In its simplest form, SEO is all about making sure more of your ideal customers find your website and engage with you than was the case before doing SEO. In other words, a successful SEO project will positively impact your bottom line. If you need to present the case for doing SEO to your manager or the board, it's all explained below.
SEO Is Not A Dark Art
Before discussing the business case for SEO, it's probably worth explaining why it's as mainstream a business practice as PR, advertising, or business networking and not a dark art.
Over the years, SEO has been shrouded in mystery, and plenty of shady practitioners have tempted people with claims of an inside line on how the major search engines work. The truth is quite different and much simpler.
For the most part, a web page is created to impart some information. It could, for example, be some product information, an explanation about a specialist service, or a case study explaining how a particular problem was solved, in the hope that someone reading it might decide to make contact because they need a similar problem solved. Generally, web pages contain words, pictures, videos and, importantly, contact forms.
Search engines try to understand what a web page is about by examining certain elements, such as the words, pictures, and videos, as well as some elements that are not that obvious, such as the HTML Page Title, Meta Description and Headers. Before you run for the hills, wait a second, and I'll explain.
Page Title Element
A Page Title Element is usually the text that's displayed in a search result. It's the single most important element on a web page from an SEO perspective. Title elements are usually written using words that are being used by people searching. For example. If you're an accountant and you have a page on your website about offering Xero Consultancy services, Xero is a popular SaaS accounting system; your page title might be created along these lines.
Research uncovers that people type "Xero accounting specialists" into Google when looking for help setting up Xero for their business. You offer these services and you want Google to show a link to a page on your website when people carry out that search.
So, assuming your page contains content about your services and perhaps some social proof about organisations you've already helped, your Page Title Element might look something like this.
Xero Accounting Specialists, Get Up And Running With Xero Fast
This title contains the search term you want the page to rank for and some reassurance that you'll be able to help the person looking quickly get up and running with Xero.
Clearly, creating good Page Title Elements is an art form that requires an understanding of SEO and creative copywriting ability.
Meta Description
All things being equal, a page's Meta Description is a short, punchy sentence explaining what the page is about. Meta Data is information about information, a mini version of the page itself. For example, if a page explains, in great detail, the benefits of using Xero, the meta description might read something like this.
Find out why choosing to use Xero to manage your company finances makes sense. We're Xero accounting specialists and know Xero inside out.
So if Google serves your page up in a search result, it's going to look something like this.
Xero Accounting Specialists, Get Up And Running With Xero Fast
Find out why choosing to use Xero to manage your company finances makes sense. We're Xero accounting specialists and know Xero inside out.
And that's it; you now understand the what and why of Page Titles and Meta Descriptions. But what about the Headers?
Headers
Headers are easy to understand. When you create any formal document, you will have headers, sub-headers and sub-sub-headers. It's the logical way to organise a document so readers understand it. On a web page, it's just the same. By ordering your page into a hierarchy, people will understand it better, and so will search engines.
The Missing Link
Before moving on to the main subject, how to create a business case for SEO, there's one more thing to understand about SEO. Web pages are given credibility based on their link profile. Now, this might sound confusing but stay with me and I'll explain.
Going back to our Xero example. What if 100 accountants claimed to be Xero accounting specialists and created a page on their website to that effect? How on earth can Google decide which one to show first and which to show last? Enter links.
A link from another web page to your web page is like a vote of confidence. Google uses links to decide how credible a web page is. So, if, for example, The Times newspaper were running an article on their website about Xero and approached you for some expert input, and in the article, they linked to your web page about being a Xero specialist. That link would make your page look more important than other pages.
Now, links are a contentious subject, and getting good links is very hard. Therefore, there's a whole industry ready and willing to relieve you of your hard-earned cash in exchange for links. Much of the industry is tacky and borderlines on the illegal - they hack other people's websites to place links in the content - but some great agencies take an ethical approach to the whole endeavour.
If you'd like to know more about links and link building, this is a great resource.
Show People The effects of Not Doing SEO
Making the business case for SEO or, conversely, choosing not to do it is straightforward. In essence, all that's required is an understanding of your potential customers and the tools they use to solve their business challenges. If you think about it on this level, you're most of the way towards making that business case to your manager or board. Let me explain.
Using data from your website, third-party tools like SEMRush and a broader market research exercise, including an exhaustive investigation into your competitors, will establish whether or not your potential customers use search or social media to put themselves in front of potential customers.
You may have heard the term "keyword research," and that's part of the story. The good news is that you're almost certainly already sitting on a potential gold mine of information. Enter Google Search Console or GSC.
This free tool provides information about your website's search performance. It shows the words and phrases people type into search engines and where they are based on a country-by-country basis. Importantly, it shows where your pages rank in the search results. This data taps very nicely into the fear and greed genes of those who hold the SEO budget purse strings. Confused? Read on.
SEO FOMO
Imagine sitting with your boss, who thinks SEO is a dark art and a waste of time. You open up the GSC and show them that 500 people, in the last month, typed Xero accounting specialists into Google in the UK.
You then show them that your company's web page offering this service consistently appeared on page 3 of the search results and didn't get a single click. You then take them to Google, type the same search term in, and show them the businesses that appear at the top of the results. She now knows two things:
1. People are searching for Xero accounting specialists.
2. They are finding your competitors, not you.
This fear of missing out, or FOMO, is a strong emotion, and it will help you develop your business case for investing in SEO. After all, why would any business choose to leave opportunities on the table, and this is exactly what's happening?
So, based purely on the numbers, if people are searching for what you sell and not finding you, it's costing your business money and makes the business case for investing in SEO very strong. But it's not just a numbers game and not just about keywords.
It's Not Just A Numbers Game
When thinking about SEO, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking it's only about improving search rankings and increasing the number of visitors to your website. It isn't. It's about making sure the right people find your website and convincing those people to make contact. The latter is often referred to as Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). It sounds geeky, but stay tuned, and it will all make sense.
Sometimes, the best business case for SEO isn't about increasing visitors; it's about getting more opportunities from the visitors you're already getting. Now, strictly speaking, this isn't SEO; it's CRO, but who's counting? The bottom line is that when you engage with a credible SEO specialist, they will review not just the number of search visitors, they will also be very interested in what those visitors are doing once they arrive on your website.
If you find the right team or agency, they may also offer to help with your website messaging and the story your business is telling. That's because sometimes something as simple as changing the wording of a page's headline can transform the page into a lead-gen rockstar.
This means that when considering the SEO business case, an added benefit will be improvements to your website that converts more of your visitors into customers. The fact is, good SEO people are interested in way more than title tags, rankings and visitor numbers, good SEO people want to make your business more successful in any way they can, and this makes the business case for hiring an SEO very strong.
SEO Done Well Helps Your Business Prosper
It might seem like a statement of the obvious, but SEO executed by a really good team will positively impact your business in many ways. This is especially true when it comes to your website content because no SEO project will do well without a solid content strategy. Most SEO work revolves around creating great content.
The content expands your website helps you secure more of the right kind of visitors and positions your organisation as a thought leader. And let's face it, you hate creating content, and you're not very good at it, so a massive business benefit of investing in SEO is the way your limp website content will be transformed into business-class brilliance. This can only have a positive impact on the way your organisation is perceived. Then there's the flakey technology.
Your Tech Issues Fixed & Site Speed Improved
Investing in SEO has one last benefit that's worth mentioning. If your website hasn't been put together with SEO in mind, it's probably technically sub-optimal. SEO experts examine your online presence in depth and look for all the ways your website can be improved so that it delivers more value.
Site performance, or the end-user or site visitor experience, is a key area where improvements can be made. This isn't simply about satisfying the ever-changing moods of the search engines; it's about giving potential customers the best possible reason to stick around or fill in that online form looking for help. Nobody likes a technically faulty or slow website, and investing in making the site fault-free and fast is money well spent.
So, although you might not have realised it, investing in SEO also means your site will improve technically, as well as through content improvements, page optimisation, and messaging.
The Final Roundup
Investing in SEO will improve the way your site helps you to grow your business. It will make sure that your organisation gets its share of the opportunities search engines present, and it will make your website way better than it is right now in terms of the story you're telling, the quality of your content and the technical quality of your site.
SEO, done right, delivers so much more to a business than keyword research and a few tweaks here and there. It can transform the way you generate enquiries and present opportunities that would otherwise have simply passed you by.
Finally, it's worth noting that there is one group of people who will be delighted if you don't spend money on SEO, your competitors.
