How To Speak the Language of Your Top SEO Stakeholders — Whiteboard Friday

So step one to communicating really effectively with your senior SEO stakeholders is identifying the outcomes that matter to them. That’s the goals, the things that they’re being tasked with, the stuff that they are having to talk to their stakeholders about every day. These are the initiatives and goals that you’ve heard spoken about in the all-hands meetings or in your team away days. 

It’s the things that they are constantly reinforcing that you maybe don’t fully understand, or maybe you think you do understand them, but actually, when you really dig into it, they’re using different metrics or different terminology than you. 

Example 1: Improving return on investment (ROI)

And you think, well, that’s great because SEO traffic is free traffic, right? So, of course, whatever I tell them we want to do is going to be something that they say yes to, because it’s all profit. But that is until you speak to them and realize how they calculate return on investment. And you realize there actually are quite a lot of calculations that go into working out whether SEO is profitable or not. 

There’s the software that you’re using, or there’s the fact that you need to use yet more developers’ time, or the fact that it actually costs money to host a web page and to have people visit that web page. Even if they’re organic traffic, it still costs the company money because of all the servers and various other things that go into hosting a website and receiving traffic. 

And when you start to understand all of that, you can start to factor those kind of calculations into your own return on investment calculations, so when you go to your chief marketing officer and you have three seconds to communicate your plan before they’re back to their emails, you can talk directly to them about a very genuine return on investment for the idea that you’re proposing. And that’s going to have a lot more traction with them because you’re speaking their language and you’re meeting the goals that they’ve already set for themselves for the rest of the year. 

Example 2: Reducing technical debt

Or you’re talking to your chief technical officer, and she says that she’s been tasked with reducing technical debt across the website. And you think, great, technical SEO is all about making our websites more efficient. Of course, she’ll understand that our goal is essentially her goal. 

That is, until you find out that when she’s talking about reducing technical debt, she’s talking about a full systems re-architecture. The core components in your website are going to get recoded to fix all of the years of just patching and trying to fix bugs that’s been going on. 

And so, actually, rather than talking to her about the value of canonical tags and the work that you’ve got proposed for the next quarter, you instead start having conversations with her about, “Sounds like what you’re doing might actually be a bit of a website migration. My SEO team is going to be really well-positioned to support you in that. And during that process, we’re going to be fitting in the canonical tag and hreflang tag and all the other technical SEO stuff that we wanted to get fixed.” 

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