SEO

Building An SEO Business Case Your Boss Can’t Say No To

Published

2 years ago

April 12, 2022

Building An SEO Business Case Your Boss Can’t Say No To

Scientists may tell you the last dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, but they haven’t met your boss.

The very definition of old school; she’s the kind of person who only begrudgingly accepted email because she’s still convinced the internet is a fad.

But she’s the decision-maker and the person who controls the purse strings. How do you convince her of the importance of SEO?

How do you build a case for adding it to your marketing plan and allocating the resources to make it successful?

If only there was some sort of handy guide you could refer to… oh wait. We’ve got just the thing.

Why SEO Should Be Part Of Every Marketing Plan

In 2021, American consumers spent $870.78 billion online, or roughly 19% of total purchases. And that’s not even including all the in-person sales that were driven by web research and awareness.

Quite simply, every business needs a website.

And because websites with no visitors are of no use at all, every business needs SEO as part of their marketing plan.

This article will give you a step-by-step process to build a business case to add search engine optimization to yours.

Why You Need A Business Case

A business case is a formal justification for undertaking a project. It evaluates the benefit, cost, and risk of alternative options and provides a rationale for a specific solution.

Too many small businesses, overwhelmed by the enormity of day-to-day operations, completely forgo business cases.

But without one, you’re probably wasting valuable resources on projects with little benefit, losing sight of project goals, and struggling with proper prioritization.

This is something you don’t want to do with SEO, particularly if you’re trying to convince someone else of its importance.

You need a good business plan to make your case, one that describes the following:

The opportunity.
The problem in the current system.
The solution.

This doesn’t have to be overly long; in fact, being concise is often better.

But it does need to clearly describe the vision and goal of your SEO strategy, the data to support your contentions, and the technological tools you’ll need.

You need to include financial projections about cost and return on investment, ideally on a month-by-month basis for the first year, as well as information about when you believe your SEO project will become cash-flow positive.

Building Your SEO Business Case

Below, we’ll work you through the process and help you develop a case your boss will have to sign off on.

Conduct A Website Audit

Like any good plan, your business case should start with research. And this means a comprehensive website audit, which will provide your team with a performance baseline.

Begin by evaluating your current SEO status and strategy, if you have one.

Determine what’s working at bringing in traffic to your website.

Do you have common keywords that are leading to your site? What pages are visitors landing on most?

Identify the opportunities that your strongest pieces of content provide.

Look at both on-page factors like keyword density, optimized images, headers, and URL names, and off-page factors like backlink quality, site structure, internal linking, and 404 errors.

Knowing where you’re starting from will help you accurately forecast the results your SEO campaigns will generate.

Intimidated by this process? Don’t be. There are numerous free tools you can use for site audits that will give you the information you need.

Do A Competitive Analysis

SEO is a zero-sum game. The traffic you’re landing is the traffic your competitors aren’t. And vice-versa.

With this in mind, it’s absolutely crucial that you know exactly what they’re up to, so you can find why they’re outranking you and discover opportunities to swipe visitor clicks from them.

But beware – your biggest SEO rivals may not be your biggest industry competitors; they may be only tangentially related companies that use similar keywords.

Figure out who you’re up against with an SEO competitive analysis. You’ll want to ask (and answer) questions like:

What keywords do competitors rank for?
Which keywords are they not utilizing effectively?
How are they promoting their content?
What is their SEO strategy?
How is their on-page content optimized?
What is the quality of their backlinks?
Are they using paid ads? To what effect?

Not sure how to find all this information?

Aside from the always helpful articles you’ll find on this website, there are also a number of essential tools you can use to figure out just what the competition is up to.

Speak To Your Target Audience Based On Intent

In a digital world, it can be easy to forget that there are actual people on the other side of your campaigns and that you’re not just creating content for search engines.

Take some time to identify your target audience persona and research why this hypothetical person is visiting your website. You should identify:

Who is a typical target?
What do they want?
What keywords or phrases are they searching for?

Some people find it helpful to create a character or characters to whom they can then speak directly to with content.

For example, an online hardware store may have a persona called Jim, based on an imagined customer:

Jim is a middle-aged man from the Midwest. He has a good job, but not enough disposable income to hire a professional for home repairs, so he does things himself. He knows his way around tools. He is a family man who enjoys sports, barbecue, and watching television.

By envisioning Jim as a real person, some writers find it easier to speak directly to him, using language he would feel comfortable with, which in turn leads to better results.

You don’t have to go this far, though the more you understand who you’re targeting, the better your SEO campaigns will perform.

Create A Monthly Content Plan

Now that you know who you’re targeting, it’s time to start planning to reach these people.

Create a month-by-month plan outlining your content.

Determine what you will focus on. This could be a theme like the holiday season or a product you want to push. Not everything needs to stay on theme, but it’s generally easier to plan a month’s worth of content when it’s all related.

Next, review your calendar to identify key dates like events, product launches, and affiliate promotions.

Armed with this information, it’s time to create a high-level content plan that presents the big picture of what you’ll be doing for the month.

Map out promotions and core content like blog posts.

Not sure what your priorities should be? We can help with that.

Want to go even further in-depth and develop an SEO strategy for the entire year? We have a free ebook that’s just what you need.

List Your Keywords

Of all the parts of SEO, perhaps the most important is keywords.

The foundation of an overall SEO strategy: it tell search engines what your content is all about and why it’s the perfect solution for their needs.

So, how do you find the keywords that are most useful for your goals? By this point in building your SEO business case, you should be well prepared to identify them.

There are a number of tools and techniques you should use, beginning with brainstorming a list of topics relevant to your content.

Come up with a list of seed keywords and then use a good keyword research tool to identify others.

Because you have already identified user intent, this will be helpful in finding long-tail keywords.

Likewise, your previous work investigating the competition will come in handy here by helping you figure out what keywords are working for them, so you can use them yourself.

Build The Workplace Relationships You Need

Now that you’re armed with the plan for a winning SEO strategy, it’s time to start assembling the resources to put it into action.

You don’t have to hire an SEO specialist or hire an outside firm to get started (though that can be a very good idea), because you likely have many of the pieces you need already in your organization.

Marketing, IT, and sales should all be brought into the fold.

While some people may be less than thrilled by what they’ll perceive as more work for them, explain they you’re all on the same team and working toward the same goal.

Build rapport with them by showing them how their individual contributions will make your SEO undertaking more successful.

Spend some time educating them on the process and be sure to highlight the importance of each of their roles.

Strengthen Your Case With Facts And Data

At the end of the day, most executives only care about one thing: Does it provide a return on investment?

That’s what’s great about SEO – it provides a wealth of data points you can use to show not only that what you’re doing is worthwhile, but that it’s paying off too.

And there is ample evidence to show why you need an SEO plan.

For example, you’ll surely want to mention that Google is responsible for 92% of web searches, with more than 267 million unique visitors in the U.S. alone. Or that 56% of web traffic comes from mobile devices.

If you’re promoting a paid component to your overall SEO plan, be sure to highlight that for every $1 a business spent on Google ads, they made an average of $2 in revenue.

Using this data, you can tell a compelling story that covers more than the black and red of a balance sheet and encourages buy-in.

Measure And Track Your Success

SEO is a long game and not one that will reap immediate rewards. You need to make this clear to stakeholders right from the start.

But with a solid strategy and a little old-fashioned elbow grease, you’ll soon start seeing measurable results.

Google is great at providing you with factual support using key metrics like:

Organic traffic.
Keyword ranking.
Click-through rate.
Bounce rate.
Conversion rate.
Time spent on page.

By carefully tracking your performance, you’ll get a better understanding of where and how you’re succeeding, as well as identify areas for improvement.

Conclusion

SEO is a good investment for any organization, but it requires an investment upfront in both time, budget, and resources.

While results are not always predictable, SEO is one of those fields where you get out what you put in.

If you throw together a slap-dash plan without much thought, you’re not going to get the quality results you would get from a more methodical approach.

But by developing a carefully thought out business case for SEO and highlighting its potential, it’s very difficult for even the most curmudgeonly boss to deny its value.

From increasing your customer base to driving new sales, there is no question a quality strategy will help achieve company-wide goals.

Now get to work – you have an SEO business case to build.

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SEO

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

Published

3 hours ago

August 31, 2024

Max

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.

Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic

The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.

Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.

Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:

“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “

The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”

Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:

“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”

That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.

A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:

“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”

Facing Reality Is Productive

Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:

Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay

WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.

Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.

Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.

The live webinar featured:

Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.

WordPress Market Share Stagnation

The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.

Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.

Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.

Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.

CMS YoY Growth

Webflow: 25.00%
Shopify: 15.61%
Wix: 10.71%
Squarespace: 9.04%
Duda: 8.89%
WordPress: 1.85%

Why Stagnation Is A Problem

An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.

It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:

“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”

Perception Of Innovation

One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.

It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:

“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”

Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.

“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”

Is Improved Marketing A Solution

One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.

Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:

“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”

This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.

They said:

“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”

Future Of WordPress

This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.

The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.

Watch the webinar:

Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?

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SEO

Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Published

22 hours ago

August 31, 2024

Max

Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.

How AVIF Can Improve SEO

Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.

Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.

It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:

Improve your site’s crawl efficiency

Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.

What Is AVIF?

AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).

AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.

AVIF Versus WebP

AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.

Is AVIF Supported?

AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.

I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.

Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.

Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.

AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google

According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.

“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”

Read Google’s announcement:

Supporting AVIF in Google Search

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SEO

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Published

2 days ago

August 30, 2024

Max

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.

This is what Eli had to say:

“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.

This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”

Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.

What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?

Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.

Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.

Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)

“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.

Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”

Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion

Read the discussion on LinkedIn:

Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO

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