How to Persuade Your Boss to Invest in SEO
If you know that SEO is a worthwhile investment for your firm, the first step is to get your employer on board.
That may be simple if you work for a tech-forward firm like Nummero and have a manager that knows the value and relevance of SEO, but it may be more difficult for those who have less web-savvy supervisors.
In this article, we’ll go through how to build an argument that’s more likely to persuade your supervisor.
Why bother trying to persuade your boss?
SEO can increase traffic and revenue to your company’s website while also improving its bottom line.
This is effectively your job description if you work on the marketing team for the company you work for.
But, other from a pat on the back, what’s in it for you?
If you can persuade your employer to invest in marketing concepts that will benefit your company’s bottom line, you will be able to leverage this to your advantage in the future.
You may utilise it to obtain a raise, a promotion, or just additional resources.
The options are limitless.
How to Persuade Your Boss to Invest in Search Engine Optimization
If you think convincing your boss to invest in SEO is a good idea, keep in mind that your boss probably doesn’t give a hoot about SEO.
They are just concerned about their bottom line.
Keep this in mind while you construct your argument.
You’ll lose if you construct your presentation around things that we marketers get excited about, such as traffic, backlinks, or website authority.
You must demonstrate how SEO will increase your boss’s income and assist them in meeting their company objectives.
Step 1: Present the outcome
Getting your supervisor on board with your proposal from the start is critical.
You do this by starting with the outcome.
In other words, describe the desired consequence of the item you’re pitching.
How?
Simply fill in the gaps in the following statement:
We can accomplish [outcome] in [timeframe] by investing in SEO.
Make sure your outcome is linked to your company’s aims.
It should be something that your supervisor is interested in, rather than something arbitrary like “more traffic” or “more backlinks.”
As an example:
We can reduce our ad expenditure by $15,000 per month by investing in SEO and substituting paid traffic with organic traffic.
Keep your desired conclusion as detailed as feasible, but don’t make it up.
It must be reasonable.
It is also preferable to underpromise rather than overpromise.
Step 2: Explain your reasoning.
The easiest step is to pitch a desirable conclusion.
Now you must explain how and why you feel your recommended solution (spending in SEO) will result in the desired result.
For this, you’ll need data.
Assume you work in e-commerce, for example.
You investigate your Google Ads account and discover that you’re now bidding on 20 keywords in Google Ads for $15,000 each month.
According to your Google Analytics statistics, this traffic generates $40,000 in sales each month on average.
Even better, because most pages that rank organically in the top ten for a popular keyword also rank for hundreds of other keywords, ranking organically will almost certainly drive more sales than advertising.
You may wow your employer by entering the top-ranking website for each of your target keywords into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and looking at the Traffic Value measure.
This is the estimated “value” of the page’s organic search traffic each month.
In other words, to achieve the traffic that the website above receives organically for ‘free,’ you’d need to pay an estimated $43,500 per month on Google Ads.
You might even use these figures to predict the prospective income boost from investing in SEO, which you could then offer to your supervisor.
Explaining things in this manner demonstrates that you’ve done your research and that your plan isn’t merely ‘pie in the sky.’
Step 3: Make a plan.
If we presume your employer is sold on your good pitch and research, the next question they’ll have is how you’re going to get from A to Z.
It’s easy to get caught down in SEO lingo here, so keep the broader picture in mind.
Assume you crawl your site with Ahrefs’ Site Audit and discover some technical SEO concerns.
Don’t give your employer a 30-minute speech about how your site’s faceted navigation is producing duplicate content issues that require canonicalization.
You’ll undoubtedly notice their eyes glaze off as if you’ve begun speaking in a strange tongue.
Keep things simple if you want to keep people on your side.
In this example, that may imply demonstrating how your Health Score compares poorly to your competition.
You only want to say two things here:
What you intend to do and why (keep it high-level)
What materials you’ll require
Employees, freelancers, tools, and whatever else you’ll need to carry out your plan are examples of resources.
If you need to hire new workers or freelancers, you should think about and explain who will supervise and train them.
You want to show your supervisor that you have everything planned out and that your strategy is feasible.
Step 4: Discuss the figures
No employer will approve a project that is unlikely to provide a return on investment.
If you’ve just mentioned several resources, they’re undoubtedly wondering, ‘How much will all this cost?’
Now is the moment to respond to that inquiry.
The procedure itself is rather simple.
Simply add up all of the materials you just discussed in a spreadsheet.
This is straightforward for SEO tools and software because the majority of them have public price websites.
Simply select the plan that is best for you.
Google typical pay for workers and freelancers or look at average hourly rates on freelancing websites.
Although this is a wonderful start, it doesn’t inform your supervisor anything about ROI—which is what matters.
Unfortunately, this is more difficult to measure than it appears because your SEO efforts will continue to produce fruit even after the primary project is completed.
As a result, creating a “break-even” graph makes more sense.
This indicates how long it will take to return the SEO spend.
For example, suppose your project’s monthly cost is $5,127.
We’ll be pessimistic and predict no income gain because SEO takes time.
During the first six months, then progressively increasing to $40,000 and removing the necessity for advertising in month twelve.
As you can see, the “break-even” time in this example happens in month 12.
Just keep in mind to utilize conservative figures here.
After all, you don’t want your supervisor to be on your case the moment your anticipated “break-even” time arrives.
You should also emphasize that these are only estimates; you cannot promise anything.
Step 5: Dispel myths and deal with concerns.
By this point, you should be practically home and dry, but your supervisor will most likely have a few questions and worries.
Answering these will involve some quick thought because questions differ, but a few similar problems seem to arise.
Let us have a look at a few of them.
“Isn’t SEO simply a bunch of nonsense?”
Given the number of deceptive SEO services on the market (I’m sure we’ve all received calls promising first-page rankings), this is a legitimate question.
But how can you approach it without seeming overly defensive?
Honesty is the greatest place to start.
Explain that, while certain “snake oil” SEO service providers prey on unsuspecting company owners, the SEO process itself is legal.
It is essentially the technique of manipulating well-known Google ranking criteria to help pages rank better in search results.
You can also benefit from “social proof.”
For example, you may demonstrate that inbound marketing strategies such as SEO are the top quality source of leads for 60% of marketers:
If you want to take it a step further, consider giving your employer ‘Traffic Value’ stats from Ahrefs’ Site Explorer for successful rivals.
Explaining how rival A receives an estimated XXXX organic visitors per month valued at $XXXX would most likely drive home the point.
“Doesn’t SEO take a long time?”
This is another case when honesty is the best policy because SEO does take time.
Rankings do not happen overnight, and anyone that claims differently is most certainly peddling “snake oil.”
In reality, according to our two million keyword analysis, just 5.7 percent of pages rank in the top ten within a year:
Because most supervisors understand that there is no such thing as a silver bullet in marketing, expressing that something takes time isn’t always a bad thing.
It demonstrates that you understand how things function and have a realistic viewpoint.
Consider it a plus, not a disadvantage.
“What if a Google update/penalty wipes us out?”
Google upgrades and penalties are frightening issues, and properly so.
Many sites have seen their organic traffic vanish almost overnight as a result of a penalty.
Manual penalties aren’t anything you should be concerned about if you use “ethical” SEO recommended practices.
Google, on the other hand, updates its ranking algorithms many times a year.
These can have a detrimental influence on your traffic, but they are unlikely to entirely wipe you out.
Typically, there will be only a minor decrease or increase in traffic—or no change at all.
Conclusion
It might be tough to persuade your boss to invest in SEO, but the advantages can be enormous.
We are living proof of this.
Our efforts in SEO-focused content have brought us a slew of new clients and helped to establish our reputation as a leader in the SEO market.
If you want the same thing for your organization, you must learn to speak your boss’s language and structure things in a way that they will understand.
Keep the SEO terminology for chats with co-workers who share your interests.
You may contact Nummero for the best internet marketing services in Bangalore. We are the Best digital marketing company in Bangalore.