So it’s finally time to let your boss know about the legendary “Hummingbird,” likes of the “White Hat” rodeo boys and the notorious “Black Hat” players in online marketing. That’s heart-warming and feels like a bold step towards achieving more at work. Yes, all SEO professionals & SEO companies have the same story: it’s always frustrating to work with a boss or a team with no understanding of your primary job. In fact, the situation looks uglier if you don’t know how to communicate the importance of SEO to your boss, which is like telling them of your relevance in their business.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is seen by many as a highly technical and complex concept, but that’s not the entire case. Although some level of dedication is required from anyone that wants to master how they can increase their website’s visibility fully, any business-minded person can handle the basics of SEO, especially when it’s directly affecting their performance.
Explaining the importance of SEO to your boss is also a means of helping them to understand how the entire algorithm works if they want to know. The knowledge of SEO importance would encourage your boss to pay good attention each time you have something to present on SEO. They won’t look at you awkwardly anymore when you mention a 404 error, backlinks, redirects, etc. But how do you communicate efficiently on this subject matter? The following steps would be very helpful if you wish to be thorough.
Step 1: Find out how much your boss know about SEO
You may be wrong to assume that your boss is absolutely unaware of what you are doing for them as an SEO expert. Sometimes, bosses enquire about what we do from others, perhaps to not make us feel bad or feel as if they are questioning our role. Assessing how much they know will help you to understand where your explanation should begin and as well as if you’re free to use some SEO terminologies without having to explain it.
We have all experienced watching, maybe, a YouTube video that’s teaching us a concept, but we had to consistently drag the seek bar forward to save time and begin where the information is useful. You don’t want to make the explanation boring or make them feel you’re wasting time to explain what they already know. Begin by politely asking them a few questions in an interactive manner. Your inquiry should not sound like you expect them to know before then; just sit on the fence during the assessment.
Also, recycling the information they already know over and over could even be seen as an insult to your boss. Okay, are you undermining your boss’s understanding of SEO?
The task here is to carefully weigh how much they about SEO so you can fully engage them throughout your explanation. Another means of scoring how much they know aside from asking questions is to take questions from them. Start by requesting that they ask their biggest questions on the subject. You may want to get this information before preparing how you want to teach them about the importance of SEO.
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Step 2: Identify your scope
While it’s important to be loaded with good information on the importance of SEO, it could be embarrassing to cross bounds out of excitement, and that could mess your presentation. Focus on the scope, which is to help your boss or team to understand how SEO is helping your office brand.
Do you really need to explain the programming codes that are used in developing the Hummingbird search algorithm? You don’t want to go into unnecessary details unless someone asks out of curiosity. Your explanation must be precise and remain on the point. Otherwise, you’ll end up confusing them. Also, the depth of some of your explanations would depend on your results in step 1.
Step 3: Introduce SEO and the necessary slangs
Because your concern is only to teach the importance of SEO to your boss, you don’t want to waste your time telling them about terminologies that are totally outside your scope. To make sure that you don’t mention unnecessary slangs, first analyze the depth of your tutorial material before gathering the SEO slangs. This is to help you easily identify the words that may become confusing when you mention them during your explanation.
You will so much help yourself if you can explain these slangs in plain and straightforward language. If possible, move away from tech stuff and use real-life situations or office events to explain them.
Also, explain the basics of SEO. Tell them about the rules and why you must follow them. You can use this opportunity to highlight potential errors, where they could come from, and what needs to be done to fix them.
Step 4: Consider the interest of your audience
With your audience now informed about the basics of SEO, it’s time to start narrowing the result down to their various interests. The importance of SEO must be presented in such a way that it addresses the problems facing your audience.
For instance, a web developer would be interested in learning about the bugs you could fix using these terminologies. Whereas a salesperson among them would be paying attention to how your entire story could drive open rates for follow-up emails and as well as convert their leads.
So, how are you going to present the importance of SEO to your boss? CEOs are not interested in the tactics or strategies in place but the bottom line. What are the likely results? This is where some new experts struggle to communicate SEO importance to their bosses effectively. SEO brings results, but time must be put in.
Before you even consider talks on SEO to anyone, the first table down how the subject could affect them directly. You’ll need to look into bigger opportunities or challenges it could solve, potential returns (ROI), the cost of implementing SEO, and how long they must wait for results to come.
Speaking of the cost of implementing SEO, you can freely tell your boss that it won't be too much in the long run, if you decide to invest in tools such as Frase.
Frase, an AI assistant and word processor all in one, will become your best friend when it comes to creating SEO-focused content.
It will identify what your target audience is asking/looking for online and will then generate content briefs in a matter of seconds. This way it will save you from the hassle of creating content your audience isn't really interested in and will also boost your SEO and search engine rankings through AI optimization.
Step 5: Use data to communicate the importance of SEO
This step marks the heartbeat of your presentation and can only go down well if the previous steps are successful.
Let’s assume you had previously explained how SEO auditing tools could be useful in identifying duplicate contents on your website. Of course, you’ve mentioned why it’s important to remove duplicate contents: to avoid penalties from Google and to improve the user search experience. Do you have any past projects to show these results?
Sometimes, all you need is just an experience. One of the necessary documents for teaching the public the importance of SEO is actual data. They must not be projects you have handled. You can monitor other projects and the strategies they have used. Document them and reveal the process, strategy, and results to your audience.
Equally, have documents of various tests, you can include live testing, and most importantly, have information about the latest SEO strategies and hire a good SEO agency to the job for you.
Satisfy your audience
At the end of the day, business ventures are for monies to come. You need to categorically identify how the supposedly increased traffic correlates with your company’s revenue performance. How much could be realized if your SEO strategy increases the company’s website visitors by X percent in the next Y months? And what’s making these figures realistic?
Stick with just a few statistics here so they won’t have too many stats to question or investigate. And just like every other presentation, conclude by being open for as many questions as possible. Your interest is to gain their support in your marketing strategies. Hence, it’s expected that you’ll remain available to take questions on what’s not clear to them from that moment on.
If you have many people in your audience, it’s best to give them a convenient channel to submit their questions, should they have questions later in the future. Your boss can always set up meetings for more and subsequent consultations.
Conclusion
There are other tricks you may want to include aside from the above-listed steps on how to communicate the importance of SEO to your boss. However, identifying your audience’s level of understanding about SEO and a presentation of practical data are two necessities in any arrangement to convince your boss on the values of SEO. Try to use very familiar keywords in your explanations and avoid going deep into how SEO works. After your presentation, agree with them on some key performance indicators (KPIs) both of you can use in monitoring your SEO strategy and in teaching them in the future.