Share with them news such as the Google updates or any positive impact from the SEO work that has meant revenue and conversions are up.
Google updates are still important to share whether your site has been affected. It is better for the stakeholders to find out about these updates from the SEO team than from the client services team or those who do not work in SEO.
Other key elements to share are some insights from conferences. What are some initiatives they have done that have been successful? Were some of these the same initiatives you wanted to implement, but there was resistance?
Is there a company newsletter you can feature, or is there a marketing newsletter you can contribute to? Share these with the stakeholders.
If you or the team write for any third-party sites, share these articles internally.
Alternatively, if there was a webinar the SEO team took part in that had a lot of views and likes, send this to the stakeholders.
Integrate SEO Within The Company
Make SEO everyone’s responsibility.
Highlight in the meetings or conversations with stakeholders that doing a site migration, changing the homepage of the site, or amending the content management system (CMS) is not just the work of the SEO team. It is the responsibility of the whole company.
For example, a site migration cannot be done on a Friday evening, or the homepage should not be drastically changed during sales periods.
SEO should never be seen as an add-on and should be an integrated part of the marketing strategy.
Unfortunately, in many organizations, the SEO strategy can be outside the product and outside the marketing strategy. Create allies within the marketing and product team. Show them how SEO impacts and affects their KPIs and how SEO can help improve them.
Creating allies comes back to working on your soft skills.
We can still have those “water cooler moments” or informal chats even if we are remote working. Ask them how their weekend was, what their hobbies are, do they have family nearby.
In these informal chats, you may also find out their pain points. What are they struggling with? How can SEO help them?
When you start building your KPIs together and helping one another, this builds teamwork outside of your immediate team and helps build more trust.
Competitor Analysis
Not many are happy when their direct competitors beat them in revenue and traffic.
Competitor or market analysis always helps to show some of what others are doing. We can see an estimate of the traffic, the paid ads they are running, and the terms they are ranking for using third-party tools.
However, context should not be underestimated. It may be that the drop in traffic and revenue you are experiencing on your site, is not just your site. Some industries may have seen a dip, while others have seen an increase.
For example, during COVID-19, travel and hospitality saw a drop, whereas Zoom and online applications and games saw their sales increase.
It is now becoming more difficult to track customers, due to AI. And this won’t get easier next year as the search landscape will continue to change. Therefore, always remember to include the context of the industry when reporting on how your site is performing.
Show what others are doing in the market, including new initiatives. This will help build and keep the trust of the key stakeholders.
Mastering Soft Skills In Securing SEO Buy-In
Soft skills should never be underestimated when trying to get buy-in for projects. Understand the needs of your stakeholders and the wider team.
Spend time building rapport with them and learning about their challenges and how SEO and their team can work together to achieve more than if each one worked independently.
However, if you find yourself in a position where nobody is paying attention to the SEO, plan to start testing different elements of what they want to change with the website, for example, changing the categories or changing the home page.
Use a tool such as SEO Testing that allows you to test different URLs; you can do split testing and time-based testing. When you have the data, present it to the stakeholders to show them the results.
SEO is an industry where it is hard to get buy-in and harder to get the budget approved. But work on your soft skills – empathy and trust – to build a team that believes in SEO and supports you 100%.
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