Search engine optimization (SEO) continues to be one of the most effective tools available to corporate marketing executives. SEO increases your company’s visibility in search engines and drives traffic to your website.
But the reality is that good SEO takes time. There are technical components that must be addressed in order to have a healthy corporate website that is ready to rank. A sound keyword plan and the right content strategy must be employed to improve the quality of landing pages and align them with consumer intent. Once these items are implemented, it takes time for search engines to pick up these signals and for your company to see progress in rankings.
This lag time can make it challenging for in-house marketing executives to demonstrate the value of SEO to other stakeholders in the company. Whether you’re the person responsible for marketing at your company or you’ve partnered with an SEO agency to launch a campaign, maintaining the support of company leaders is critical to seeing results.
Here are four easy ways to show the value of SEO to your company leaders:
Use Data to Show the Power of SEO
Make the Most of Analytics. The great thing about SEO is that everything that happens in an organic search campaign is trackable. Use the data in Google Analytics to show company leaders where your website was before your SEO campaign began and how SEO has helped moved the needle in traffic, rankings, conversions, and ultimately, revenue.
Compare Acquisition Channels. When it comes to SEO, slow and steady wins the race. As a result, sometimes other acquisition channels get more attention than organic search. However, if you look at SEO performance in the context of referral, social, and paid traffic (if you have a PPC campaign running), very often, organic search outperforms these other channels, even when overall search traffic is down. You can also show the cross value between acquisition channels. For example, show how social and paid channels drive traffic to your website, and then results in a conversion from an optimized landing page.
Powerful Metrics That Show the Value of SEO
Don’t Discount Engagement Metrics. Engagement metrics help demonstrate the value of someone arriving at your site organically. If the content on your site is high quality, people will stay on the site longer and visit more pages on the site in the process. This boosts engagement metrics like pageviews and time on site, and reduces bounce rates. Each of these are indicators to search engines that consumers consider your site to be relevant and helpful. Add in some landing page optimizations and you can turn passive visitors into new customers and show that SEO is great for awareness and leads to conversions.
Show Micro-Conversions. The best conversion from an SEO campaign is when someone visits your website and then calls your business, visits your location, or makes a purchase. However, consumers generally take 7 to 10 interactions before becoming customers. This makes the smaller conversions consumers make on your website all the more valuable. These include downloading a white paper, subscribing to a newsletter, or following your company on social media. Each of these gives your company another opportunity for a touchpoint that further engages the consumer and sends them back to your website for potential conversion. Be sure to set up conversion goals in Analytics to capture these interactions. Then you can show company leaders how SEO facilitated them.
SEO takes time but the payoff from ranking high on search engine results pages is worth it. Taking the steps mentioned above will help show company stakeholders the value of their investment.
Not sure where to start? Techwood is an experienced SEO agency with the know-how to improve the effectiveness of your corporate website. Contact us for a complimentary SEO review today.
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