Anna says: “My Additional Insight for SEO in 2024 is about SEOs communicating their value so that it helps them to get buy-in and budget from the stakeholders and the C-suite.”

As an SEO, how do you communicate your value to the business?

“It's really important to communicate your value in the language that the C-suite and the stakeholders understand. This is where the disconnect happens. What we tend to do as marketers is we have our metrics that we love, and we understand what they mean for the business and the value that they bring. But the C-suite, MDs and business owners don't always understand. They talk in terms of return on investment and customer base growth.

So, if we're reporting from a backlinks point of view or a SERP position, what does that mean for the company’s growth? They need you to connect the dots because otherwise, they can't see your worth, SEO's worth in the growth of the company. For example, the higher positions that you are in the SERPs, is that bringing more traffic? Is that making more sales? It may be obvious to marketers, but it's not so obvious to the stakeholders you're talking to. They need to say, right, we're bringing in this amount of extra traffic from getting these positions in search engines. That means we can see a change in the number of people shopping from us. If it's e-commerce, they're buying and selling and connecting those dots that way, or if it's connected to the sales team, and this is how many people are coming through and talking to the sales team. It's that giving them the picture of that journey. And it can be really hard for some SEOs because some businesses do not attribute their sales very well.

I've worked in many last-click businesses where everything in Google is last-click. The last click is attributed. And it's generally paid, so paid gets all the glory. And they think paid is wonderful. We have made all of these sales. And then when you look a bit further at the customer journey, there's been 12 touch points, they were not all paid, there was a lot of SEO in that, a lot of content. It could be articles from digital PR. There were lots of things across that journey. So it's really hard sometimes for SEOs to show their value. So, they have to come and be quite proactive about it and connect those dots for the C-suite. Because otherwise, their budgets can be reduced, oh well paid to make the sale so they can have some more money, SEO where you didn't make those sales. So, we're going to reduce your budget. And when I've been at brightonSEO a couple of times this year, the one thing I kept hearing from people was, ‘My C-suite is meddling that I'm doing a strategy, and they're changing it all, they've stopped me doing things, I feel micromanaged, I'm stressed’. And this is because they don't understand SEO is hard. After all, it is long-term. And it's a long-term strategy that is harder to measure. So, they are struggling to get this buy-in.

Whereas what I've had to do when I've worked internally is to turn that around and say, ‘Look, we're going almost to measure it like paid measures. And we're going to be very analytical about it’. Even if it's plotting out, communicating conversion rates from the top of the funnel, plotting out the customer journey, showing the C-suite, the CFO, and the CEO where people are going, how a customer journey works, and where SEO’s value is. And if you strip SEO out and you don't budget it, they're not going to get from the top of the funnel to the bottom funnel because a hugely missing out. So, you have to be quite clever about it and how you communicate with them.”

Is this not doubling down the value of SEO a little bit? Is it not the responsibility of stakeholders to understand how SEO works a little bit more in the metrics that are key to SEO?

“In some ways, yes. Because if you're running a business, it's really important, but at the same time, over half of CEOs are from finance and operations backgrounds. They're not familiar with it. They have X number of departments to oversee, from HR to operations to finance. You will find that they prefer finance operations because that tends to be the backgrounds from very analytical backgrounds. So, it tends to have to be quite a proactive approach from marketing, in that you don't often get the C-suite coming down to say, well, teach me about this, learn about this, you have to go the other way. And so, I will teach you about this because you need to understand it's important to get your buy-in. After all, we don't want this to be where you get sort of business leaders interfering in marketing in detrimental ways because they don't know, they don't understand, and we haven't educated them. And so we need to be quite proactive about it. Because otherwise, it shouldn't be like that, we shouldn't have to do that.

But even if you've got a CEO that's been in marketing, they've probably been out of it for a few years. And everything changes weekly with our business, so even I barely keep up, and I do it every day, so how are they meant to keep up? We do have to be proactive with it and act like there's a problem a lot of the time. At that moment, we see CMOs not acting like part of the C-suite. They tend to go quite siloed and separate. And that's not helping people into sets, SEOs, content, or different departments because once we start siloing marketing out, it makes it difficult. We need to have that seat at the table, talking the same business language. And the thing is, marketing is one of the only departments that doesn't talk the language of business. Finance, operations, they all talk the language of business, and we don't. I think that's a lot of the problem. It's not taught to us. It’s not in any course that I've ever been in. I've never seen a marketing course talk about how to talk about business goals and how to talk to shareholders and boards. It’s something that's sorely missed everywhere. So, there's this disconnect. I think it's both sides. There's a reluctance, but I find with most jobs, you have to manage upwards if you want to get anything done.”

If an SEO started to build a good relationship with the C-suite. Then, the C-suite wanted to understand SEO a little bit more, and they wanted you to do a half-hour presentation to share the value of SEO, to educate them a little bit about SEO. What things should be included in that quick training session, and what things shouldn't be included?

“I think a quick overview of talking about their business goals and showing how you will link your metrics to them. They can see how we're going to measure things for SEO. There's an education on brand, but long-term brand building versus short-term sales activation ensures they know that long-term brand building brings a better return on investment. So, pulling in stats, either from your business or the web, on how the better return on investment happens across those channels like SEO. They like case studies or evidence. So if it's not yours, and you haven't got any evidence internally, find case studies from the web. There are some really good case studies. We just Google SEO cases on ‘how people have managed to put more into SEO and get a better return’. I do a funnel, which is the marketing funnel, which is our conversion rates at each stage. If SEO gets a bit more budget, I think I can up this conversion funnel at the top, and I show we've got 10,000 people coming in here. Only five people are at the bottom because our conversion rates are bad. So, if we do more awareness and activity here and need to do some middle-of-the-funnel activity or wherever, the SEO activity I want to see will increase this.

So, if we have 10,000 people come in here, we then get 1000 people coming out the bottom instead of like two, so trying to show them with stats and figures because that's how they work, how you can connect from start to finish, and where SEOs part is in it? The return on investment is incredibly important. This is why once you talk to CFOs about the return on investment on the sales activation, you have to keep pumping money into it to keep it activated, whereas brand building is long-term, and it overtakes in return on investment. And this short-term sell stuff. Over time, they like that because they hear the word return investment and reducing budgets. You see their eyes light up with glory when you talk about cost saving. So, you've got to appeal to them in whatever you're doing and have an SEO one-on-one on how it will do that, how it does a great return on investment. So, there are sometimes some back-of-the-envelope calculations because SEO isn't always as easy to say we put money in here, it comes there. But with conversion rates and an understanding of how the funnel works, they'll see and understand where you're coming from and why it's important.”

How should an SEO react if the C-suite says, ‘Look, we understand the brand’s value. It’s all well and good, focusing on the long-term. But we have to focus on this quarter. And that's all that matters at the moment’. Should the SEO push back and say, ‘Look, we need to be building long-term as well,’ or do they need to listen to the C-suite and focus on the short-term?

“I think there's a balance of both because if you keep short-term, you keep chasing your tails constantly. And I've worked for businesses that do that. But there are areas in which I talk a lot about digital PR because I worked for a company that had a real need for short-term gain. So, we talked about ramping up digital PR, which helped us get a lot more traffic quite quickly into the business and through those backlinks. And it's helped us rise quite quickly in the SERPs in certain pages we wanted to target. I've told the story quite a few times. People hear me talk about the gaming chairs. Well, where we needed to get rid of stocking gaming chairs, it was coming up to Christmas, and we needed to clear some of the warehouses. So, we did a campaign that linked to your gaming hit chair with a page that wasn't ranking well. We managed to boost that. So we could show that we got more sales very quickly. And over four or five weeks, we were starting to show results.

So, there are SEO techniques that you can show very quickly. And the thing to take note is that we must stay away from silos because SEO content has a long-term value. But if you work with the social team and the content team, you can get that content out quicker through social channels by reusing it and repurposing it across posts. So, you can say this is the long-term game for these channels, but I've worked with social, I've talked to them, we've put them in the schedule, they think they'll work from helping get traffic from social. So, you can work together to get that short-term game across channels, you can work with paid, and you can boost some of the channels with paid. So, the SEO part will take a little bit longer, but we've just given them some great content for their paid channel. So, you can work as a whole marketing to make sure that you're covering those short-term and long-term goals together and you're getting the most out of everything.”

Should all SEOs be doing this? I mean, should highly technical SEOs focusing on on-site health be doing this? And also, how do you go about building up these skills? Because thinking about things like conventional business goals, metrics, and strategies doesn’t necessarily come first nature to SEOs.

“This is saying that then very rarely taught in marketing qualifications, there are a few that touch on them. But they are a skill set. That's not by any marketer's fault, lacking the one thing I think is really good sitting in meetings that aren't marketing meetings. I used to sit in a lot of commercial meetings. Those are super useful for understanding the commercial goals, how all the other teams, like the operations team and the finance team, are talking about those goals, and starting to understand how the business works. I've been in a few roles where the previous marketing manager just went to marketing-related ones, and I'd be in everything, particularly new to the business. If it's talking about stock, if it's talking about the budget for the year, I would be in them because the best way to learn is to hear how everyone else is talking about it. So, doing it on the job and understanding there are some wonderful mini MBA courses and things like that, management courses, which I talk a lot about, some of those talk a lot about business. There are a lot of free courses you can find online that are business-related, talking about things like how to set business goals, how to budget, and how these things can fill in the gaps. You don't have to do anything because you'll start picking up tips. But going to the meetings also means that people see that marketing, no matter what department you are in marketing: social media, SEO, content, they know that you're serious about understanding the business and connecting. And to be fair, some interesting decisions happen in those meetings, and you get to see them as well. So, try and step out of the marketing remit and think about whether you want to go to the finance ones because you will get involved a lot more, and they'll see you more on par with them rather than being siloed. It's really good. It's good for your career. And it's good for them seeing you're facing those meetings, and you'll get that sort of kudos that you are finance and business orientated because you were there as well.”

You shared what SEOs should be doing in 2024. Now, let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“I think it's how they report, particularly to the stakeholders and the C-suite. I've been in quite a lot of presentations where we've got a 30-page or 30-slide presentation on SEO, and it goes deep into the metrics. And the problem is if you email that to people, they just don't read it. If you're in the meeting with them, maybe they don't understand. So, cutting down those presentations to a few slides. And just talking back into the business terms of what the business leaders need to know, how is SEO growing the business? What difficulties is it having? Are we reaching our targets? Do we need to change? What's a quick overview of what's happening? And if there's any reason you need to pivot, keep it high-level. Because I think sometimes when we present, we love, I love data, and I love the metrics. But for people that it's not their job day-to-day, they don't want all that detail. And we spend far too much time making presentations to those details. So, cut it to a few slides on just those key things that the C-suite needs to know and do have your data, so if they want to sit down and go into it with you, then fair enough, but don't spend that time putting it into something fancy because that can take hours. It’s not worth it if they're not going to understand or read it.”

Anna Bravington is a Co-Founder and Marketing Strategist at Those That Dare, and you can find her over at thosethatdare.com.