to actually make the campaign viable and get value out of it. But these are some of the things, in our experience, that we try to do.
Get things done proactively
Then get things done proactively. Now, this is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Again, depending on the size of your company, you will have many stakeholders. You will have in-house development teams, purpose-built CMS, where you may not be able to get things done on the technical front.
But what I mean by that is if you have the ability or the opportunity to get on the website and get things done, you have the ability to create content, you have the ability to move forward on certain things and show that you’re actually trying to provide value, what’s the worst that can happen? Are they going to complain that you’re trying to provide them value and you’re trying to give them a return on investment on their SEO? Now, once again, don’t be stupid with this. If you’re with a big brand that has a custom CMS and there’s some legalities and you have some stuff, just don’t go into the website. You don’t want to demolish ASOS in one day, okay?
But with some brands, if you have the ability to get things done and show your proactivity within reason, again, I like that because it shows that you’re actually trying to get things done. You’re showing the business, hey, we’re trying to make this work. You’re not just paying us, and we’re going to sit back and do nothing. We’re actually trying to make your SEO help you achieve your business goals.
Prioritize key services or products
Prioritize key services or products. Now SEOs tend to focus only on SEO, which is fine. But once again they forget that on the other side there is a company that pays the bills and wants to see results.
So one of the things we want to do is focus on prioritizing the most important services offered or products. What I mean is, which ones do they get the best margin on? Who are the ones who want to push? Which ones generate the most revenue or are the most popular?
Focus your SEO strategy on those key services and products initially instead of just focusing on the privacy policy page or some random product that they might sell one of because it has great search volume. This will mean nothing to a company’s bottom line. Focus on key services or products.
Simple reporting and update on the “why”
Another thing is to simply report and update the why, and this probably also goes hand in hand with clear communication to stakeholders. SEO is intangible. For these people they are just numbers in the air. In reality they don’t know. Yes, there will be vanity metrics, or yes, they will see number one on Google, right? But what happens when you’re not number one yet?
Well, because it’s intangible, the only tangible thing they get is a report, is it your team, is it that call, is it that strategy? Those documents are the things they can see, then keep and listen to because SEO is intangible? There are all the things happening in the background, but your marketing manager, CFO and CMO just want to see results. They want to see the number go up. This is what they want to see.
Therefore simple reporting, Data Studio. Maybe there are custom tools out there. You can simply detail what the SEO numbers mean, but match them to their business objectives. So don’t use similar unbranded queries. For you and I, we know what that means. But for the average user who works in the industry, they may not know what non-brand means. So you really have to explain what that means. So you would use certain keywords that they would know. Sometimes a client will say, “We want to be known for these keywords.” Then you use those keywords that they want to be known for, their goals to explain what branded or non-branded means.
Show income, money. You might have fixed about 10 title tags, but they don’t know what the hell a title tag is or care, right? What does it actually mean? Well, hey, customer, we’ve optimized the metadata to improve people clicking on our results. Therefore, we can lead to more traffic and potentially more revenue or more leads. So you want to try to explain those really SEO things in a way that matches their business goals so that they understand. Otherwise, they will just have a very confused look on their face.
Clear communication with stakeholders
Clear communication with stakeholders. Again, using things like Docs or Sheets or Word, explaining it clearly. Explain it as if they were 5 years old. Presenting, using Slack, using emails. Call us. Sometimes it’s easier to call them and explain on the phone why there is no email exchange. You can have 50 long chain emails and everyone forgets what happened.
Adapt your SEO strategy to your business goals
Matching the SEO strategy to the business goals, so this is the overall thing where we’ll say, hey, the client comes to you and says, “We want to be number one in this. We want more revenue and we want more leads.” Great.
These SEO things must then match to achieve those goals. So how will you get more revenue? Okay, we’ll focus on those key services and products. We will focus on the EEAT. We will focus on the technical health of the website. But when you say EAT, they don’t know what it is. So you’ll say something like, “We’re creating these about us pages and team pages because we want to create your own Wikipedia and your own LinkedIn on your website so you can show Google and users, hey, we know our stuff.” things. These are the legitimate people behind this business.”
Restate your goals: Show the impact of SEO
And reaffirming those goals. Shows the impact of SEO. Show those graphs, show those ranks. Have some meetings with them to say, “Are we still on track? What’s happening in the business? How are the products doing?” Basically, ask them some financial questions like: “How is the company doing? What are the goals this week?”
Sometimes you may not get this information. But if you get enough context to say, “Are we hitting our goals this month or not,” you can then adjust your SEO strategy to say, oh, actually, that’s a little bit of a down quarter coming up. What can we do? That’s fine, and then you can make the adjustment. Because if things happen in the business and you’re not aware of it, they get that report or they get that call and say, “This doesn’t mean anything to me. What does it mean? No money coming in.” Ah, but that’s why we had to do X, Y, Z on this project. “Who cares? No money coming in.” You’re a little screwed.
What is most important to them?
And last but not least, always remember what is most important to them. Now, for you, as an SEO, you’ll say, yeah, doing the work is great, or fixing the meta metas and putting in internal links and doing backlinks and all of these things are important to you as an agency, which is Great. This is how we show value, yes.
But ultimately it is the customer who pays the bills. What is most important to them? If it’s simply about getting more organic traffic, that’s fine. You, as the SEO, need to explain why this is good as a goal, but then also continually educate them on some of the other parts that make up SEO. Yes, ok, traffic is only the first part. But are you getting the right traffic? Are they converting? And it leads you to many more questions, which can then shape your strategy.
But always remember the Why AND what is most important to them, and then you get that information. Then you can create your own strategy and you can create your own work and time dedicated to achieving those goals. What should happen, now, again, it doesn’t always happen this way, but what should happen is that the company should appreciate the fact that you’re trying to leverage and actually utilize the channel of SEO and the power of SEO to help them achieve those goals.
So that’s it for today in terms of SEO and brands, brands and SEO, matching business goals to SEO strategy. Remember, what do brands usually want? More organic traffic, less revenue, better branded or unbranded search, better rankings, beating the competition.
What’s stopping them? Poor SEO, poor education, lack of goals and priorities, understanding of marketing, resources, ego.
And what can you do? Be proactive. Sometimes, depending on the situation, it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission. By prioritizing key services or products, focus on the things that will make them money. Clear communication with stakeholders through simple reports and updates on why we are doing this. Reaffirming your goals. Continuously understand what their goals are and show the impact of that SEO through simple reporting and clear communications. Match your SEO strategy to your business goals and always remember what is most important to them. What’s the reason? Impact essentially on vanity metrics.
So that’s it. I’m Anthony from StudioHawk.