| | | | | | | | Our biweekly newsletter series brings you insightful tips and perspectives from industry-leading SEOs and marketing experts. In this issue, Marcus Tober, Searchgeek and Head of Enterprise Solutions at Semrush, shares tips to help SEOs get stakeholders on board.
Get attention and buy-in with the right SEO KPIs By: Marcus Tober
Not every company succeeds in SEO. Even with financial backing, the success of SEO often comes down to the story SEOs tell.
By story I mean giving the right data to stakeholders to get their attention and long-term support. The reason stakeholders don't support SEO often comes down to two reasons: - SEOs use the wrong KPIs. It could be visibility KPIs that lack context in comparison to the competition or real traffic. Or it could be way too many metrics, which stakeholders don't understand.
- SEO can be at odds with other business goals, like user experience.
Take this real-life example: A product team is trying to improve the conversion rate (CVR) on a category page. They discover that some content and links distract the user, so they remove them, successfully increasing CVR. But the consequence of these changes can be a slow but steady decline in organic traffic.
How can you solve this problem? A stakeholder needs to make decisions. The typical SEO KPIs are useless for decision making unless you translate them into a business context. SEOs can't get buy-in if they're speaking a language that others don't understand.
SEOs can solve this by being specific, even if it's hard. SEOs need to understand the goals of stakeholders and reverse engineer the OKRs from stakeholders into their SEO KPIs. Then make sure your reports aren't overwhelmed with data.
The solution to the CVR problem above was for SEO to work together with the product team to tie the right SEO KPIs—Share of Voice or Market Share—into their OKRs.
Everyone loves to win The magic way to get attention from stakeholders is to use the competition. Use the Share of Voice (Position Tracking) or Market Share (Traffic Analytics) reports in Semrush to give the context of where you are in your market.
Use real data instead of generic statements, and tailor it to the stakeholder. For the engineering team, don't say "the website is slow." Instead, compare your page speed metrics with the competition.
For top management, you could combine your market share with sessions and sales, which helps to build confidence when demand, and therefore traffic, is "low."
Show how SEO metrics can be baked into OKRs Once stakeholders understand SEO metrics, they can include them into OKRs.
For example, they could set new goals around gaining market share, or to beat a competitor in page speed—which can help prevent decisions being made without consideration to the consequences they may have on SEO.
The less often people interact with SEO, the more specific you must be and the fewer metrics you should use. Ideally, your KPIs allow stakeholders to understand cause and effect, which will create more buy-in for SEO.
Put it all together with Semrush's My Reports and make your case with data-driven insights. But remember to use the right data.
Go to My Reports → | | | | | | |  | | | | | | | | | Head of Enterprise Solutions
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