How to Synchronize SEO with Your Client’s Business Goals?

SEO is a key element in many online businesses’ strategies. Nevertheless, establishing a fruitful cooperation between SEO professionals and a given company is often a challenge. Usually, the main obstacle is the lack of mutual understanding.

SEO specialists frequently operate with a specific jargon related to search engine algorithms and search engine optimization, which may be hard to understand for those outside this field. On the other hand, the representatives of various businesses often view SEO professionals as all-round experts. As a result, they don’t always have a precise understanding of what they are actually purchasing and how SEO activities will contribute to the development of their companies.

To overcome this barrier, it is crucial to set SEO in a broader business context. The collaboration between an SEO professional and a business should be based on a shared understanding of the organization’s goals and strategies. SEO specialists should be actively involved in the business processes and learn about the marketing objectives, products/services, target audiences and the competitors of a given company. On the other hand, business representatives should openly state their expectations, goals, and success metrics.

Moving beyond traditional roles and integrating SEO activities into a company’s overall strategy can yield significant results, increasing online visibility and translating into achieving an organization’s objectives. So, how to synchronize SEO efforts with your client’s business goals? This is the topic that I want to bring up here ?

Integrating SEO efforts into the broader business context is a key step on the road to success. Especially, since online competitiveness is growing continually. Synchronizing SEO activities with the client’s business strategy can bring many benefits. I might not reinvent the wheel since SEO specialists are well acquainted with the effects of such efforts, however there are quite a few differences that are important from a business perspective.

SEO that is aligned with business goals increases organic traffic and the visibility of the site in search result. This, in turn, builds opportunities for conversions. After all, this is the primary goal of SEO.

Yet, there’s one big BUT.

Very often SEO goes its own way, building visibility and traffic to those webpages that are irrelevant from the business point of view. Artificially pumping up visibility with a blog that only circulates around the important topics is an ideal example of that. Such SEO activities do not translate into reaching the real business goals.

This is mostly related to creating content and linkbuilding. If the content is relevant to the target audience, it not only affects the position in search results, but also helps build brand authority.

I must, however, point out that these SEO efforts are often mistaken with E-PR. Sure, they are related, but they have their separate goals. Thus, it’s worth working with PR while being on the SEO side, so that it can use your SEO efforts and enrich them with a touch of PR. Only such integration comes with the best results.

SEO efforts that are well integrated with business goals can increase conversions and sales. Optimizing a page for specific key phrases that are related to a client’s products or services can result in more users that are ready to buy.

As a result, SEO ceases to be just a tool for generating traffic, and becomes a key part of the sales process. Here, we also have the case of SEO development, which is heading towards SXO – a combination of SEO and UX. Thanks to SEO experts specializing in this approach, it became possible to focus even more on the sales results.

Here, of course, one could once again argue that it’s nothing revealing. However, returning to the aforementioned big BUT – if we focus on optimizing the wrong areas and pages, conversions and sales will be put aside. And yet, they are most important from the business point of view.

Targeting your SEO efforts properly lets you avoid wasting resources on the wrong courses of action. Focusing on the right key phrases, services or products that are most profitable for the business, helps avoid wasting both money and time.

The cooperation between the SEO team and other marketing teams (content marketing, Google Ads or Social Media)enables the creation of consistent and effective campaigns. These activities reinforce each other, creating a synergistic effect that translates into achieved business goals. This is often overlooked, and even dare I say, these teams often compete heavily with each one another and instead of working together, try to get each other’s slice of the cake.

Aligning goals for SEO with client’s business goals enables more precise monitoring and analysis of the results. It makes it possible to measure the effectiveness in the context of realistic objectives, which makes it easier to make decisions about further actions.

So, we know why synchronization is important and what effects it can have on the business, but the most important thing in all of this is to understand the client’s business goals.

Let’s start with the fact that understanding the business goals of your SEO clients should take place at every stage of cooperation, and even before it. The initial identification of the objectives should take place as early as at the service sales stage (and even at the lead stage!), so that the offered prepared could be tailored for each particular client’s needs.

The, already at the customer service stage, there are several steps and activities that will help you build a deeper understanding of the client’s business goals. You can distinguish 5 key steps at which you can extract information about your client’s objectives:

1. Lead – the process of understanding a client’s business goals can begin already when your clients are still potential ones (leads). Many SEO professionals and agencies use contact form on their websites to let the clients submit their needs and objectives. This is the first opportunity to get an initial understanding of your client’s business goals.
2. Sales call – when a sales call is established, it is important to ask pertinent questions about the client’s business goals. This is the moment when you can gain a deeper insight into what the client wants to achieve with SEO.
3. Brief – once a client is acquired, it is essential to prepare a detailed brief. This document should include all key information about the client’s business goals.
4. Kick-off call – at this stage, it’s worth having a more detailed conversation, in which you can once again confront your SEO action plan with your client’s business goals. A joint discussion can reveal possible misunderstandings and allows you to adjust your strategy even further.
5. Update milestones – when conducting SEO activities, it’s key to have regular updates and communicate with the client. Presenting achievements in the context of the established goals helps monitor progress and adjust the strategy as needed.

The lead itself is already the first intersection at which SEO and your client’s business meet. However, is it the time to acquire as much information as possible? Well, there are different approaches to this.

One of them is creating an elaborate contact form, which will immediately require the potential client to think about their purpose and why they need SEO in the first place. Its main downside is that a potential client may quickly become discouraged by the amount of information required and give up on completing the form. Nonetheless, a lot of information can be extracted from such a form, information that will help further in the process. Additionally, such forms can protect you from leads that you don’t want to handle, for instance due to a budget that does not correlate with your expectations.

An example of such an elaborate form can be found on the website of SEOGroup:

Source: Seogroup.eu

Personally, I’m a fan of “establishing a relationship quickly” – the bond that can turn a lead into a real conversion is better established during a phone or video call, or a meeting. A client will rarely be willing to provide so much information about their business without having built trust in your company yet. For SEO companies, this is also a moment when the potential client may lose interest in their services.

Source: Delante.co

An analysis that allows us to thoroughly understand the client’s business goals should be our starting point. Do they care most about increasing sales? Maybe they want to build brand recognition and authority? Or perhaps their goal is to expand their customer base and attract new customers?

Knowing the main goals, we can proceed to determine what to prioritize and select key success indicators that we will monitor during our SEO services. This will allow us to plan our efforts in a way that will enable us to achieve client’s business goals as efficiently as possible and have insight into whether we are doing it right.

We will start developing our SEO strategy with keyword analysis. The techniques that can be used here vary; however, it’s important to use this analysis to find those key phrases that align with our client’s business goals and that will generate traffic that will bring their business closer to achieving these objectives.

A content optimization and creating plan, based on the previously chosen key phrases, should also be well-thought-out, so that it is aligned with what the client wants to achieve; in the case of content marketing, the content should be created for the most valuable pages. We don’t want to focus on attracting traffic that has no chance of helping the client achieve their goals.

The same goes for off-site strategies. Link-building should be conducted in such a way that it both increases the visibility and authority of the whole website, while helping the client increase conversions and sales, gain new customers and so on – depending on what the goals are.

Finally, the technical optimizations should also be aligned with your client’s goals. Loading speed, responsiveness, URL structure – all these elements of technical SEO might coincide with specific client goals as well.

I have already mentioned establishing success metrics. Here, we need to underline what you should be monitoring to ensure that your SEO efforts are in line with your client’s business goals. These include:

• SERP positions,
• website traffic,
• conversion rates…

and more. All such parameters will enable you to measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.

Of course, these should be monitored regularly to keep track of the results and progress of your efforts, and to identify areas for further optimization, if necessary. Trend analysis might also prove helpful.

Regular reporting and presentation of the results are also crucial. An SEO report should be easily accessible – after all, the client will mostly be interested in the data that shows how SEO brings their business closer to achieving their goals, rather than dry statistics or a list of performed actions.

Regularity is important when discussing the performance, but so is clear, open communication. It’s important that both parties know the full range of actions being performed on the site, and why they are happening.

This way, you will learn the client’s opinion and gather valuable feedback – again, this will help you adjust your SEO further, to truly meet your client’s business goals.

The most common challenge is likely to be beating your client’s competitors in search results. There are many ways in which you can outperform them; however, it is important to take the right course of action based on your client’s specific business goals.

SEO specialists must also keep an eye on the ever-changing search engine algorithms, and so adjust their actions on the go. Therefore, when adjusting SEO strategies to your client’s goals, you must remember that when an algorithm update happens, your main priority should be maintaining high visibility of your client’s page. Otherwise, it might be difficult to achieve other objectives.

The budget might also prove to be yet another challenge. In some cases, it will be quite limited. At those times, you need to create a strategy that will optimize the costs and maximize the effectiveness of your SEO efforts, while achieving the goals set by the client and getting the most of it.

Synchronizing SEO and a client’s business goals requires a comprehensive, holistic approach. What depends on it are:

• the SEO strategy that you will create,
• the success indicators and metrics that you will monitor,
• the way in which you will communicate with the client,
• the approach to challenges and obstacles that you will need to tackle or overcome.

Remember – in order to correlate SEO and business goals, you need to focus on cooperation and communication between the SEO specialist and the client. Regular, open communication is what will allow you to get to know the customer’s needs as thoroughly as possible and adjust your strategies and actions accordingly.

Contact us! We will create an SEO strategy for your business that is fully in synch with your goals!