How to get more of what you want in SEO

How to get more of what you want in SEO

Get more SEO buy-in and budget by aligning with company goals, telling compelling stories and improving your communication skills.

It’s rare that you always get what you want in life.

As SEO professionals, we all know the sheer pain of not having enough resources because “others are not understanding the value of SEO.”

You can’t win all the time. But, often, we lie to ourselves.

It is not that the other side is wrong but that we are not doing a job that is good enough.

You will not improve your position by seeing yourself as a victim.

You need to break out of this cycle of learned helplessness.

Dale Carnegie wrote this in 1936:

“Do you know someone you would like to change and regulate and improve? Good! That is fine. I am all in favor of it. But why not begin on yourself? From a purely selfish standpoint, that is a lot more profitable than trying to improve others – yes and a lot less dangerous.”

To get more of what you want in SEO, you need to change yourself.

The common denominator here is communication.

We are great at everything SEO and bad at dealing with people. This article will help you overcome this problem.

If you are short on time, here are the takeaways:

1) Derive SEO goals from company goals and use input metrics, not just output metrics.

2) Deliver a hot story of how SEO helps achieve company goals, not just ice-cold statistics.

3) Sell SEO as growth, not marginal optimization.

3) Improve your communication skills, not your SEO skills.

4) Work with others in united clockwork, not isolated silos.

5) Make SEO easy and uncomplicated, not nerdy, esoteric and too complex.

6) How to get more SEO buy-in and budget

To anything in SEO, you need two things:

.



Buy in

Budget/resources.

To get both, you need to show that you understand how the business works and how SEO will impact it. Then, tell the right story and reframe how you sell SEO.

Company goals > SEO goals: Get in line and leverage input metrics to get more buy-in

I see SEO failing most often due to a lack of execution and throughput. Why does this happen?

There is a severe lack of understanding of SEO’s value. But it’s not that other people are stupid. Instead, it’s that we are not doing a good enough job communicating this value.

Adam Goyette hit the nail on the head with this statement:

“The problem isn’t that your CEO ‘doesn’t get marketing’ as many marketers love to lament. The problem is they care about how marketing is impacting revenue and you are making that impossible to understand or even worse hiding from it.”

You need to show that you understand what the company wants. Then, you must demonstrate to the company how organic search can help to achieve that.

The solution: Derive SEO goals evidently from business goals.

For example:

The company needs to reduce paid media costs.

As a result, the goal is the same amount of paid media revenue ($1 million) but in organic revenue, so about 50,000 average sales.

SEO can help achieve that goal by:

Getting a certain number of leads/sales deducted from existing numbers.

You will need 300,000 organic page views to money pages (old and new).

To get there, we need to meet more market demand (keyword coverage).

As a result, we need to have more category/product pages, sales enablement content, etc.

To create these pages we need writers, designers and developers.

This will cost us $100,000.

Graphic inspired by Alexander Rus and his presentation at SMX Munich

Graphic inspired by Alexander Rus and his presentation at SMX Munich.

Going from business goals to SEO goals to input metrics is a concept made famous by Amazon and covered in the book “Working Backwards.”

In brief, instead of reporting only on output (something you cannot influence directly), you derive metrics that, when increased, influence the output.

Amazon, for example, started with a number of product detail pages.

Input metrics often need to be refined over time because you will not always find the best denominator immediately.

Amazon refined the metric to the number of product detail page views because a product page no one sees is a product page no one needs.

This was again refined to the percentage of product detail page views but only counting when products were in stock.

🚫 A product no one can buy is a product no one can buy.

✅ The final input metric was refined as the percentage of product detail page views where products were in stock and immediately ready for two-day shipping.

Here’s an example of how this could be visualized for the company described earlier:

A graphic that shows how input metrics work as leading indicators, influencing the north start metric which then influences the output metric. In this example it would be # of page views for category pages and in stock product pages, as well as # of indexed money pages. The north start metric is # of purchases per month. The output metric at the end is annual recurring revenue.

Note: The goal is not to avoid using outputs but to communicate how your actions contribute to increasing them. SEO takes more time than PPC, for example, so your report should include the fact that you are working on the right things.

It can also motivate you, your team or your client to see what the SEO (team) achieved in a month or any other period.

Make the invisible visible – both your understanding of how the company works and your work to create profit.

Dig deeper: SEO outcomes vs. SEO outputs: Understanding the difference

A compelling story will get you more SEO budget than ice-cold statistics

In “Same As Ever,” Morgan Housel states:

“There is too much information in the world for everyone to calmly sift through the data, looking for the most rational, most correct answer. People are busy and emotional and a good story is always more powerful and persuasive than ice-cold statistics.”

Human beings are not rational, even if we think we are. When you are pitching to get more of an SEO budget, what you need is a good story.

Here’s a quick example:

A graphic showing how you can tell the right story to get more SEO buy-in and budget. You need a situation (Organic Traffic is declining). Then you need Evidence (Because of a test we did in the US we know we can drive significant organic growth). After that comes what you are asking for (We should invest $ 100,000) followed by the coherent actions (in SEO, UX, and Accessibility teams to compete with [insert key competitor] to achieve a result (to achieve $ 100,000-150,000 / year incremental growth). Lastly, communicate why the ask is aligned with the company strategy (This aligns with our company strategy because we focus on inbound traffic and are an inclusive company).

Graphic inspired by Tom Critchlow – How to Get SEO Buy-In

Here’s an example slide (inspired by a client we are consulting) to show the “urgency” to act on the developments in their industry and the opportunity it presents:

An example slide with a headline that says "Case Study: X took the industry by storm". The graph below shows years from 2019 to 2023 on the X-axis and organic traffic on the Y-axis. In blue there is competitor X and in red our client's domain. Over the years our client was ahead of this competitor but didn't decide to invest deeply into SEO. The competitor took over in 2021-2022 and now leads massively by having more than 2x the organic traffic our client has.

We don’t see stillness but movement. With the right slides for your pitch, you can show two states: going from downfall to dream outcome.

Show how your plan, as outlined before, is supposed to meet this challenge and opportunity.

People think they want accuracy. What they actually want is certainty.

People don’t “buy” something. What they actually buy is an emotion that is tied to their dream outcome.