If you know SEO Would be a good investment for your business, the first step is getting approval from your boss.
That could be easy when you’re working for a technology-driven company like Ahrefs with a boss who understands the value and importance of. understands SEO, but it can be more of a challenge for those with less weaving bosses.
In this guide, we discuss how to construct an argument that is more likely to convince your boss.
But first let’s briefly discuss why you would want to do this …
SEO has the power to increase traffic and sales to your business website and improve bottom line results. If you work on the marketing team for the company you work for, this is essentially your job description.
But what do you get apart from a pat on the back?
If you can convince your boss to invest in marketing ideas that will make a positive contribution to the company’s bottom line, you can use this to your advantage in the future. You can use it to get a raise, a promotion, or just to get more resources. The possibilities are endless.
What if you think you’re going to convince your boss to invest in? SEO is the right step, the first thing to keep in mind is that your boss probably doesn’t care SEO. They only care about their bottom line.
Keep this in mind as you formulate your reasoning.
If you frame your pitch around things we marketers love like traffic, backlinks, or website authority, you will lose. You have to explain how SEO will make your boss more money and help him achieve his business goals.
Let’s go through how to do that, step by step.
- Understand the result
- Explain your logic
- Create a roadmap
- Talk about the numbers
- Dispel myths and tackle objections
Step 1. Present the result
It is important that your boss invest in your pitch from the start. The way you do this is to lead with the bottom line. In other words, explain the intended outcome of the thing you are presenting.
How? Just fill in the gaps in the statement below:
By investing in SEO, we can achieve [outcome] in the [timeframe].
Make sure your outcome is tied to business goals. It should be something your boss cares about and not something arbitrary like “more traffic” or “more backlinks”.
For example:
By investing in SEO, we can cut our ad spend by $ 15,000 per month by replacing paid traffic with organic traffic.
Keep your suggested outcome as specific as possible, but don’t pull it off the air. It has to be realistic. It is also better to promise too little than to promise too much.
Step 2. Explain your logic
Presenting a desirable outcome is the easy part. Now you need to explain how and why you believe in your proposed solution (investing in SEO) will lead to the suggested result.
To do this, you need data.
Suppose you work in e-commerce. You browse your Google Ads account and find that you are currently bidding for 20 keywords in Google Ads at $ 15,000 per month. If you look at your Google Analytics data, you can see that this traffic is responsible for an average of $ 40,000 in revenue per month.
If you can rank organically with these keywords SEO, you can get this traffic “for free”.
Even better, since most pages that organically rank in the top 10 for a popular keyword also rank for hundreds of other keywords, organic ranking is likely to drive more sales than ads.
You can bring this point closer to your boss by plugging the highest ranked page for each of your target keywords into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and the market value metric. This is the estimated “Value” of the site’s monthly organic search traffic.
In other words, the above page would cost you an estimated $ 43,500 per month on Google Ads to get the traffic it gets organically “free”.
You can even use these numbers to estimate the potential increase in sales by investing in SEO– then show that to your boss. When you explain things in this way, you show that you have done your homework and that your suggestion is not just a “cake to heaven.”
Step 3. Create a roadmap
Assuming your boss is convinced of your solid opinion and research, the next thing he will want to know is how you get from A to Z.
It’s easy to get bogged down SEO Lingo here, so try to focus on the big picture.
Let’s say you are crawling your website using Ahrefs’ Site Audit and you find some technical ones SEO Problems. Don’t give your boss a 30-minute talk about how the multi-faceted navigation of your website creates duplicate content issues that need to be addressed with proper canonicalization. You will likely see your eyes glaze over, as if you have started speaking a foreign language.
If you want to keep them on your side, keep things simple. In that case, it could mean showing them how your health score compares favorably to your competitor.
You only want to communicate two things here:
- What you are going to do and why (keep it high)
- What resources do you need
Resources include employees, freelancers, tools – anything you need for your roadmap.
If you need to hire new employees or freelancers, it is also worth thinking about and explaining who is leading and training these people. You want to demonstrate to your boss that you got everything to the point and that your plan is realistic.
Step 4. Talk about the numbers
No boss will give the green light to a project that is unlikely to generate any return. If you’ve just listed a number of resources, you’re probably wondering, “How much is all of this going to cost?”
Now is the time to answer that question.
The process itself is pretty straightforward. Just rate all of the resources you just talked about in a spreadsheet. That’s easy enough for SEO Tools and software as most of them have public pricing pages. Just choose the plan that’s right for you.
For employees and freelancers, the average Google salaries or the average hourly rates on freelance websites.
UpWork has some nice data on this:
The final table could look like this:
While this is a good place to start, it doesn’t tell your boss about it KING– what matters. Unfortunately, this is more difficult to calculate than it sounds, because you SEO The efforts will bear fruit long after the first project ends.
For this reason, it makes more sense to create a “break-even” chart. This shows how long it will take for the investment to pay for itself SEO.
For example, let’s say the estimated cost of your project is $ 5,127 per month. because SEO If it takes time, we are pessimistic and assume that the income will not increase in the first six months before we gradually increase it to USD 40,000 and no longer need any advertising expenditure in the twelfth month.
This is what it would look like:
You can see that in this case the “break-even” period occurs in month 12.
Remember to use conservative numbers here. After all, you don’t want your boss to be on your back the second your proposed break-even period comes. You should also make it clear that these are only estimates; you can’t guarantee anything.
Step 5. Dispelling Myths and Addressing Objections
You should be almost home and dry by this point, but your boss is likely to have a few more questions and concerns. Answering these questions takes a little thought as the questions vary, but some common concerns arise.
Let’s look at some of them.
“Is not SEO only snake oil? “
Given the number of dishonest people SEO Services in the market (I’m sure we’ve all had these calls promising first page ranking) this is more than a fair question.
But how do you go about it without getting too defensive?
The best place to start is honesty. Explain that while some “snake oil” SEO Service providers hunt down vulnerable business owners, the process of SEO in itself is legitimate. It’s simply the process of manipulating known Google ranking factors to help pages rank higher in search results.
You can also use the “social proof” to your advantage. For example, you can show that 60% of marketers have inbound marketing practices such as: SEO are your highest quality lead sources:
If you want to go further, consider showing your boss the “Traffic Value” metrics from Ahrefs’ Site Explorer for competitors that do well. Explain how competitor A gets an estimate XXX organic visits per month worth. $XXX will likely drill home as well SEO can work.
“Not SEO last eternally?”
This is another question where honesty is the best policy because SEO in fact takes time. Rankings don’t happen overnight, and anyone who says otherwise is likely selling “snake oil.”
In fact, according to our study with two million keywords within one year, only 5.7% of the pages are in the top 10:
Most bosses know that there is no magic bullet in marketing, so explaining that something takes time isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It shows that you understand how things work and that you have a realistic perspective. Think of it as positive, not negative.
“What if we get wiped out by a Google update / penalty? “
Google updates and penalties are scary topics, and rightly so. Many websites have had their organic traffic wiped out practically overnight after a penalty.
Here is just one example:
If you are “ethically” SEO Best practices, manual penalties are not something to worry about very much.
However, Google updates its ranking algorithms several times a year. These can negatively affect your traffic, but they are unlikely to wipe you out completely. Usually you will see only a slight decrease or increase in traffic – or no change at all.
Final thoughts
Convince your boss to invest in SEO can be difficult, but the benefits can be immense. We are proof of that. Our investments in SEO-focused content have drawn countless customers to us and helped to firmly place our brand on the world map SEO Industry.
If you want the same for your business, you need to learn to speak your boss’s language and shape things to harmonize with them. Keep that SEO Technical jargon for conversations with like-minded colleagues.
Any questions? Ping me on twitter.
