Getting buy-in for projects either at work, or from an organization can be difficult, but for SEO projects, it can be even more challenging as it is not always easy to tie the SEO work to results.
To improve buy-in, looking to soft skills outside of SEO can make the difference.
If we know our soft skills and and what our strengths are, then we can understand others and be able to communicate with them better. This then helps when we want to get buy-in for projects, including SEO.
In this article, we go through some key areas to address to help you get buy-in at your company such as communication and the ability to cultivate trust.
Soft Skills
We spend a lot of time improving our technical SEO or working on keyword research and reporting, especially getting up to speed with Google Analytics 4 (GA4), but how much time do we spend on improving our soft skills? Do we know what our strengths are?
When working in SEO and with the wider team, soft skills become important.
Soft skills, also called interpersonal skills, are non-technical and impact your performance not only at work but also in your personal life.
They include how to manage your time, communicate with others, resolve conflict, and listen to others, to name just a few.
The CliftonStrengths helps individuals focus on what they are naturally good at. It helps assess your soft skills, including how empathetic you are, which is a great leadership and team player skill.
Empathy
Tom Critchlow said getting buy-in requires executive empathy. He explained that “executive presence is the art of seeing the problem from someone else’s point of view.”
We need to make the stakeholders, such as the CEO or CFO, want to care about SEO and how it can help them achieve their goals and the broader business objectives.
Empathy is putting oneself in another person’s shoes and seeing it from their side. We should apply this not only to the main stakeholders but to the development team or design team and others who will become your biggest allies.
Trust
Empathy is a key part of the trust triangle, and it also includes authenticity and logic.
It takes a long time to build trust, and when it is lost, most of the time, it can be traced back to a breakdown of one of them.
Your colleagues and the key stakeholders will trust you when:
They feel you care about them, which is empathy.
They have faith in your competence, which is the logic (and why it is important to show results from SEO work clearly)
They believe they are interacting with the real you, which is authenticity.
Screenshot from hbr.org/2020/05/begin-with-trust, November 2024
Reporting
If we want the stakeholders to allocate more budget next quarter or even next year to SEO, review the previous reports you and your team have worked on and have shared with them over the year.
What reports have they read? Which ones have they ignored?
Make sure that you get feedback monthly or at least quarterly on what reports the stakeholders find useful and which metrics they want to see more of in the future.
Nobody wants to see pages of reports – the stakeholders are busy people. You should focus on reporting on the most important KPIs to them.
Some people with minimal time to fully understand SEO (such as the CEO and CFO) may think organic traffic is a given, and less investment would not necessarily mean less traffic.
Therefore, it is always important to show what the SEO team did and provide clear results.
For example, tell them “we created the content strategy and built out the blog on X topics, and this created an uplift in traffic and revenue by X%”. Showing the direct impact of SEO helps justify the SEO team and their work.
KISS
KISS stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. Although this framework is used mainly in the design space, it can also be applied to the wider business.
It has been used in many companies, like Apple with the iPhone. Keeping something focused and simple is difficult.
We can also apply the KISS principle to SEO and get buy-in by removing the jargon that comes with it – just focusing on what the impact will be.
For example, instead of saying that we have a lot of 404 status codes when products are out of stock, show the stakeholders that the product pages return an empty page. There is nothing on the page to keep the user there.
Show the traffic to some of these key product pages, and when they are out of stock, calculate how much revenue is lost.
KISS goes back to the reporting element. Keep the reports simple and show only what the stakeholders value as important. Don’t include tracking of hundreds of keywords if they are not driving clicks.
Focus on the main terms that generate clicks and impressions in Google Search Console. Use the events in GA4 to show how many conversions the site and the pages have generated.
Open Line Of Communication
Make sure you speak to the stakeholders throughout the year, not just when reports are due or when you need more budget.