You already know SEO is the way you need to go to gain sustainable growth for the business you work for as a marketeer. But as of now, there has never been an investment in SEO, or the investment was stopped. As a (online) marketeer you want to make sure you give your boss the best feasible options to gain growth for the business. But, how can you convince your boss that the investment in SEO is a sound advice? In this blog we will help you with how you can construct the arguments to convince your boss to invest in SEO.
Start with telling your boss the results you will expect
You will have to get your boss interested in your pitch from the start. The best way to do this is to start off with the gains of SEO. For this you will need to start your argument with:
“When we start with SEO and get the desired results, I expect a turnover of X amount in X time.”.
But, turnover is not the only desired outcome you can aim for with SEO. What SEO specialists most often do is also look at how you could possibly downscale ad spend when SEO starts taking over.
“When SEO starts to take over, we can decrease ad spend on [these products/categories] by X amount and let organic traffic take it over.”.
After this you could also use some other benefits of SEO to show your boss why SEO is the way to go that are less measurable. But keep in mind that your boss will be most easily convinced by measurable results that boil down to ROI. When you start making these arguments, make sure that they are realistic.
Go into how you came to this potential
After showing your boss the main reasons to go for SEO and what results you expect, your boss will want to know how you will reach that result. To be able to even show this, you will first need to do a high-over keyword research. This high-level keyword research will help you understand and get the potential growth in numbers. Start off with researching the main topics of your business. So for example, your business might be an e-commerce website that sells all sorts of categories of products like computers, books, etc. Make sure you dive into the keywords and check the monthly search volume. Once you have the monthly search volume, you can use your current data in analytics to start calculating.
You will start off with taking the monthly search volume and then multiplying that with the CTR you are expecting to get on that keyword. We often go for 5% CTR (based on the average CTR for position 4-10). For example: Books has a monthly search of 200.000. With a CTR that would mean 10.000 visitors to your website. Now you have to check the sessions per user. In this example we will take 3. This means you will have 30.000 sessions. Now, you haven’t looked into the keywords deep enough to say you will be able to keep the current conversion rate. So we’d advise you to calculate with a 1-2% conversion rate. In this example we will use 1,5%. These 15.000 sessions will turn into 450 conversions per month. Now take your average order value and multiply that with the 450 conversions, for example the average order value is € 45,-. This means that you will create a turnover of € 20.250,- on a monthly basis. Do this for every main subject so you can show your boss what growth could be expected when you start working on SEO. The best way to show this to your boss is with a simple funnel image like the one down below.
Work out a roadmap on how to get there
Now that your boss knows what results he can expect and how you came to those results, he will want to know how you will get to that result. The best way to do this is to make a roadmap that shows this. Show your boss in this roadmap how you will first start off with building and improving. Most often you will start off with an in-depth keyword research to know exactly what pages to start on. After this you will start making structures for pages out of these keywords. Once this is done you will start writing and implementing content. Depending on your strategy this might repeat itself for the coming years. For the technical part you will have to look at impact vs feasibility. What is the impact of the change and how feasible is it? Once you’ve arranged these, you can fill in the roadmap accordingly. The same for off-site SEO. You will need to gain Authority, no matter what. Either to decrease or increase the gap with your competitors. Because working on your authority takes time, we would advise you to start this off right away together with on-site SEO. In the case of link building, it might take several hours to actually find the right websites that fit your criteria, other than that it will also take time for the authority to be “sent over” to your website.
Once you start filling out your roadmap in this way you will notice that in the world of SEO there’s a lot of recurring work. This is why we would advise you to make your roadmap quarterly. Your boss will often look at results quarterly with higher ups as well, so it will fit his agenda. So make a plan in which you can divide it into quarters in which you can also easily show how some work will recur every quarter.
Go into the ROI of SEO
SEO is often seen as “free traffic”, but it is not free traffic. It takes an investment in 3 pillars: On-site, off-site and technical. You will need to do keyword research, structure building, write and post content, work on your authority with link building and make sure your website works as best as possible within the technical ranking factors of search engines. This takes specialists who have to be invested in to do the work. This could be either internally or externally. Now, if you choose for externally the costs will be the hourly rate x needed hours to get results. If you’re going to handle this internally, you will have to get the right tools to be able to do SEO. In this case you can think of tools like Semrush, Majestic, Moz and many others you will need to be able to do the work, but also keep track of your results.
We would advise you to make two scenarios in which you sketch out both the internal and external way of working. This does require you to have the knowledge on what type of specialists you will need to get the job done. In the basics you will need at least the following specialists:
- SEO specialist
- Content writer
- Developer (back-end)
A combination of these three will be able to work on all three of the pillars of SEO together. It doesn’t mean you per se need these three specialists, because often you can find a SEO specialist that can do both the strategic work as the content writing. But you will need these three fields of expertise to be able to work on SEO.
The tools and the people will be your costs for SEO. Now we need to set that off against the potential growth you have already calculated for the start of your pitch. Now it gets a little bit more tricky. Because SEO will not give you results tomorrow. SEO is a long-term investment. The average you can use to calculate when the returns will be coming is as followed: A website with an Authority of ~45 can rank a keyword in top 4-10 on average in 3,6 months. Now, if you don’t have that 45 authority yet, you might want to check your top competitors to see how you fall into the scale and recalculate this 3,6 month.
Now you will need to use your roadmap. Here is the information on when you will have what category content live and when. You can now use the above average for results (or your re-calculated expected time for results) to start calculating when you expect what return to come. Take your calculations of the potential growth and start plotting them into months where results should be coming in. Once you have done this, you can see exactly how after for example 3,6 months there will be a growth in results that will just keep on growing.
Set off your costs versus the expected turnover growth and you have the ROI shown on a monthly basis which will show your boss the ROI can only increase over time.
Prepare for the myths about SEO
Your boss most often has already heard about SEO from others and you won’t be the first one to pitch it. And even if you are the first one to pitch it, your boss has probably already heard about some myths in SEO that will have a negative impact on your pitch.
One of the most common ones is that SEO can be seen as a hustle. Sadly, there are agencies out there that prey on the fact that it is not a field of exact knowledge. So they know how to sell it, but don’t actually know how to create the results they’re promising. Make sure that you are honest and that you stay realistic. Explain to your boss that SEO is fully legit, because it is nothing else than following the rules of search engines and making sure your website follows those to increase the results in the search engines. SEO specialists know certain ranking factors and know how to play into that to get results. In that case, it is not much different than setting up an ad in Google Ads.
Another myth often heard when you start pitching SEO is that it will take forever. Yes, SEO takes time, there’s no way to go around it. But if you have been realistic in your ROI calculation you will have this question tackled before it can be asked. Because you will be showing your boss when expected results should come in. Your boss won’t mind that it takes time, as long as you’re open and honest about the fact that it will.
The last myth you should definitely prepare for is the questions about Google penalties. There are some scary stories going around in which websites have lost all their SEO gains due to penalties. But, it’s not like they got them randomly. These websites have used tactics that are known as “blackhead SEO”. You can read this as “illegal/against the known rules”. This means that they might be hiding keywords behind content, buying spam links, etc. You are not going to use these tactics, so manual penalties are not a concern. Again, honesty is also needed. Tell your boss that there is a risk we will lose results after an update to a search engine.
Do you want to do SEO like a boss? Get in touch.
