On average, companies spend about 10% of their total revenue on marketing. At the same time, even in this digital age, many companies allocate little of their budgets to search engine optimisation. That looks like a mistake during a time when both B2B and B2C buyers research and buy online.
Do you need help getting your management onboard with further SEO investments? Find out how your company can benefit, why management may hesitate, and what you can do to change their perspective.
Why Should Your Business Invest in SEO?
The primary reasons why businesses should invest in SEO include the following:
- You might already understand that most search optimisation tactics also help improve customer experiences. Optimising your website also means enhancing your brand image and customer satisfaction.
- High-quality search engine traffic from people who use queries to find what you sell can reduce conversion costs and increase profits. More organic traffic might mean you can spend less on expensive ads.
- Most of all, no business wants potential customers to look for their brand and find a competitor that outranks them on Google. That experience will detract from your brand’s credibility and your company’s bottom line.
Even if you’ve already figured out why your business should invest more in SEO, you might need help getting your boss to agree with your point of view. Take a few minutes to understand why many companies feel reluctant to allocate funds towards SEO and how you can change your manager’s mind.
Why Do Some Companies Avoid Investing in SEO?
If SEO can help improve your digital platform, attract more site visitors, and improve profits, why do so many businesses seem stingy about allocating money towards critical improvements? Most likely, nobody has taken the trouble to carefully document the unique financial benefits that your enterprise will enjoy.
You may need to work to “sell” your management on investing more in SEO. As with any sale, understanding objections can help you overcome them.
A miserly grip on SEO budgets generally stems from one or more of these reasons:
- Unless you work for a high-tech company, your boss probably needs to learn more about how SEO works. Management may feel reluctant to invest in something they don’t grasp.
- SEO takes time and testing. Some haphazard attempts to optimise some aspects of the website didn’t produce quick results, so management shelved the idea.
- Top managers need more than keyword reports and traffic numbers. They need to see how SEO offers value to their business. Many SEOs still need to better document their success in the financial terms their boss requires.
- Developing an SEO strategy and presenting it in a way likely to generate enthusiasm takes careful planning and an understanding of your audience. Executives want to see improvements translated into revenue or savings.
Even the most well-considered SEO strategies take time to produce benefits. Inexperienced SEOs may struggle to attribute gains to optimization steps. These SEOs may generate numerous reports about improved keyword rankings or even a steady increase in traffic. However, they need to translate those wins into increased revenue or savings.
Steps to Get Your Management to Say Yes to SEO
You now understand how your business could benefit from improving your website’s visibility and performance. It’s time to examine tactics you can use to adjust your management’s perspective.
Step #1: Do Your Homework
You must present your bosses with a well-considered strategy to benefit the company’s bottom line. Thus, ensure you can produce realistic projections and a data-driven approach to achieve them. You’ll need to do some homework first. For example:
- Begin by performing at least a preliminary site audit to uncover technical issues, like bad links, duplicate pages, and slow load times.
- Document how much your business spends on other advertising, like paid ads and social posts.
- Find low-hanging fruit keywords that your site already ranks for but could deliver considerably more traffic with a higher position on search pages. Using reasonable conversion rates and a traffic estimator, determine how much a top position could add to revenue.
- Use customer feedback and surveys of stakeholders to uncover real-world website issues that could impact performance or usability.
Step 2: Present the Final Results Early in the Presentation
Digital marketers love to talk about SEO with terms like site authority, content relevance, search intent, page ranks, backlinks, page speed, and CTRs. Those terms have value because they refer to critical aspects of SEO. However, SEO jargon like that will make many executives’ eyes glaze over unless you’ve already engaged them with the premise of your argument.
Top management needs figures and timeframes to justify an investment. Ensure you state the achievable outcomes and how long they will take. For example, you may estimate your project could save 4,000 a month in paid advertising within a year by increasing organic search visitors. You might also believe cleaning up technical SEO issues can improve conversions by 10% because slow-loading pages and dead links frustrate visitors, so they don’t stay on the site.
Step 3: Prepare to Support Your Estimates With Data
You may need to justify how you came up with your estimate and timeframe. For instance, let’s say your company spends 10,000 a month on paid search advertising. Based on your research, you may have estimated that you can replace 20% of those visitors with free, organic search traffic within six months and 60% in a year.
After you offer a summary of anticipated results, you can provide details about your plan. You might include some SEO terminology, but you should also have prepared to tie these metrics to financial benefits. For example, you can use tools to estimate search traffic for top rankings. You could calculate sales with your current conversion rates or explain how you plan to improve it and use a forecasted rate.
Step 4: Communicate Your Plan
Once you’ve gotten this far, it’s time to present your audience with a high-level roadmap of what you plan to accomplish. Again, try to keep the discussion manageable. Refrain from overloading your presentees with excessive tech talk. For example, instead of diving into a technical explanation of issues caught by a preliminary site audit, show them the dashboard with the site’s overall health score. If they ask for more information, you can dive into the details.
Step 5: Offer More Details About Your Numbers
Your management will expect you to present them with an ROI for your SEO strategy. Calculating your SEO ROI might prove the stickiest part if you ask your company to spend $6,000 monthly and wait six months to a year to enjoy positive results. Judging by your prior calculations, the project’s SEO ROI may not run into the black for an entire year to 18 months.
Hedge your bets by prioritising various parts of the project. If management baulks at your budget request, you have room to compromise. Try to convince them to tackle your best bets for quick wins. Your initial success should enhance your credibility and encourage more funding in the future.
Why Work with a Trusted SEO Partner?
Almost all companies have limited resources and plenty of competition for funding projects. A partnership with a trusted SEO firm, like Lemon Pulse, can empower your project during each stage, from initial discovery to full implementation and scaling. We have completed successful SEO projects with well-regarded companies for over a decade. Over the years, Lemon Pulse has grown because its clients thrive.
You need an experienced, trusted partner to provide essential experience with the most advanced SEO tools, search engine requirements, and best practices. Contact Lemon Pulse anytime to learn how SEO can increase profits, reduce costs, and impress your boss.
