Decoding SEO for business leaders: 5 tips to get stakeholders on board

As SEO professionals, when we present our strategy and project ideas, we are often met with blank stares from business stakeholders. They are not able to connect the dots from SEO jargon to business goals.

And my fellow SEO colleagues, we need to own this one. Every so often we forget to speak in simple language that is understood by all. We do tend to speak in acronyms and codes.

In today’s digital world, we buy and sell online, we pay our bills and make our deposits online. When the first instinct of the users is to “Google” the products or services they want, the business needs to ensure they provide content that meets the user’s search intent. Search Engine Optimization plays a pivotal role in ensuring this content is optimized and available for search engines to display to the end users.

Organic search contributes significantly to the website performance, as well as plays a critical role in the buyer journey, which could lead to a conversion or an engagement. Without proper SEO strategies in place, users will face difficulty locating your content and instead find your competitors.

Thus, understanding SEO is essential to overall business success — and we need to be able to decode that message for all business leaders to understand and value.

Know your audience

First off, you must know who you are talking to when you are explaining SEO. Set a foundation, that it’s about users, rather than search engine bots. Typically, the non-SEO professionals consider SEO to be a technique to outsmart search engine bots and algorithms to rank number one in Google search results. Well, we all know that is not how things work. As a matter of fact, there are dozens of articles on mistakes to avoid.

Leverage your competition

Show and tell always works. Walk your business stakeholder through an actual keyword search on Google and let them observe how the competition is dominating the search results. Then slowly clarify, like peeling an onion, why the competitor is performing better and where do gaps exist in the internal strategy. Essentially breaking it down in simpler terminology. Show how the competition has out-maneuvered you with optimized content, appropriate keywords targeting, and applied technical best practices to ensure the website is visible and creditable.

Get on hands on

User experience plays a major role in how search engines crawl and understand the website. When UX teams integrates SEO best practices, the websites are easily discoverable in search, not to mention it leads to effective user experience. In lieu of justifying the business holder that the site navigation is broken, demonstrate how difficult it is to search and navigate to the desired pages. Rather than stating that if a page is taking 3-5 seconds to load, it might be slow, let them experience the frustration of a slow page load. These are critical experiences that lets the story develop itself.

Share this article

Related articles

Work with web development

If you are trying to gather backing for a technical project, we need to be extra careful. Algorithm, tags or metadata are not widely understood terms. To an untrained ear all this sounds like gibberish. It will be beneficial if you explain the advantage each element delivers, instead of narrating a variety of technical terms.

For example, instead of saying we need to implement noindex tags, you might want to say, “we need to secure the confidential / private content that is currently getting displayed publicly.”

Instead of asking for implementation of Hreflang, you might want to state “this will allow the business to indicate to the search engines the different web pages in alternate languages that exist and their relationship.”

Get funded

Why should the business fund the project? How does SEO contribute to the bottom line? Advocating SEO successfully means selling to the business stakeholders on the benefits SEO brings. Demonstrate how SEO impacts each stage of the user journey and how the SEO project would bring in effectiveness.

First order of the day is to understand what are the business goals. Usually, it is how to increase revenue. Here make data your friend. Present the data on how much traffic is being attracted organically and how organic users are engaging with the site. What amount of revenue is generated by organic users, the return on investment and of course the repeat buy stats.

Once you show the funnel and profitability of the channel, the buy-in from stakeholders is easy. Then you can break into individual projects and how these projects impact the buyer’s journey.  Consider your execution plan, define and specify details about the people and cost required.

The better you explain SEO, the more likely your stakeholder will buy in the project and provide funding for execution.

Conclusion

SEO can be easily understood by anyone as long as you put it in a language that they will be able to recognize. Simplify your message and make it into comprehensible concepts, which not only explain what it is, but why it works.

Tanu Javeri is Sr. Global SEO Strategist, Performance and Programmatic Marketing at IBM.

Want to stay on top of the latest search trends?

Get top insights and news from our search experts.

Related reading

Specific strategies for local businesses trying to understand the potential voice search will have on their bottom lines.

Google updated their exact match close variants to include implied words, paraphrase words and same-intent keywords. How does this affect Alpha-Beta?

Notes from Michael Akkerman, Global Head of Pinterest Partners Program: discovery over search, audience engagement over size, time well-spent, communities.

There were more than a billion voice searches a month, as of January 2018. 40% of those mobile searches had local intent.

Want to stay on top of the latest search trends?

Get top insights and news from our search experts.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Tanu Javeri

For more SEO, PPC, internet marketing news please check out https://news.scott.services

Why not check out our SEO, PPC marketing services at https://www.scott.services

We’re also on:
https://www.facebook.com/scottdotservices/
https://twitter.com/scottdsmith
https://plus.google.com/112865305341039147737

The post Decoding SEO for business leaders: 5 tips to get stakeholders on board appeared first on Scott.Services Online Marketing News.

source https://news.scott.services/decoding-seo-for-business-leaders-5-tips-to-get-stakeholders-on-board/

How We Train PPC Experts

I work with a team full of lifelong learners. It is a requirement to work at Hanapin. Gotta have that thirst for knowledge. Something happens, though, when you have a diverse team with varying depths of PPC knowledge: one-size-fits-all training doesn’t work. One-size-fits-most doesn’t work. This is a problem I ran into when I sat down with my colleague to construct our training program for 2019.

How do you deliver group training that engages every team member at every stage in their careers? How do you do it without outsourcing everything?

In this post, I’ll walk you through Hanapin’s newest approach to training our team through all stages of development. I’ll introduce you to three Hanapin Heroes and work through how we will approach training for each of them.

Training an Agency of Experts

As an agency, we want our people to have depth of knowledge, creative solutions, and industry-leading expertise. Unless someone is going to pay us to educate and train ourselves day in and day out, having the knowledge alone doesn’t pay the bills. We actually have to put it to good use. Which is why we ask our team to set aside about 6 hours a month for training.

Back in the day, we could spend a whole day together, teaching each other, challenging ourselves to learn something new and share that information with our team, and creating a slew of best practices for our agency. But we were small and new and the industry was starting to grow up a bit and us with it. So it was easy to be inclusive with our material.

Fast forward to today. As you will see by my very generalized examples of a team’s breadth of capabilities, putting a team of 50 in a room together and throwing information around hoping different bits stick to different groups of people is chaotic and fruitless. We needed to allow our teammates to grow in ways that suited their goals. So let’s meet a few members of the team.

Katie Conversion: New To The Industry

Katie is a Production Associate. Katie was hired 4 months ago. Previously in B2B sales, she changed her career trajectory and headed into the world of PPC. She knows her way around a spreadsheet well enough. Bids, budgets, quality score, programmatic, conversion rate optimization? Katie is just now getting comfortable with PPC jargon.

Katie’s training should be:

• Technical skill heavy
• Process oriented
• Broad views
• Building a toolkit of Common Practices

Trent Traffic

Trent is an account manager. He has been with the agency for 2 years with 3+ years prior PPC experience. He really wants to start focusing on Amazon and improve his shopping campaign skills. He hates lectures and prefers collaboration.

Trent’s Training should be:

• Advanced strategy tactics
• Workshop-based/hands-on
• Deep-dive into single topic

Daphne Display

Daphne is an Associate Director. She is new to the role, but has been in the PPC industry for 6 years. She oversees 2 XL Enterprise Accounts and advises on a slew of B2B, B2C, Ecomm, and Lead Gen clients. She has an organic growth goal she needs to hit. She wants to grow her accounts and her team. She craves innovation.

Daphne’s training should be:

• Filled with the latest industry trends
• Advanced marketing strategy
• Ways to develop herself and her team

In the past, we have had a full day of training devoted to 1 topic. Here’s what an agenda looked like:

Happy training day, team! Today we are taking a deep dive into Facebook.

• Getting started with campaign options
• Lookalikes: how do you use them?
• Brand safety
• Creating a social strategy for B2B

Here’s how each member of the team might absorb that information:

Katie: I need to know all of this. This is all new information. This is great. But I don’t work on any accounts that use this yet. I guess I’ll just put this in my back pocket for later.

Trent: *Yawn* Old news. I’ve been running FB campaigns forever. Speaking of Facebook, I think I’ll take a look at my best friend’s honeymoon photos. (No one I work with would ever be this disengaged, right team?)

Daphne: Oh good. I’m glad we are covering this. My team needs to know this. Are they paying attention? I have to get that email out to that really important client asap. But I should be paying attention. Are they going to tell me something new? No? This is what I already know. No worries. I’ll put out some starter questions and boost discussion.

I took a course on training and something that stuck with me was this: if at least 1 person learned something and was engaged and got something from the class, then you have done your job. Yeah, true, I guess. But I think leading training for the whole team means the whole team should walk away with something.

Solution: Individualized Group Training

Paradoxes. We love them here at Hanapin. Individual Group Training? It makes no sense! And truthfully, it doesn’t. But it is the best way I can describe it. Lumping multi-experienced individuals into one training wasn’t working. So we thought long and hard about three things:

• Agency Growth Goals
• Career development
• Engagement

And here is the new structure for our day of training.

Integrated marketing

We all come from different backgrounds. Just because you studied marketing 6 years ago at university doesn’t mean you know PPC. And just because you know PPC through working in the industry for 3 years doesn’t mean you have a foundational knowledge of marketing. Integrated marketing is taking a branch of marketing strategy and understanding how it works in tandem with a PPC strategy. No one PPCs in a black hole. Even though our clients come to us because they need an expert in PPC doesn’t mean that they are solely relying on PPC to drive revenue.

We will spend a portion of our day hearing from field experts: marketing professors, our own marketing team, CRO experts, SEO teams.

Our Take

Are you still using the phrase “Best Practice” to describe optimizations? If you are, that is fine. It may work for you. But in the past year or so, at an agency our size, it is a bit taboo to say “best practice”. We have clients of all shapes and sizes and “best practice” becomes increasingly problematic. Even if we have two clients who are in the same vertical, they may have different budgets and different goals. So even though we don’t really have a “best practice” for specific initiatives, we still need to have a plan.

Our Take is designed for small groups. Something is shifting in the industry. What is our stance? How do we measure success? The idea behind Our Take is to build an understanding of the topic, source solutions from the team, and create processes to implement in our accounts.

For instance, with the increase of AI and the subsequent increase of available ad types, conventional ad testing is dead. But this all crept up on us. We didn’t wake up one day and have to redo everything we normally do with ads. It was slow and we adapted. But we forgot to develop tools and processes to help us manage the results and glean actionable insights.

An Our Take session might talk about the future of ads, explore AI, and challenge the team to develop a tool to assist in ad testing, build a report template for clients, and create case studies on multi-ad type testing.

Experience Tracks

Here is where the individualized training comes into play. For the afternoon session of training, the group will be split into 3. How do you know what group you belong in? It is a little bit based on tenure and a little bit more based on experiences (note the ‘s’ at the end). Where are you in your career? What can you learn that will make the most impact for you and your clients/department/agency?

The Strategy Track might feature “how-to’s” to assist with technical capability development. For example: how to build a custom bid template for multi-brand accounts.

The Growth Track is more focused on big picture. This track could include leadership development sessions but also include training on market expansion.

And finally, the Innovation Track is devoted to moving the agency forward in capabilities, efficiencies, and growth. These sessions would be small group SWOT breakouts, individual projects, or leadership-dictated hot-button issues.

Share the Wealth (of Knowledge)

The cool thing about working in an agency full of experts is that we are our own best resource. While there might be a need for us to bring in industry experts to lead us in training, for the most part we have the skills we need to train each other. We have the responsibility to each other to share what we know. Albert Einstein believed the only source of knowledge was experience. Guess what? We have buckets of experience.

Technically Speaking

Beyond the strategy and the innovation and the philosophy, teammates like Katie still need some technical skill training. With a lot of things PPC, it is trial by fire. You can listen to the philosophy of a strategy till the cows come home but it isn’t going to sink in until you actually get into a platform and build something from scratch.

We still want to equip our team with a baseline knowledge of platforms and tools. Which is why we will be devoting 1.5 hours a month to technical skill training. Each month will offer 4 topics. You get to choose which class to take to sharpen your skills.

PPC 4 Life

I don’t think we will ever reach a point in our industry where we will be like “Welp, that’s it! We know everything!” So I encourage you to keep your skills honed, your brains open, and ask for on-going training. And if all else fails, just keep coming back to PPC Hero for the latest.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: Lauren Rosner

For more SEO, PPC, internet marketing news please check out https://news.scott.services

Why not check out our SEO, PPC marketing services at https://www.scott.services

We’re also on:
https://www.facebook.com/scottdotservices/
https://twitter.com/scottdsmith
https://plus.google.com/112865305341039147737

The post How We Train PPC Experts appeared first on Scott.Services Online Marketing News.

source https://news.scott.services/how-we-train-ppc-experts/

Branded Searches In Google My Business Insights

Last month, Google introduced a new group of analytics data in Google My Business Insights called “branded” searches. Google defined them as “Customers who find your listing searching for a brand related to your business.” Joy Hawkins met with Google and had a chance to clarify with examples what these types of searches are.

Joy posted in the Local Search Forums these specific examples of what is a branded search versus a direct search, etc. She said:

“State Farm” returns a 3-pack for several locations for State Farm. This is a branded search.

“State Farm Bob Hagen” just returns a knowledge panel for that specific location. That’s a direct search.

“Starbucks Near Me” returns a 3-pack with several locations – this is a branded search.

“Starbucks on Mission College Blvd” returns just a single, specific Starbucks location. This is a direct search.

For more examples, check out the thread.

I hope this clarifies things for some of you.

Forum discussion at Local Search Forums.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

For more SEO, PPC, internet marketing news please check out https://news.scott.services

Why not check out our SEO, PPC marketing services at https://www.scott.services

We’re also on:
https://www.facebook.com/scottdotservices/
https://twitter.com/scottdsmith
https://plus.google.com/112865305341039147737

The post Branded Searches In Google My Business Insights appeared first on Scott.Services Online Marketing News.

source https://news.scott.services/branded-searches-in-google-my-business-insights/

Google Tests Dropping The Knowledge Panel From Search Results

Google has confirmed in the Google Web Search Help forums that they are running a test where the search results page shows no knowledge panel. The knowledge panel on desktop typically shows up on the right of the page when there is a match for a name, brand, company, facts, etc. Andy from Google confirmed Google is testing not showing it to some searchers.

Andy B. from Google wrote “want to confirm that what you are seeing is an experiment. We’re always testing new ways to improve the Search experience for users, and one of the ways we achieve this is by experimenting with different methods.” He added that if you do not like it “please leave in-product feedback at the bottom of your Search results page to share your thoughts.”

Here is a screen shot of the experiment where Google does not show the knowledge panel:

Here is what I see, with the knowledge panel:

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

For more SEO, PPC, internet marketing news please check out https://news.scott.services

Why not check out our SEO, PPC marketing services at https://www.scott.services

We’re also on:
https://www.facebook.com/scottdotservices/
https://twitter.com/scottdsmith
https://plus.google.com/112865305341039147737

The post Google Tests Dropping The Knowledge Panel From Search Results appeared first on Scott.Services Online Marketing News.

source https://news.scott.services/google-tests-dropping-the-knowledge-panel-from-search-results/

Google To Split Google News User & Publisher Forums

Forever, Google had a single Google forum for both Google News consumers (i.e. searchers) and publishers (news publications) to share and post their complaints in. So you would have people complaining about the quality of the Google News results and at the same time publishers complaining that their site is not showing up. It causes confusion and the two really don’t make sense to mix together.

Lisa Wang from Google announced in the Google News Help forum that starting tomorrow, November 30th, Google will be splitting off this forum into two separate communities or forums. One for the user and searcher (content consumers) of Google News and one for Google News publishers (content producers).

On Friday, November 30th, at around 10am PT the current Google News forum will be read only and the new forums will be accessible at the links below:

You will still be able to access the old forums, but not write or ask for help in it.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

For more SEO, PPC, internet marketing news please check out https://news.scott.services

Why not check out our SEO, PPC marketing services at https://www.scott.services

We’re also on:
https://www.facebook.com/scottdotservices/
https://twitter.com/scottdsmith
https://plus.google.com/112865305341039147737

The post Google To Split Google News User & Publisher Forums appeared first on Scott.Services Online Marketing News.

source https://news.scott.services/google-to-split-google-news-user-publisher-forums/

Meet The Captain Of SEO From Vietnam

Did you ever meet the captain of SEO? If not, you can, he is from Hội An in Vietnam – he has a boat named Captain SEO. Eli Schwartz, an SEO I’ve known for a long time shared the photo on Facebook and said I can share it here.

I bet many of you never met Captain SEO?

This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article. Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

For more SEO, PPC, internet marketing news please check out https://news.scott.services

Why not check out our SEO, PPC marketing services at https://www.scott.services

We’re also on:
https://www.facebook.com/scottdotservices/
https://twitter.com/scottdsmith
https://plus.google.com/112865305341039147737

The post Meet The Captain Of SEO From Vietnam appeared first on Scott.Services Online Marketing News.

source https://news.scott.services/meet-the-captain-of-seo-from-vietnam/

The State of Local SEO: Industry Insights for a Successful 2019