How To Speak the Language of Your Top SEO Stakeholders

Are your SEO proposals getting lost in translation? In this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Helen discusses why traditional SEO language often falls short with senior leaders and how you can better communicate the value of your work. Learn how using the metrics and outcomes that truly matter to stakeholders can help you get the buy-in you need.

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Hi, Moz fans. I’m Helen, and I’m going to be speaking to you today about how to speak the language of your top SEO stakeholders. These are the people who are at the very top of your chain of command. They’re the managing directors, the chief marketing officers, those people who really control your budgets but have maybe five minutes to try to fit, hmm, let’s be more realistic here, five seconds to understand what it is that you are trying to communicate to them, try to process whether it’s important or not important to them, and decide within an instant whether they are going to support you with your proposal or quietly ask you to leave.

They’re busy. They’re really busy. And you have maybe moments to capture their attention, to communicate exactly what it is that you need for your SEO initiatives to be successful. But for some reason, whenever you do try to talk to them, something gets a little bit lost in translation. It’s like the stuff that you’re saying isn’t really quite what they’re hearing.

You say, “I need a little bit more budget for our next PR initiative,” and they hear, “I want more money, please. Benefits, undecided.” Or you say, “I could really do with a little bit more time from the developers this sprint because we’ve got a few bits that we need to sort out with our hreflang tags,” and they hear, “Jargon, jargon, jargon, something to do with websites?”

And you say, “I really think we should look at trying to fix the overarching issues that we have with the landing pages on our site,” and they hear, well, nothing. They’re not listening anymore. They’re back on their emails. You should probably leave. Your five minutes are up.

So essentially, in the fast-paced industry that we find ourselves in and the corporate world that a lot of us inhabit at the moment, it’s all about getting your point across really quickly and concisely. And we have to do that to people who don’t speak SEO. And that means we really need to look at how we are focusing our reporting, our communications, our proposals, so that we’re meeting those top-level stakeholders within their realm of understanding.

So rather than expecting them to upskill and learn SEO jargon, we instead need to meet them where they’re at because they’ve only got a few moments to really process what it is that you are proposing to them. So I am going to give you a really simple framework. It’s so simple. It’s only two steps. You’ve learnt more complicated TikTok dances. I believe in you. 

Step 1: Identify the outcomes that matter to your stakeholders

So step one to communicating really effectively with your senior SEO stakeholders is identifying the outcomes that matter to them. That’s the goals, the things that they’re being tasked with, the stuff that they are having to talk to their stakeholders about every day. These are the initiatives and goals that you’ve heard spoken about in the all-hands meetings or in your team away days. 

It’s the things that they are constantly reinforcing that you maybe don’t fully understand, or maybe you think you do understand them, but actually, when you really dig into it, they’re using different metrics or different terminology than you. 

Example 1: Improving return on investment (ROI)

And you think, well, that’s great because SEO traffic is free traffic, right? So, of course, whatever I tell them we want to do is going to be something that they say yes to, because it’s all profit. But that is until you speak to them and realize how they calculate return on investment. And you realize there actually are quite a lot of calculations that go into working out whether SEO is profitable or not. 

There’s the software that you’re using, or there’s the fact that you need to use yet more developers’ time, or the fact that it actually costs money to host a web page and to have people visit that web page. Even if they’re organic traffic, it still costs the company money because of all the servers and various other things that go into hosting a website and receiving traffic. 

And when you start to understand all of that, you can start to factor those kind of calculations into your own return on investment calculations, so when you go to your chief marketing officer and you have three seconds to communicate your plan before they’re back to their emails, you can talk directly to them about a very genuine return on investment for the idea that you’re proposing. And that’s going to have a lot more traction with them because you’re speaking their language and you’re meeting the goals that they’ve already set for themselves for the rest of the year. 

Example 2: Reducing technical debt

Or you’re talking to your chief technical officer, and she says that she’s been tasked with reducing technical debt across the website. And you think, great, technical SEO is all about making our websites more efficient. Of course, she’ll understand that our goal is essentially her goal. 

That is, until you find out that when she’s talking about reducing technical debt, she’s talking about a full systems re-architecture. The core components in your website are going to get recoded to fix all of the years of just patching and trying to fix bugs that’s been going on. 

And so, actually, rather than talking to her about the value of canonical tags and the work that you’ve got proposed for the next quarter, you instead start having conversations with her about, “Sounds like what you’re doing might actually be a bit of a website migration. My SEO team is going to be really well-positioned to support you in that. And during that process, we’re going to be fitting in the canonical tag and hreflang tag and all the other technical SEO stuff that we wanted to get fixed.” 

So rather than saying, “I hear you. You’ve got some kind of technical debt thing going on. Look at my technical debt project,” you’re fully understanding what it is that they are trying to achieve within their role as chief technical officer. And you’re finding ways to directly support that whilst bringing in some of the initiatives and ideas that you also want to see completed.

So by doing that, rather than you having two disparate goals, you’re actually unifying those goals and making it so much simpler for your chief technical officer to understand (a) what you’re talking about, and (b) how it benefits her and her team.

So that’s step one. 

Step 2: Change the language and metrics you use to talk to your stakeholders

Step two. That’s all about the language, more specifically about the metrics that you’re using, as well as the words that you’re using. Make sure that when you are talking to these senior stakeholders about SEO things, you’re using the language that they are familiar with. 

It is quite difficult to learn another language, as I have found out through my copious attempts at trying to use a certain app to learn French. So it’s much, much simpler if you just speak to them in their language. So the words that they’re using every day to communicate with their stakeholders. 

Reduce crawl issues > reduce crawl costs

So you want to talk to your chief technical officer about reducing crawl issues, but they’re not really in the Googlebot universe. They don’t really care about crawl budget that much. What they actually care about is genuine budget. 

So if you talk to them instead about reducing crawling costs, suddenly they see the impacts that your crawl budget work is going to have on their actual budget, and they can much better align what you’re trying to achieve to their ultimate goals, because it’s going to reduce the costs on their team. 

Fix technical SEO issues > reduce technical debt

When you’re talking about fixing technical SEO issues, talk about how that reduces their technical debt. Because, again, our technical debt and their technical debt might not quite be the same thing. So you really need to understand that and start talking in the language and processes that they do. 

Rankings data > Market penetration

Or maybe you want to talk to your chief marketing officer about how well your recent SEO work has done, and you use rankings as an example of that. But they don’t fully understand what that means for them because, yes, it means more visibility. But? Instead, talk about how rankings directly relate to market penetration. So if some new internationalization work you’ve done recently has helped you get rankings in a new country, talk to them about that, but definitely explain how that is essentially showing market penetration for that country. Because chances are that’s going to be something they’re more interested in than simply rankings. 

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Goals > Qualified lead generation

Or goals. You spent forever setting those up in Google Analytics 4 just for your chief marketing officer to not fully understand what it is that you’re trying to show through those goals because they don’t really care about your microtransactions and clicks, and things that are happening on the website. Instead, they are much more concerned with marketing qualified leads or sales qualified leads, things that they understand, the metrics they probably set up and defined. 

So rather than talking about goal completions on a website, talk about how that directly relates to their leads process or how much money you think that your SEO work has directly generated through these leads. Bring it back to metrics that they genuinely understand and perhaps are using every day.

New or returning visitor data > churn rate

New versus returning visitors, again, another metric that will be in your analytics reports. But does it mean anything to your senior stakeholders? Do you need to talk about churn rate instead, perhaps? Or do you need to learn what churn rate is first and then talk about churn rate with them? 

Branded keywords > Brand sentiment and share of voice

Branded keywords. Again, keywords are useful as an indicator, but they probably aren’t very useful for those very senior stakeholders. They’re going to be caring a lot more about things like brand sentiment and share of voice. 

So you see you take your metrics and you couple them with their metrics, and suddenly you’re going to have a lot smoother conversation. Because instead of expecting them to speak SEO, you’re speaking their language and showing them how that relates to SEO. 

Why is this important?

Sounds simple, right? But actually, it’s quite a lot of work. Is it worth it? Well, I think so. 

Aligns goals

When you manage to get this right, you are doing things like aligning your goals. By aligning your goals, you’re showing how the work that you are doing is directly impacting the work that they are doing and benefits them overall. That means it’s going to be a lot, lot easier for them to understand and recognize the benefits of doing this work, supporting it, perhaps resourcing it.  

Provides outcome certainty

Provides certainty to the outcomes. This means that if you say this piece of work will generate X, they fully understand what X is, and actually, X is a metric they are measuring themselves. And therefore, it directly rolls up into the goals and KPIs that they are looking at.  

But when it comes to the end-of-year report and they’re reading it, they fully understand what’s been happening, and the outcome is what they’re expecting. Because if it’s not, you could have done a lot of work, reported on the wrong metrics, and it seemed like it wasn’t successful when, in fact, it was. 

Encourages buy-in

It also encourages buy-in. You’ll find that it’s a lot easier to get a yes with budget proposals or resource proposals if you can show how your work directly links to their goals and the things that they’re looking to do, how you taking a portion of their budget away is essentially providing dividends for them. 

Continues engagement

And also, it continues engagement. If you are using this language in your reports every month, you’re going to continue to find that your stakeholders understand it. It resonates with them. They fully understand the peaks and the troughs because it’s metrics that they are used to using. 

All of this really helps you because it just smooths conversations. It makes them go a lot easier.  

So instead of having to try to think about the SEO metrics you’re using or the terms you’re using, they can just park all of that brainpower and instead can focus on how to give you a promotion and how to give you more money. 

Thanks so much for listening.