Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a huge opportunity for any business. Why? Because its prime real estate in the Google search results and its FREE! Well, it is not free because it requires work but it doesn’t require paid advertising cost. It does require work in managing your website, developing strong content, hiring experts in SEO consulting to help rank in the search results pages (SERPs). It also requires driving qualified traffic that converts into sales or leads.
Many CEOs are fed a lot of misinformation about what SEO is, and is not, by so-called experts in the field. This guide will shed light on what you need to know as a senior leader or business owner to maximize your SEO efforts, support your marketing team, and see scalable growth from this highly profitable channel.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting your website to rank in Google, Bing, Yahoo or other search engines for highly relevant terms. The SERPs, or search engine results pages, is where your site can rank and is comprised of both paid listings (pay-per-click aka PPC or CPC or paid search) and organic search also referred to as SEO.
Many CEOs type in a keyword and don’t see their site. There are many reasons for this. Aligning on priorities and expectations with your team will help you as a business owner or senior leader avoid these issues and ensure success.
I type in a keyword and my site is not showing, why?
This is probably the most asked question, and the easiest to answer. If you are asking this question, you and your marketing & SEO consulting or internal team have not laid out a strong SEO strategy. A keyword you as an owner may find valuable may not be on the radar of your marketing team for various reasons.
For example, if your business sells online education courses and you type in “best online college” you may not show on page 1. Why? Because this is a highly competitive and difficult keyword to rank for on page 1.
Your marketing team may be focused on long tail, highly profitable terms for specific courses like “best online bookkeeping courses”. Understanding what keywords your team should work on and why is a guaranteed strategy to be successful. Once you and your team know what keywords are ideal to focus on, a plan can be developed for key metrics and resources needed. As a senior leader or CEO, this will enable you to ask great questions and challenge your team to deliver incredible results.
What should our SEO plan and strategy look like?
Start with a simple SEO strategy outline: benchmark data, create action plans and accelerate growth. This is Optimize Digital’s 3 step plan: Analyze, Action, Accelerate.
1. Analyze benchmark data: In the benchmarking data phase, narrow down your keyword list to 10-30 core terms. At an early stage, you can pull up to 100 terms, but identify your top 30 terms you expect to show on page.
With this list of keywords agreed to by your marketing, sales and leadership team you have to understand your current data points: position, click traffic, impressions and click-through-rate (CTR). Your team can pull this information for free using Google Search Console. This Google system can be used monthly to manually generate reports on progress. There are great paid tools that automate this reporting, as it can take time to put together. These tools include SEMRush, Ahrefs and more that will monitor your keywords and progress for you.
Using these benchmarks for your top 30 terms, categorize each keyword into one of 3 categories: defend, move up, add.
- Defend keywords are those on page 1 you want to protect their position
- Move up keywords are those on pages 2-5 you want to improve their ranking to page 1
- Add keywords are those either with no ranking or past page 5 and may need new content
Next, create some baseline website traffic from SEO: this includes traffic metrics, what users are doing on the site and any results (sales, leads, etc) and top SEO entrance pages. Your internal team or external SEO consulting agency can pull this from Google Analytics. Now you have Analyzed your benchmark data and categories, now is the time for action.
2. Action plans: during your action phase, we want to create 30, 60 and 90 action plans based on your categories and ongoing SEO activities.
These Action plans should take your keyword categories and have specific actions and activities to drive results. It also should cover foundational work and ongoing SEO activities.
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- Defend keywords
- Monitor these keywords for position or CTR change and be prepared to act
- Move Up keywords
- Look for optimization or conversion rate optimization (CRO) opportunities: such as changing the meta title or description to entice more clicks
- Add keywords
- These keywords will most likely need the most attention and page/content creation to support the best user experience
- Foundational work
- Part of your action plan may be to install Google Analytics, Search Console or other SEO tools to monitor your site and enable the best reporting possible
- Ongoing SEO activities (a few examples)
- Mobile site enhancements and experience updates
- Optimizing for user experience: reduce bounce rate
- Reviewing technical SEO metrics for opportunities
- Defend keywords
Each month, your team will report on movement for keywords and your baseline site metrics. Important to note, don’t expect huge improvements in the first 90 days even. SEO is a long play. You will most likely have some early huge wins with some easy optimizations or additions, but SEO overall is a tough channel with lots of competition.
Reassess your progress each month and be prepared to look for, and pivot, to new opportunities with your internal team or SEO consulting agency.
3. Accelerate Growth– Now you have some data about what is working and what isn’t, now is the time to accelerate. A great example is if a certain content theme or keywords are taking off, this may present an opportunity to create iterative content pages.
For example, if you are selling collegiate gear and keywords for “best college sweatshirt store” and “cheap KU hoodies” are gaining traction, your team could focus on “best college sweatshirt store in X city” and have pages for lots of college towns. Or perhaps you are selling home services and pages for “Samsung washing machine repair” are taking off and driving sales. Your team may iterate and create pages for all brand opportunities for washing machine repair and even other appliances as a test.
During the Accelerate growth phase, you and your team should focus on what is working and how to put more “gas on the fire”. This is also a time to understand why some pages or activities are not working and take a new approach. While the accelerate growth phase is fun, you should test new activities and strategies with your SEO consulting team or internal staff. Continue reporting on progress and looking for low-hanging fruit. Keep an eye on your competition too.
We don’t have an SEO team, do we need to hire an SEO consulting agency?
SEO is a fantastic channel and one that is important to a lot of businesses. As a CEO or owner, your team may already be doing work building SEO into your marketing plan. Whether you hire someone on your team or use an outside resource, or agency make sure you have a plan and set clear, measurable goals.
Most businesses can greatly benefit from an outsourced SEO resource or agency. A great SEO person can be very costly and hard to find. There are a lot of people who say they do SEO but really are unable to measure their results, or think it is all about content and traffic.
What should we look for in an SEO consulting resource? Or avoid?
Since SEO can be a “black box” for even a seasoned marketer, your best SEO teams or employees will have the heart of a teacher. This person or agency will always explain what they are trying to do, how they are doing it, and how they will measure success.
You do not want an agency that promises fast results, measures on just traffic or keywords they add. Why? Because these metrics are VERY easy to game.
Say you’re running a lead generation effort for credit cards. Your SEO team can easily focus on ranking for all kinds of unrelated financial service terms like “best financial advice for seniors” or “best budgeting apps to save at the grocery store”. None of which will likely drive sales, but will drive keyword rankings, positions and traffic. Avoid companies that work on backlinking strategies until you are able to manage, oversee and collaborate on these strategies. They can quickly become blackhat.
What is white hat, gray hat and black hat SEO?
These terms define the various types of SEO activities and how they align with the terms and conditions of major search engines.
White hat tactics align and fit perfectly with any terms and conditions and are considered best practice in SEO. Examples of white hat tactics include content creation focused on delivering a high level of user experience and quality, authoritative content. Google’s quality guidelines can be summed up by EAT: expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
Gray hat SEO are tactics that are not expressly against terms and conditions, but could possibly cross into the black hat territory or some day Google or other engines may decide are against their policies. Examples include purchasing old domains and standing up new content, buying followers on social media or purchasing backlinks. Gray hat SEO is really anything that isn’t white hat but also is not expressly black hat.
Lastly, black hat SEO is the area you do NOT want to be in. Black hat SEO includes aggressive link building schemes, keyword stuffing, content automation, sneaky redirects and more. Think of these tactics as “quick win” schemes. When quick results are presented to you by an SEO resource or agency, they may employ these techniques. While they will pay off initially, your site can suffer penalties and long-term effects once discovered. Google is very sophisticated and will catch on to these black hat tactics some SEO consulting agencies employ.
SEO for the CEO: Final Thoughts
When starting, or growing, your SEO program, the best thing you can do as a CEO or owner is seeking to understand what SEO can, and cannot, do for your business. By partnering with your marketing team and asking great questions, you can be the best advocate possible.
SEO is tough. Even seasoned, experienced marketers can struggle with how to approach SEO. Many may take a beginner’s approach without thinking through the problem you are trying to solve. Work with your marketing team to identify how SEO should work for your business: are you trying to build brand awareness or authority in your space? Are you trying to drive leads or sales? Should you hire full time SEO experts or work with an SEO consulting agency? By understanding your goals, you and your team can build a program around your goals and align your efforts to truly see success.
If you need help building or strengthening your SEO program, contact us. We can help you and your team build your ideal plan, measurement and goals to see scalable, incredible, results.
