WHEN YOU’RE PITCHING SEO, how do you usually describe the potential outcome of your SEO CAMPAIGN?
When I position SEO I focus on 2 aspects: steady long term growth and bldg loyal audiences (as opposed to PPC) #seochat
Mordy Oberstein
A1: Our outcomes should be tied to driving real business results. You get out what you put in, so I want to start from the beginning and talk about how improving content will lead to more conversions. #seochat
Ryan Glass
I focus on 3 things from a content perspective: 1. Steady growth (don’t yell at me until we’re 3 months in at least). 2. Building an audience by adding value to a community (not just keyword hunting and spamming) 3. I always try and align the above 2 with the client’s values
Tom Urbaniak
A1. I usually build it out as an interactive quest that integrates the different aspects of the business into the website, to achieve the ideal outcome for the business of being both more efficient and successful. Increasing revenue, and gaining clients more efficiently. #seochat
SEO Arcade
A1. You’ve got to talk real business impact. It’s trivial to move numbers on an analytics dashboard. Does that lead to new business? Subscribers? What’s the real goal here? #SEOChat And, woof, I think this is part of a lot of why SEO doesn’t work for a lot of companies? The language doesn’t track to “real” marketing because it’s all about numbers on a spreadsheet and fictional “visitors” and assumptions based off the junk data that is analytics…. #SEOChat
Doug R Thomas, Esq./
Q2: Metrics matter. How do you set your client or manager’s eyes on the RIGHT metrics that will define your SEO campaign’s success?
This one’s super important and all about expectation management and getting to the root of their issues. There’s a difference between getting traffic and traffic that CONVERTS! A lot of clients initially don’t understand how to bridge the gap between traffic and sales
Tom Urbaniak
A2. So KPIs are always a bit hard. People will want direct attribution, and I think it’s so limiting to think that way. Clients will see big increases, but because the numbers in analytics don’t say it, it can’t be true. #SEOChat
Doug R Thomas, Esq.
#SEOChat A2. I typically get them to agree that what really matters id Business, thus Business Goals, thus Business KPIs, then get them to see that certain SEO Metrics align/contribute to Business Metrics/Goals.
Lyndon NA (Darth Autocrat)
Q3: How does projecting/forecasting Return on Investment need to change when you’re working as an in-house SEO?
my loom in the comments! @MarketMuseCo — net-net, as an in-house, you need to make sure you understand costs to create, implement and maintain, & know the resources — get a value match on the outcomes of the whole effort & impacts. You aren’t just selling it once. #seochat
Jeff Coyle – Content Strategy and SEO
A3: It’s still important to have targets, those just happen to be different. They can still be financial, but it needs to be measurable for what is trying to be achieved. #SEOChat
Pam Portland
#SEOChat A3. Technically – there should be no difference whether you are in-house, agency or independent provider/consultant … forecasts should be the same. The main difference is the data available to you regarding production/implementation times and costs.
Lyndon NA (Darth Autocrat)
Q4: Do you base your traffic potential on models of previous traffic, or do you turn toward search volume data to show your campaign’s potential benefits?
A4: We are specifically looking for a lift in volume data, page position, and clicks. We are using optimization tools to improve our older content which was written to be interesting, but not always effective in attracting readers. #SEOChat
Pam Portland
A4. #seochat Now this is a topic near and dear, since I went and made an SEO forecast tool based on search data http://seoarcade.com – It’s one SIDE to the coin and has it’s advantages because often it’s about uncovering POTENTIAL gains (trends often fail there)
Jeremy Rivera
A4. Often I’ll take a different tack than projections for campaign benefits. I really like talking about what users see when they are trying to accomplish a goal that the site can achieve. This also helps avoid red herring strategies. #SEOChat
Doug R Thomas, Esq.
Q5: What are the biggest hurdles you face when trying to connect SEO to revenue?
#SEOChat A5. * Access to private data * Poorly recorded transactions/figures * Little/no/poor attribution setups More often than not – many don’t truly assign attribution to SEO – it’s typically “we did X, and Y went up – so it is due to X” 🙁
Lyndon NA (Darth Autocrat)
A5. The client (or Sales…) If your client is not a eCommerce business model, then it’s ALWAYS messy when it comes to leads -> sales. Most clients have some hiccup or irregularity that makes it hard to connect a clean “conversion rate” of a lead to close rate.
SEO Arcade
A5: You can optimize your SEO to the hilt, but if your content reads like everyone else’s how can you expect to move the needle? The two must work together to be effective in driving and increasing results. #SEOChat
Pam Portland
Prediction quality, time to value, value match with stakeholders on indirect value, so many hurdles. #SEOCHAT — check out the @loom!
Jeff Coyle – Content Strategy and SEO
Q6: What posts, videos, or resources have you bookmarked or created related to the SEO ROI conversation?
A6. Well that’s a softball question for sure, but this guide to how to use @semrush or @ahrefs data to create an SEO forecast by hand, is pretty “handy” https://seoarcade.com/get-a-rough-estimate-of-potential-seo-traffic/
SEO Arcade
Q7: What aspect of SEO ROI did we not yet discuss, but you think is a valuable sub-topic to explore further?
A7. #seochat return on INVESTMENT – We haven’t really talked about how to balance the scales because SEO isn’t actually ever JUST done by the SEO team, is it? You’ve got PPC, Product, Marketing, Branding Support, Sales and other “fingers in the pie” – so the outlay of effort isn’t JUST in the SEO budget. But how much of the pie can you claim as the SEO agency, consultant or in-house SEO? You may spend just 1 hour giving SEO insights to the content team, but they multiply that framework and approach 100x, is that trackable? Hardly. Keep track of those anecdotes though!
SEO Arcade
The unmeasurable – or the hard to measure benefits of having a visible web presence! #SEOchat
Mordy Oberstein
indirect values of authority growth. Building foundations are often the means of getting a chance to be successful, so future efforts can be. Not all pages that have massive power get traffic. #SEOMYTH #SEOCHAT
Jeff Coyle – Content Strategy and SEO
Hope you enjoyed the recap! In case you missed the previous week’s #SEOchat
here are some more topics you missed!
