Most SEOs can say they’ve struggled to explain the value of their work at one time or another. Explore tactics to navigate the challenges of communicating the value of SEO to stakeholders, in this episode of Whiteboard Friday. Join Bethan as they talk about how to align SEO metrics with business goals and navigate tough ROI conversations with confidence.

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Hi, there. I'm Bethan Vincent from Open Velocity, and I'm here to talk to you about everyone's favorite subject — convincing stakeholders of the value of SEO and all of those tricky conversations we often have to have with people who maybe are more senior to us or maybe haven't ever experienced the impact of SEO or frankly aren't SEO experts. 

But just to take a step back, why are we in this position where we really feel like we have to defend the work we're doing maybe to a degree above and beyond other marketers, other channels, other disciplines? 

So firstly, there is this preconception that SEO is free traffic, and I think that's still pervasive with certain stakeholders. 

This comes from the kind of oppositional nature it's often put it in relation to channels like PPC. “SEO is just free.” When we all know there's a huge amount of effort, time, resource cost that goes into it. So that's one of the challenges we face, this notion that it's free and therefore should be something that just happens on its own. It doesn't require loads of effort to do. 

Secondly, again, something we're all very aware of, SEO isn't just a turn it on, everything floods in. We know there's kind of a longer-term time horizon we're having to work to here, and we're often asking stakeholders to invest in something that may not see a return for three to six months in the future. 

So what I'd like to do is to give you a little bit of a framework to use when you're faced with that dreaded question, "when will we see ROI," because as we'll see, "it depends" is not a good enough answer for senior stakeholders.

So we'll move over here. 

Firstly, one of the things that's sometimes missing when presenting back performance to stakeholders, and this happens in every marketing discipline, I'm not just calling out SEO on this, is there's no connection between the results we're seeing on the marketing side of things and actually what the business strategy is, what the business is trying to achieve.

We could talk for days, hours, weeks about business strategy. I think if there's any advice I could give to a younger Bethan on how do I make myself a better marketer, it's to actually understand how businesses work and what business strategy actually looks like. We could spend a lot of time on that. But I just want to give you a short something to work with at the moment.

So Michael Porter, who is the grandfather of modern marketing theory, talks about the fact that there are kind of three strategic levers, if you boil it down, that businesses can pull. 

Cost

They can either compete on cost, and that's being the cheapest in the market. That is your IKEAs, Walmarts. That's often massive organizations who are trying to dominate the market. They have very low margins. So the game is all about volume. Now walking this back to SEO, what we're here to talk about today, that can often mean that your focus is on volume and reducing cost. It's all about efficiency. So that's one route businesses can take. 

Unique

Secondly, you can be unique. You can be differentiated in the market. You can stand out. This is part of that whole brand-building argument we talk about. Apple, I think, is a really great example of this that everyone can probably relate to. The idea of a computer isn't necessarily unique, but their articulation of it was. Part of your strategy is creating that standout, that visibility. It is real building that brand in a market. 

Focus

Thirdly, focus. Narrow down, focus on a niche audience. This is really an interesting one actually because this is all about it's efficiency, but it's efficiency in a different way. It's you're trying to reach a very narrow subset of the audience that your product, your service is tightly aligned to. You don't want wastage, around the sides, trying to reach an audience who actually are not primed, they are not interested in your product as well. 

So once you kind of understand these three things, you can start to think about: Okay, what role is our SEO strategy? What role is the performance? What context is the performance operating in, and how are we aligned with what the business is actually trying to achieve? 

You'd be surprised. A lot of stakeholders are almost kind of waiting for their teams to start asking questions about: Well, okay, what are our business objectives? What are we trying to achieve? Are we competing on cost? Are we trying to be differentiated? It's a really great way to show that you're actually really interested in the business, right? But also, it will help you frame the results you're seeing in a much better way that actually aligns with what the business is trying to achieve. 

So that's identify the business strategy. 

Secondly, map SEO metrics to business KPIs, and this is, again, speaking to that whole alignment piece. You want to align yourself with what the business is doing. 

Now, again, I just want to take a little step back because this poses the question: Okay, what is a metric, and what is a KPI? It's something I in the past have got very confused with. 

So if we kind of look down here, a very kind of useful, high-level way of thinking about it is metrics are often pretty tactical. They're often very single-channel focused as well. There might be an industry benchmark. So something like email open rate or email click-through rate is a really good example of this. In SEO, that might be organic sessions or organic click-through rate. 

Whereas a KPI is more likely to be based on business objectives. It's tied to the objectives, the growth narrative that the business wants to pursue. It's often multi-departmental, as in lots of different departments are contributing to that metric. 

A really good one is lead conversion rate because sales can't necessarily completely own that in isolation, neither can marketing. You've got to work together to achieve that KPI. Again, some other kind of examples of KPIs, which would be cross-departmental and high level in an organization, it might be lifetime value to cost per acquisition ratio, how much you are spending to acquire a customer that leads into that long-term value of the business. That's a really SaaS one you often see in SaaS businesses. 

Or something like pipeline velocity as well, how fast a deal is moving through the pipeline, which marketing can influence and sales can influence. 

So that's just a little bit of a primer on what we mean by metrics versus KPIs. Often, we have SEO metrics, and I would ask you to think about, okay, how are they contributing to the business KPIs, the objectives that have been set at a kind of higher level. 

Again, it's a really great question to take to a stakeholder to be like: Okay, what are our kind of business KPIs and objectives we're working to? Actually, you can literally, even in a spreadsheet, kind of map back the metric that your team is working on or you're working on back to a different KPI and build up that almost kind of flow-through narrative. That's a really impactful way of doing it actually. 

So we really do have to put ourselves within context. We can't work in isolation.

We also need to be able to present a forecast. Now I know forecasts are often a tricky point in SEO and in marketing in general. So my experience, I've worked across multiple different disciplines, very much kind of marketing generalist. I now run a strategy consultancy, and I see the problem time and time again, right? That it's very hard to predict the future. I think sometimes we feel under pressure to produce forecasts that are ironclad, that are absolutely solid. 

Again, I'm putting myself in the shoes of a stakeholder who's received forecasts from SEO departments, agencies. I know it's a forecast, and a forecast is literally just a realistic expectation of the future. There are multiple different ways of producing a forecast. We could dive into that subject. It deserves definitely its own Whiteboard Friday video. But what I would say that "it depends" is not a good enough answer. 

Again, just to help you with this whole, okay, how do I produce a forecast, how do I answer the question of when will we actually see ROI from this — I think when you're presenting a forecast, a really useful exercise is to align with levels of certainty because we all know there are variables in what we do. 

There are variables in everything in the entire world. Like I said, no one can predict the future. So actually coming to the table with not just a single forecast, but potentially a best worst case and a best case scenario, it really opens up things to have a better conversation about what is possible. 

Just to go into best worst case and best case, this is often how I like to present forecasts. 

So best worst case is almost like at the lower boundary of what is achievable, we think this will happen. If everything goes okay, basically, we think this will happen. Best case is we do everything. It's amazing. We hit our kind of elevated expectations. What I find really interesting is looking at the boundaries in the middle. 

To give you an example, so let's say you put together your SEO forecast, and based on this, you think SEO will deliver maybe the best worst case a three-to-one ROI. You've calculated all of the costs and all that kind of stuff. Best case scenario is a six-to-one ROI. All other channels or in this example PPC is performing at a five-to-one ROI. 

That now gives you room to have a really interesting conversation and almost a negotiation with the business because I, as someone presented with that forecast, would be like, okay, this is really interesting. So best worst case is not that great. Maybe I should be plowing more money into PPC where I've got that five-to-one ROI. That's assuming there's more volume to go after and you haven't tapped out that channel. Best case is interesting. Best case actually outperforms my other channels. 

So what do we need to do to hit that best case scenario? It allows you to have a much more in-depth conversation because it actually might be, well, realistically to hit this, we're going to need extra resources to do that. We're going to need the full support and buy-in of the engineering team to be able to do that. 

Like I said, it just gives you a lot better room for a negotiation and a conversation as well, and no one is necessarily holding you to it in that conversation yet. But I think the one thing about forecasts as well, it should be something that you can reflect back on and compare to actuals. That's a really interesting exercise to do. It feels a little bit scary while you're doing it, and we will be coming on to what happens when you don't hit the KPIs or the metrics that you've set. But that's what a forecast should be there for. It should be there to inform decision-making and also be a useful tool for looking back on performance after the fact.

So this is the A. It really is align with levels of certainty, and I think as well the C, creating a narrative. I've given you a bit of an example of a narrative around things. But you can't just, especially with a stakeholder who isn't SEO literate or marketing literate, they've brought in to be the expert in the room, right? They're not the channel expert. But you do have to do some heavy lifting in terms of explaining what is happening.

Like I said, "it depends" is not a valid answer. It depends because X, Y, and Z. These are the possible scenarios we could be in. Also, it depends on competitors as well. We don't exist in isolation. There's always contextual stuff going on. It depends on product. Do we release these features in the next few years as well? So creating that narrative can be really important, again, with bringing people on board with you and aligning them with reasonable expectations because, again, a forecast should be a reasonable expectation of the future.

I think the final piece, which is tell the truth.

So there is a fear when a stakeholder asks, "So when will we see ROI from this?" Like I said, you should have an answer, a reasonable answer to that question. But what happens when you don't hit it, you don't hit the KPI?

There is a temptation to bury your head under the sand and be like, "We're just not going to mention this to anyone and hope that no one picks us up on this." I've learned throughout my career that actually owning it and giving a good explanation, which we'll come on to, actually really makes stakeholders respect you more.

I work with a lot of investment managers in my job, and they are all humans who understand that things don't always go to plan. But what they're really interested in is why didn't it go to plan. 

So if you don't meet a KPI, there are a few questions you can ask and have the answers to that show you've tried to unpick the problem further. So in terms of missing the KPI, so which KPI have we missed? Why do we think we've missed it, and how much have we missed it by? Specifics, these are the details. Getting into that, that can be really useful.

Do we think this is down to internal or external factors? So do we think, for example, it's an internal execution issue? It's a reasonable or actual KPI to set for ourselves. We just didn't achieve it because of X, Y, and Z internal issues. I've not met KPIs in the past because, frankly, some of the material we were producing wasn't good enough and didn't hit the mark with our audience. Again, understanding that helps you understand what the fix might be.

External factors can be competitors. It can literally be, okay, when we set this KPI, we were the only competitor with this functionality or with this level of service in the market. Since then, three other competitors have come in and absolutely blown us out of the water. That can be a really interesting thing to unpick.

Also, have we not met the KPI short term? So is this a KPI we haven't met let's say this quarter, or is it part of a longer-term trend? Again, because that really allows you to start to unpick like what is actually the problem here. In quarter, often in my experience, not always, it depends, but often in quarter, sometimes it's more of an immediate thing, like an internal execution issue. Longer-term trends are sometimes more indicative of a longer-term shift in the external market. Again, understanding allows you to correct the issue and actually allows you to create a better forecast in the future as well.

Finally, have we just not met one KPI? That can be a really interesting question because this speaks to the whole like: Is it an isolated incident? Is it a long-term trend? What do we actually need to fix here? So again, are we just not hitting let's say a conversion rate? But actually we've got the right amount of leads. We've got the right amount of deals in the pipeline. It's just the conversion rate is an issue. Or we've got fewer leads in pipe and also we're not converting them. Again, that might speak to a wider market or an external issue. But you can't presume. You've kind of got to do the work to go digging.

External stakeholders, like I said, do accept that things go wrong. But what they actually want to know is what you're going to do about it, and you don't know what to do about it unless you actually understand the problem. You can't come up with a solution without the diagnosis. It's like a doctor just prescribing I'm just going to prescribe antibiotics before I even see them and they get in the room.

So hopefully you feel a little bit more equipped to handle the dreaded "when will we see ROI" question.

A final kind of thought from me is that sometimes that question can feel a little bit unreasonable and like you don't have all the answers to it. Give as much information as you can get. Let's say you're missing pieces of information. Be, again, really upfront with that because it may be they can actually help you find it.

I've had situations in the past where I've gone to finance and I've had to project a kind of forecast to give the rationale behind an investment in a certain channel, and I've gone like, "I've got the working out to this far, but I'm missing these pieces of information." My CFO in that scenario was like, "Okay, cool, I can help you with this. Let's go away and do this together." I think it earned me a lot of respect to be perfectly honest, and it made my job a lot easier because they helped out.

So thank you so much for having me. I've been Bethan Vincent. If you want to find out more about Open Velocity, what we do, you can find us at openvelocity.com.

If you want to connect with me, I'm on pretty much every platform. It's a little bit embarrassing at this point. But you can find me @bethanvincent on the platform of your choice. Thank you so much.