You love your job and care about your company. You see a clear need to improve your company’s web presence in order to keep up with the competition. Your boss however doesn’t want to hear about this search engine optimization stuff. He’s got different priorities that deal with “real” business opportunities and with budgets being so tight, he definitely doesn’t want to invest in something as unproven as SEO.
This is probably sounds familiar for many motivated, forward-thinking employees that work at more traditional companies. Your boss’ sentiment is understandable though. SEO is still a pretty vague concept for many people and hasn’t been part of doing business for all that long.
To help you strengthen your arguments the next time that you discuss SEO with your boss, we’ve rounded up a few possible reasons why your boss doesn’t care about SEO yet, and how you can change this.
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There’s No Story
Data is not always easy to understand, especially when you’re not well versed in the subject matter. In order to explain the benefits of SEO to your boss, you need to create a story to go with your data to make the data easier to interpret.
Don’t just show your boss rankings and conversion rates, but tell him/her which important business KPIs this data drives. Show him/her the impact on sales, marketing costs, etc.
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Are Competitors Doing It?
Depending on whether your competitors are using SEO or not, you can play this two ways. If your competitors are active in the SEO game, of course you need to get into it too. Show your boss – again creating a story around the data that you have – how your competitors are driving sales with SEO.
If your competitors are not using SEO at the moment, this is your opportunity. In order to gain that competitive edge, you need to develop your business in a way that your competitors are not. Leveraging SEO early can keep you ahead of your competitors. Also, if there’s no real SEO competition in your business, it will be easy and relatively cheap to get started and see quick results.
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Your Boss Doesn’t See the Bigger Picture
SEO isn’t just about ranking higher in search engine results. Your boss might not know this though. You have to convince your boss that SEO can positively affect many aspects of your business. Increasing visibility, building up your brand name and authority and lowering costs of customer acquisition are all potential benefits of SEO.
There are many benefits to implementing SEO in a company. Put all together, these benefits create a much more compelling story to sell to your boss than if you just focus on rankings and conversions.
It’s time to create a great SEO story and start selling your boss on all the benefits of SEO. Can’t for the life of you convince him/her this is something the company should be investing in? Perhaps it is time to leave the ship and start your own business. That way you can do as much SEO as you want.
Zane Schwarzlose is an SEO for Fahrenheit Marketing, an Austin based web design firm. His boss cares greatly about SEO.
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