Justifying SEO Strategies

 

One of the first foundational aspects of any online marketing strategy today is search engine optimisation (SEO). Especially in an organic sense, the good news about search engine optimisation is that once you’ve established a strategy and begun focusing on implementation, you’re often living and breathing the strategy and growing with it. But very little benefit is achieved if SEO is being implemented for the sake of implementation, with no inherent proof points to justify your approach, your resources, your agency fees and consumer/end-user value. This justification in the six key areas explored in this article is the primary focus point at this stage of the SEO action plan.

Understanding the ROI of SEO

 Many of my clients fear that it will be hard to justify her work. It won’t take her forever to increase her Google rankings … there will be no wait time. She’ll see the reward of her efforts the minute search engines notice me, she’ll start ranking well, and I’ll have an influx of traffic. If my conversion rates improve, and my average order value increases, I’ll be earning more than I invested in her service. The search-engine optimisation (SEO) professional will have a crushing ROI case. ROI is about immediate value as well as delayed value. Improved rankings will lead immediately to an increase in visitors, with the possibility of an increase in sales, expansion of the customer base, improved company financials, and refined abilities to serve customers and reach top talent. Contrast this with paid advertising, such as buying ads on Google, where you have to stop spending money the minute your budget is exhausted.

 Finally, calculate your ROI using relevant metrics such as increases in organic traffic, keyword rankings and conversion rates. When you demonstrate SEO’s impact on actual business outcomes, it gets a lot easier to justify your strategies. Track your cost per lead or sale using SEO versus other marketing channels, and you can clearly show how you stack up financially against the alternatives. If you consistently demonstrate positive ROI, you can make a great case for continued investment.

Aligning SEO with Business Objectives

 Only an SEO strategy that’s allied to the larger, strategic goals of business will be a securely justifiable one, because you’d be aligning your SEO objectives with the objectives of the wider organisation leading you toward your brand awareness KPIs, your sales KPIs and so on. This starts with having a genuine feel for business vision and mission but also with identifying the KPIs relevant to marketing in general and SEO strategy in particular.

 Furthermore, the process is about being on the horn with stakeholders, internally and externally, from marketing to sales to product development, to figure out their key priorities for the month or quarter. For example, if the business is pushing a new product, then part of your SEO strategy could include finding the right keywords to drive that product’s visibility and traffic through new promotional or product content you’d write. Having your SEO closely aligned to business goals means that you can justify the strategic steps you take to your boss.

Leveraging Data-Driven Insights

 Data-driven insights: these drive the rationales behind SEO strategies. Analytics tools enable you to gather, process and interpret Information and data, and then apply the findings to your choices of SEO strategies. You could, for instance, readily observe and track user habit on the website; show which pieces of content work, and figure out optimisation opportunities. You take out hypothesising when you audit your website using Google Analytics and other analytical tools. That’s a big plusses. This means your strategies are based on proof and figures, not on hunches. Data are a lot easier to justify to stakeholdesr.

 Data-driven insights are also most useful because they help you project trends and patterns into the future, and use them to inform your ongoing SEO strategies. For example, looking at search trends helps you anticipate changes in consumer behaviour so you can adjust your keyword strategy (predictive SEO is a subarea of consumer-choice modelling that employs search query patterns to make products and services more discoverable online); and running A/B tests on different SEO tactics allows you to work out which are most effective, which provides useful justification for your strategies by rooting them in data.

Demonstrating Competitor Analysis

 Among the arsenal of justification tactics at your disposal, competitor analysis is probably the strongest, and at the same time, the most overlooked. By evaluating the SEO of your competitors, you can uncover new opportunities for your website and SEO strategy. You can see how your site ranks for certain keywords and what the content landscape looks like for your competitors. You can then make improvements to your SEO strategy and create content that sets you apart from the rest. This is known as competitor analysis. In this article, I will discuss some useful tips on how to improve your site based on competitor analysis.

 In addition, competitor analysis gives you something to compare against to see if you’re receding or advancing with respect to your SEO. If you know the metrics of your competitors’ websites, it helps you identify what you’re doing right and wrong. This allows you to tweak your strategy and, crucially, to quantify your SEO efforts for stakeholders. If you can show that your tactics are helping you level up, you’re in a better position to request resources for SEO.

Proving the Value of Content Marketing

 Content marketing serves an important role in SEO and therefore it’s important to be able to show why it’s there and how it connects with other areas of your SEO strategy. This makes it an important exercise to show how you’re optimising your website for both users’ needs and search engine rankings. High-quality content brings more organic traffic, increases the amount of time people spend on your site, and strengthens search-engine trust in your website. To be able to showcase how your content marketing is a part of your SEO, you need to know exactly what your other SEO goals are, such as being more visible and brushing up your rankings.

 Show seasonal trends in organic traffic, time on page, bounce rate and social shares, as well as examples of how your content is ranking in Google, and you’ll prove your worth. What’s more, if you use content marketing, and you execute it well, your content should be a tangible example of that off-page factor we talked about before. If you can provide elements like case studies or examples of how content marketing campaigns have boosted their work, and drive home the message that the writing they deliver is the reason your SEO strategies are succeeding, then you’ll both start speaking the same language. Now you’ll have homegrown content that is equal parts sexy and demonstrably valuable as a critical tool in your SEO toolbox.

Ensuring Long-Term Sustainability

 Justifying SEO on this basis also involves reassuring the business owner that your intended plan is sustainable. If your strategies are only achieving positive results in the short term, such as through manipulative shortcuts like black-hat SEO, then the business owner has a valid concern about whether it was really worth it for your intervention to make any difference to the long-term health of the website. If, instead, you can describe practices that are specifically designed to drive success over time (such as technical SEO, great content and link-building schemes that follow ethical guidelines), then the sustainability angle should reassure the business owner that your work is likely to produce long-lasting benefits.

 Finally, be sure to explain long-term sustainability in terms of the risks of short-term or ‘black hat’ SEO. While it can present a fleeting boost, black hat SEO may lead to the penalty phase of search-engine rankings and a long-term loss in the credibility of your site. With sustainable SEO development, the knowledge of how to maintain a steady presence in the search results will prevent losing the gains made by previous investments in ethical and effective SEO. Pitching it in terms of sustainability helps to explain why SEO deserves to continue to require investment.

Conclusion:

 So if you want buy-in from stakeholders, they need justification for SEO, as well as budgets allocated for SEO, and a sustainable plan to drive results in the future. We have outlined six ways you can give evidence to justify your approach: ROI. Tie it to measurable business objectives. Data. Compare with the competition. Evidence of content working. Long-term investment. Justification is the evidence you need to show your stakeholders why SEO will work for your company. It proves that your processes and strategy align with digital and business objectives.