Why CMOs should keep their SEO experts close (Hint: They’ll save thousands of dollars)
In over 12 years of digital marketing, I’ve had the opportunity to escort and consult to companies in various sizes and stages of their business development – from launched startups to Unicorns. Apart from the professional success and great marketing results I enjoy sharing with clients, most of all I love the close relationship that develops when working for years with the same people. One of my clients likes to joke that after 8 years, I’m their oldest employee.
CEOs and CMOs often ask me, “how can we measure ROI when hiring an SEO/Online Marketing Consultant?” The obvious way that has been covered in countless articles is through the main metrics: organic traffic, to leads, to sales. But as much as SEO can be clearly measured in this way, I actually want to discuss something completely different here, because there’s an angle that’s rarely covered.
What many execs miss, is that the right person can save them tens of thousands of Dollars (even more). To all CMOs I say: your SEO expert is one of your biggest assets and you have to keep them very close.
Why?
Many CMOs rush to execute changes to the website, to messaging, and URL structure without consulting their taking SEO into account. As much as these changes may play a crucial role in the company’s business objectives, the short term result is often… catastrophic.
Some of the not-so-best practices result in page cannibalism (when pages compete for the same keywords and neither get enough juice to rank anywhere worth mentioning), or more commonly in poorly optimized pages, which take months to begin delivering even small amounts of traffic.
Some of the worst cases I’ve seen had several WordPress installations dividing the website’s pages between them, ending up in a cacophony of designs. This leads to a horrible user experience, and makes Google start pulling it’s digital hair. (It goes without saying that for good SEO, you don’t want to stress the search engine algorithms!)
Some of you will say there’s nothing new here. Where’s the ROI? Well… In all the cases above, and countless more, it took weeks or months for the content and dev teams to restore, recover, and get the websites back on track. That’s time that was not spent on new projects or additional developments.
It also took the SEO consultant time to put all the broken website pieces together, re-optimize, fix, and run countless tech audits. Time that could have been spent on growth.
Lastly, traffic was impaired by a severe drop in rankings, which naturally reflected in less organic leads and missing quarterly goals. All that had to be compensated by pumping up the paid traffic budget. So companies were not only looking at a loss in income, but further investments in order to recover.
Below is an example breakdown of a company that made big changes to their main marketing pages, homepage, and conversion funnel. These changes were made ad-hoc, without considering the delicate balance of SEO requirements, or how it may be impacted. Starting with traffic of 20,000 monthly organic visitors, they dropped to 12,000 and lost 40% of their planned leads.
In order to get back on track and meet quarterly goals, it took 4 months and cost:
- Redesign – $3000
- Development and improvement of code – $3000
- Content rewrites (in house) – $4000
- Time allocation by CEO, CMO, and CTO – $5000
- Ads to compensate for the drop in organic traffic – $13,000
- Loss in revenue (drop in number of leads) – estimated in $25,000 after ads compensated for organic leads
- A full quarter delay in the planned growth of 10% – difficult to calculate.
Bottom line – At least $53,000 lost on duplicate makeovers.
The takeaway – keep your SEO person close, in all stages of development and messaging revisions.
Ask for keyword research, to see which terms are the ones you’d mostly like to compete for, and then embed them in your content from step one. Check and recheck that your new brand messaging is aligned with both business needs and SEO considerations – your target audience and can potentially bring good (and high-intent) traffic.
Make sure you’re not focusing only on rankings, but also on visibility. Ask your SEO person to show you how different keywords impact your visibility. For example – how would they tackle an important keyword for which only two organic results show above the fold (after ads, video, features, snippet, etc.).
A good SEO person will have valuable input regarding UX, design, choice of words, and targeting the right audience. They’ll understand how to reach an audience with the right intent, at the right moment in their buyer journey.
An excellent SEO person will feel to you as if they are a part of your in-house team.
Why should CMO’s keep their SEO guy close. Spoiler: It will save a lot of money (see inside exactly how much).
#SEO #Digitalmarketing #marketinghacks