Empathy And Trust Are Key

Getting a buy-in for projects at work or from an organization it can be difficult, but for SEO projects it can be even more challenging because it is not always easy to connect SEO work with results.

To improve purchasing, looking for soft skills outside of SEO can make all the difference.

If we know our soft skills and what our strengths are, then we can understand others and be able to communicate with them better. This then helps when we want to get support for projects, including SEO.

In this article, we go through some key areas to address to help you gain buy-in from your company, such as communication and the ability to foster trust.

Soft skills

We spend a lot of time improving our technical SEO or working on keyword research and reporting, especially when getting familiar with Google Analytics 4 (GA4), but how much time do we spend improving our soft skills? Do we know what our strengths are?

When working in SEO and with a wider team, soft skills become important.

Soft skillsalso called interpersonal skills, they are not technical in nature and affect your performance not only at work but also in your personal life.

They include how to manage your time, communicate with othersresolving conflicts and listening to others, to name a few.

The CliftonStrength it helps individuals focus on what they are naturally good at. It helps assess your soft skills, including how empathetic you are, which is a great leadership and team player skill.

Empathy

Tom Critchlow said a buy-in was needed executive empathy. He explained that “executive presence is the art of seeing problems from someone else’s point of view.”

We need to get stakeholders, such as the CEO or CFO, you want to worry about SEO and how it can help them achieve their goals and wider business goals.

Empathy is putting yourself in another person’s shoes and seeing it from their point of view. We should apply this not only to the main stakeholders, but also to the development team or design team and others who will become your biggest allies.

Confidence

Empathy is a key part of the trust triangle, and it includes both authenticity and logic.

It takes a long time to build trust, and when it is lost, it can often be traced back to the breakdown of one of them.

Your colleagues and key stakeholders will trust you when:

• They feel that you care about them, which is empathy.
• They believe in your competence, which is the logic (and why it is important to clearly show the results of SEO work)
• They believe they are interacting with the real you, which is authenticity.

Reporting

If we want stakeholders to allocate more of their SEO budget next quarter or even next year, review previous reports that you and your team have worked on and shared with them throughout the year.

What reports have they read? Which ones did they ignore?

Make sure you get feedback monthly or at least quarterly on what it reports stakeholders find useful and which metrics they want to see more in the future.

Nobody wants to see pages of reports – stakeholders are busy people. You should focus on reporting on the most important KPIs for them.

Some people with minimal time to fully understand SEO (such as CEOs and CFOs) may think that organic traffic is a given and less investment does not necessarily mean less traffic.

Therefore, it is always important to show what the SEO team has done and provide clear results.

For example, tell them “we created a content strategy and built a blog on X topics, and this led to an X% increase in traffic and revenue”. Showing the direct impact of SEO helps justify the SEO team and their work.

KISS

KISS stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. Although this framework is used mainly in the design space, it can be applied to the wider business as well.

It was used in many companieslike Apple with the iPhone. It’s hard to keep something focused and simple.

We can also apply the KISS principle to SEO and gain support by removing the jargon that comes with it – just focusing on what the impact will be.

For example, instead of saying we have a lot 404 status codes when a product is out of stock, show interested parties that product pages return a blank page. There is nothing on the page that would keep the user there.

Show traffic to some of these key product pages, and when they’re out of stock, calculate how much revenue is lost.

KISS returns to the reporting element. Keep reports simple and show only what stakeholders think is important. Don’t include tracking for hundreds of keywords if they aren’t driving clicks.

Focus on top terms that generate clicks and impressions in Google Search Console. Use events in GA4 to show how many conversions your website and pages have generated.

An open line of communication

Make sure you talk to stakeholders throughout the year, not just when reports are due or when you need more budget.

Share with them news such as Google updates or any positive effect of SEO work that has meant an increase in revenue and conversions.

Google updates are still important to share if your site is affected. It is better for interested parties to find out about these updates from the SEO team than from the customer service team or non-SEOs.

Other key elements to share are some insights from conferences. What initiatives have they taken that have been successful? Were some of them the same initiatives that you wanted to implement, but there was resistance?

Is there a company newsletter you can pitch or a marketing newsletter you can contribute to? Share them with stakeholders.

If you or your team write for third-party sites, please share these articles internally.

Alternatively, if there was a webinar the SEO team participated in that got a lot of views and likes, send this to interested parties.

Integrate SEO in-house

Make SEO everyone’s responsibility.

Emphasize in meetings or conversations with stakeholders that a site migration, site homepage change, or content management system (CMS) change is not just the job of the SEO team. It is the responsibility of the entire company.

For example, a website migration cannot be done on a Friday night, or the home page should not change drastically during the sales period.

SEO should never be considered an add-on and should be an integral part of a marketing strategy.

Unfortunately, in many organizations, the SEO strategy can be outside of the product and outside of the marketing strategy. Create allies within the marketing and product team. Show them how SEO affects their KPIs and how SEO can help improve them.

Making allies goes back to working on your soft skills.

We can still have those “water cooler moments” or informal conversations even if we’re working remotely. Ask them how they spent the weekend, what their hobbies are, if they have family nearby.

In these informal conversations, you can find out their pain points. What are they struggling with? How can SEO help them?

When you start building your KPIs together and helping each other, it builds teamwork beyond your immediate team and helps build more trust.

Competitor analysis

Few are happy when their direct competitors beat them in revenue and traffic.

Competitor or market analysis it always helps to show some of what others are doing. We can see traffic estimates, the paid ads they’re showing, and the terms they’re ranking for using third-party tools.

However, context should not be underestimated. It’s possible that the drop in traffic and revenue you’re experiencing on your site isn’t just about your site. Some industries may have experienced a decline, while others have seen growth.

For example, during COVID-19 travel and hospitality saw a decline, while Zoom and online apps and games saw sales rise.

Now it’s getting harder to track customers, because of AI. And this will not be easier next year because the search landscape will continue to change. So always remember to include industry context when reporting on your website’s performanceMr.

Show what others are doing in the market, including new initiatives. This will help build and maintain the trust of key stakeholders.

Mastery of soft skills in securing SEO buy-in

Soft skills should never be underestimated when trying to get support for projects. Understand the needs of your stakeholders and the wider team.

Spend time building a relationship with them and learning about their challenges and how the SEO and their team can work together to achieve more than if each worked independently.

However, if you find yourself in a position where no one is paying attention to SEO, plan to start testing different elements of what they want to change on the website, for example, changing categories or changing the homepage.

Use a tool like SEO testing which allows you to test different URLs; you can do split testing and time based testing. Once you have the data, present it to stakeholders to show them the results.

SEO is a tough industry to get buy-in and harder to get a budget approved for. But work on your soft skills – empathy and trust – to build a team that believes in SEO and supports you 100%.

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