Communicating the value of SEO
SEO is as much about communication to stakeholders as it is about actually undertaking SEO on a website.
SEOers must communicate the value of SEO, investment needed in SEO as well as communicating realistic objectives in the face of spammy SEO companies who promise the earth.
Communicating the value of SEO
Whether in-house or agency side SEOers must communicate the value of SEO as a valuable channel delivering high ROI. Many website owners feel that SEOers are essentially selling snake oil. This is unfortunate and largely a result of not understanding the value of SEO or appreciating what is involved. SEO is a very new industry and with all new things there is often scepticism.
Website owners will often spend thousands of dollars developing a website. However SEO is often given little or no budget. When there is investment they will often want the SEOer to account for every second of the time spent on the site, and exactly what they did. This raises two issues. Firstly this does not allow any time for the SEOer to experiment and analyse, second by itemising all tasks the SEOer is essentially giving away years of intellectual property.
Communicating investment needed in SEO
SEO is not something that delivers results overnight. Serious amounts of time need to be invested by a variety of website stakeholders from content authors to developers. Unfortunately an investment of 100 hours will not immediately return 100 hours worth of benefit. Similar to constructing a building (SEOer) the eventual buyer (Website Owner) only sees the finished product and not the time taken to find the right location (domain acquisition), identify the target market (keyword research), blue print the architecture for the building (site architecture), project manage the build (managing developers/agencies), ensuring that the building is connected to all the main utilities (link building), decorate to the liking of the target market (copywriting), ensuring building regulations are met (On-site Optimisation), marketing the property (SEO, PPC, Social Media) selling the property (landing page optimisation).
Communicating the importance of realistic SEO objectives
At least once a week I see emails or ads promoting the services of SEO agencies who are able guarantee results over night without understanding the target market, competition, site architecture or even attempting to look at any of the key ingredients of the SEO mix. This puts undue pressure on in-house or agency SEOs who are faced with clients screaming to understand why their website is still 15th in the Google search results when they have an email stating another agency can improve their results even further. Some emails even suggest that a website has not been optimised at all. Most Internet marketers know these emails are most auto generated however it makes the job of communicating realistic SEO targets even more difficult.
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