How can we reposition SEO as being the foundation of a good website, and not something you can just turn on and forget? Learn more about how to communicate the value of SEO beyond traffic and leads.

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Hi, I am Helen, and on today's Whiteboard Friday, we are going to be looking at how to communicate the value of SEO beyond just traffic and links.

Now, as an SEO, I imagine you have tried really hard to raise the profile of SEO to explain what it is and to communicate the value that it has to a business. Probably, mainly at family gatherings because your family is still not entirely sure that you don't work for Google, but you'll have definitely done it amongst your colleagues and your senior leadership team.

But despite all of that, I imagine if you asked any member of your company what exactly is SEO, they would very confidently tell you it's... There are keywords, content is king and backlinks. And whilst that's not entirely incorrect, it is a really small amount of the work that goes into a good SEO campaign, and that's the problem that we have.

SEO just gets a bit too minimized. It's just a marketing channel. You can just set it and forget it. And we know that's not true because, actually, SEO has a value far greater than just bringing traffic to a website.

So, in this new world of SGE stealing our clicks, layoffs, and redundancies around every corner, I think it's time that we look at how we can reposition SEO as the foundation of a good website and not just something that you can turn on and forget.

Now, as SEOs, we will have some very unique concerns. Things like: What's Google done today? Is it another algorithm update? What's going on? And is that a Google Search Console bug, or has all of my traffic disappeared overnight? But there are some things that will impact beyond just the SEO team. There are things that other members of other teams will be interested in.

So, let's look at those, how we impact the work of other teams, and how SEO actually does lay the foundation for a really well-performing website.

So, we've got SEO as our foundation. From there, we'll notice that we actually have a lot of effect on these other things that happen on a website, like user experience.

So we know that we are very focused on making sure that pages load quickly, all of the elements on a page don't jump around sporadically as that page is loading, and that pages are linked together really intuitively.

Now, we're mainly doing this for the search engines, aren't we? If we're honest. But actually, this is really improving user experience on the website. After all, that's why the search engines like Google are trying to push us into doing these things more, despite what recent algorithm updates might suggest. But not only are we impacting user experience on the website, we're also making sure that the content, the pages that we're creating on websites are really well targeted to the users.

We're no longer just shoving keywords into copy. We're very much looking at what users want when they land on a website like ours and how we can meet that because that's what the search engines are looking for us to do. But the brilliant side effect is that we're doing it for our customers, and, therefore, they're finding our websites to be much more engaging than perhaps they would have been if we weren't focusing on SEO.

We are always looking to build more links. We always are chasing that authority. But a brilliant side effect of looking for links from high authority websites is that actually we are finding websites that are highly relevant to our users, and we are directing those users to our website through a link. So not only are we responsible for organic traffic to the website, we are also responsible for a lot of the referral traffic as well. And actually, if you have a look at your analytics, you will probably notice that you're getting a fair amount of traffic from those links that you've built recently, sorry, acquired through natural means.

And content. We don't want to just have people land on a website because we've managed to trick the search engines into ranking our pages highly. We want users to find our pages informative and to meet their needs. And SEO is all about identifying user intent and making sure that the page of copy that they land on is fulfilling that intent, but also driving them down a funnel to complete whatever action it is that you want them to complete on the website. So, a side effect of us trying to write copy that is good for the search engines is, of course, that we are meeting the needs of our users.

And let's talk about PPC. PPC and SEO have to go hand in hand. The effects that we have on landing pages mean that PPC campaigns might have more value from them because we've improved the quality of the landing page that they are directing traffic to. And also, if we're organically ranking really high for certain key phrases, it means that you don't necessarily need to spend money on a PPC campaign targeting those keywords.

So actually, organic traffic, although an investment, is also reducing costs elsewhere. And exposure to new audiences. So it's all very well that you might have an email list of thousands of people and you might have a wonderful CRM team that's really managing those relationships with existing customers. But without organic search, it's really hard to target new customers, people who are not familiar with your brand, who are really just in the discovery phase of trying to find a product or a service.

So we are helping to bring a whole new audience to a website that can then be captured onto a newsletter subscription or in the CRM database that you have.

So SEO work is really underpinning a lot of these additional benefits for a website. Okay, that's fine.

But how do you communicate that to specific colleagues who perhaps are wondering about the value of SEO for them?

Let's talk about brand. SEO data is so useful for brand teams. It helps them to understand what sort of things people are searching for in relation to our brand. Things like the frequently asked questions give you a really good idea of the sentiment of searchers when they're searching for your brand. Are they asking about reviews, for example, or are they asking is X brand a scam? That kind of information might be stuff that your brand team isn't aware of without the likes of SEOs who are studiously looking at SERPs all the time.

And also social media. Social media execs, they are focused on beating the algorithm, which sounds fairly familiar, doesn't it? So, although it's a completely separate discipline in its own right, there's a lot of crossover in terms of skills. So, as SEOs, we can bring a lot of value to our social media teams by helping them understand how to optimize for algorithms. Yeah, it's going to be a very different algorithm for Google and Instagram, but the idea of that still applies. It's a similar set of skills, and there are similar things that we can do to help educate the social media team so they understand the landscape of changing algorithms a little bit better.

And CRO. Because we're so focused on getting the right traffic to the right pages, we are always going to be impacting CRO teams when they're looking to optimize for conversion rate. That's exactly what we're doing by making sure that we are getting the right users onto a website and helping them navigate through that website to meet an end goal.

And your data teams. Now, you might have and probably have got some really amazing data teams in your companies. But chances are, if they're not marketers by trade, they might not really understand the impact of different factors on the data that they're seeing. But as SEOs, we touch so much of the marketing landscape. We're involved with so many teams, actually we can bring a lot of perspective to the data that they're analyzing. We can talk about things like how seasonality might be affecting the data or how a competitor entering the market might be affecting the data with just a little bit more insight that comes from really being embedded within the search industry.

And your engineering teams. Now, it might feel like sometimes there's a little bit of friction between your engineering teams and your SEO teams. We're always asking for stuff, aren't we? But actually, engineering teams are often looking to achieve the same things that, as SEOs, we're looking to do. They want to make pages load faster. They want to improve user experience. And working together, we can come up with some really efficient ways of doing that. So, as an SEO, you should be there as an engineer's best friend. You should be there, providing them with ideas and solutions for the complex things that they're looking to do.

And also project management. SEOs have to be good at project management, but we can help our project management teams with some of those more specialist projects that they might be involved in. Things like website migrations, website migrations are a nightmarish hellscape usually. And that's one thing that a project manager might not be aware of. But as seasoned SEOs, we've probably been through that ringer before and, therefore, are really in a good place to be able to talk to them about the exact steps that need to be carried out in order for that migration to be successful and the sorts of problems that they might encounter. So we can give a little bit more context to them, the projects that they're running.

Well, this is great, but your colleagues are probably not the ones who are going to be keeping you in your job or perhaps even giving you that sneaky promotion that you're after.

So, how do we communicate the value of SEO beyond just that traffic and maybe leads to your senior management team?

First off, you need to look at what are the business goals. Now, I'm not talking about your marketing goals or even the goals of the initiative that you're all focused on for this quarter. I'm talking about the big business goals.

So, what is it that the company is writing to their investors about? What is it that they are reporting on? Because it's that kind of thing that you want to be able to show how SEO is empowering the company to meet those goals.

So if, for example, a big year goal for your company is that it wants to expand into new markets, have a look at how you can directly link the impact of organic search activity to an expansion into a new market. Things like data around the search appetite in those markets or the sorts of behavior of users when they're on the SERPs and then on your website. All of this information combined can really help to show your senior leadership team how you are helping them to meet their core KPIs.

And also talk about how SEO is improving efficiency. We've already said how we help out all of these teams and all of the side effect benefits that we have from these different activities that we do. Make sure that your senior management team are aware of that. Show how you are helping the company to be more efficient by bringing in together a lot of these teams because that collaboration is incredibly important. Where SEO does touch upon a lot of different marketing channels and different aspects of a website, we're always bringing those teams together. We're often at the center of big projects, and that collaboration can make your business a lot more efficient. SEO never works in a silo, and we've grown up in the industry knowing that. And so we're always looking to bring other teams together.

And then, finally, talk about how SEO supports growth. So, yes, it might well be that you are moving into a new market. Exactly how can SEO help with that? And that's what we need to be doing. We need to be showing that SEO prepares a company for the future.

We can talk about forward planning. So if you are looking to launch a new brand, maybe a sub-brand of your company, SEO is really important in that because if you call it something silly, or even call it something that a company has already named their product or service, then you're instantly going to have some competition in the SERPs. That's the kind of insight that we know to look for as SEOs. But that might not be something that your management team have considered yet.

You can also analyze the SERPs for that particular new brand's name. You can work out what kind of sentiment already exists there or what kind of websites will be competing for that brand name. And it's that kind of insight, that preparing for the future that can really help a business.

Or, say you are looking to internationalize; perhaps you've thought two steps ahead to an impending website migration that you know will have to happen if you don't structure your website now for that future international growth. So perhaps your company is looking at .co.uk domain for now, but they are looking to expand into Europe in the future. You know that that's going to make probably a lot of problems in the future. So why don't we start with a .com domain that we can then internationalize under the one domain? It's that, again, kind of forward- thinking that might not be apparent to someone who isn't within the SEO industry.

So make sure you're talking about that with your senior management team. We are always obsessing about Google and the other search engines and what features that they're rolling out now. And because of that, we can position our businesses to be ready for those kind of rollouts.

So organic products, for example. Now, there are some things that go into making sure that you are ranking within the organic product features within the search engine. So that needs to happen, and it's going to be an SEO who probably drives that forwards. But without the SEO driving that forwards, then your company probably wouldn't be ready for those kind of changes in the SERPs.

And we're crucial in identifying new markets and also identifying new potential products because we're always looking at what people are searching for in and around the industry that we're in. So we're always aware of whether they're looking for a new type of product or a new way of doing things.

We're in the data day in, day out looking at what people are searching for. And through that, we can start to identify gaps in the market. Is there a product or a service that people want that none of our competitors are offering? Is it something perhaps we're well positioned to do?

So whenever you're looking to communicate the value of SEO beyond just traffic and leads, the key really is to talk about the impact and the breadth of impact that SEO has across not just other marketing channels but across the wider company.

And then you're probably ready to ask for that pay rise.

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