R.O.I. MEDIA

I was sitting in a new client meeting with the CEO of one of South Africa’s Top Property Groups, this was the first time I met the CEO and was previously dealing with other managers in the business. When they called me in for the meeting I wasn’t sure what the agenda was. To be safe I emailed ahead of time and asked the CEO’s PA if anything needed to be prepared for the meeting. She replied that we didn’t need to prepare anything and that it was an informal chat with the CEO.

At first I thought, let me fish a little deeper but I knew that results were looking good so I decided: what’s the worst that could happen? I hate going unarmed to meetings so I decided to lower the risk slightly and get the team to put together a complete campaign report to date. As the campaign had only been running three months, it was pretty much in the infancy stages but results were already on the UP!

So I arrived at the meeting, not nervous but more excited to hear what the CEO wanted to chat about. We got through the introductions and he shot straight to the chase: “If we are paying the development company money to manage our website, why do we need you to increase our website traffic? What are you guys actually doing each month?”

After being in the industry for some time, I have really come to love these questions as I have learnt how to respond in a pretty effective manner. It is even more challenging when you are asked that question by a 50+ year old CEO who just started using the internet. The reality is that the generations of our parents and grandparents are different to ours; when they pay for a service they expect to immediately see the direct result. SEO doesn’t deliver direct results; it takes months and even years to see the right returns from your marketing spend. However, when you do see positive returns it can often be exponential and far greater than the returns received from traditional forms of marketing.

When speaking to the ‘older’ generation, the great challenge is explaining a highly technical service in a non-technical manner. In other words, you need to break it down into a language that your grandparents can understand. The best way to do this is by using an analogy that you are comfortable with.

From experience, simply presenting the results of the campaign doesn’t solve the problem. Not every client will be ‘sold’ on the results alone. They want to understand what you are doing, how much time is being allocated to these tasks and why they are being done. This is more than reasonable, as I would want to know the same thing if I was in their position.

In order to get off the right footing I decided to start by presenting the results – Organic traffic was up by 75%, keyword growth about the same and over the three months we grew their monthly enquiries by almost a 100%. This site had been in existence for many years, so we weren’t starting from a zero base; i.e. the results were pretty incredible. As expected, the CEO then said: “ok this is great to see and we are happy with the results but I need to know what is it you are actually doing on a monthly basis so that I can justify this spend to the rest of the board.”

Firstly, let me say that Search Engine Optimisation is not a great definition. We don’t optimise the search engines – that is what Google and Bing do. We optimise websites so that they are able to achieve rankings in the search engines. A far better definition for what we do would be ‘Website Optimisation’.

Here is one of my favourite analogies when selling or explaining SEO. If I say to a CEO, SEO is the combination of onsite SEO, offsite SEO and a few other online variables do you think they will understand what I am saying? Yet, if I say that onsite SEO can be compared to the early stages of a presidential election and offsite SEO compares to the latter stages, then a clearer picture starts to appear.

I then go further and elaborate…Your website is the presidential candidate running for office and at the beginning of the campaign (onsite SEO), we need to define what message he or she wants to get across to the public. We therefore ensure that your website has all the right content on it so that people understand the message being communicated. In an age in which there is serious competition in the market, we must bolster the readability of your website so that it stands out from the rest of the crowd. This entails optimising your website so that the search engines pick up the right information in the most effective manner. Once we have achieved this, we have laid down a solid foundation for the rest of the campaign.

Step 2: make sure the candidate wins the election. How? Get as many votes as possible. As your website is simply one candidate in a million, we need other sites to ‘vote’ for your website so that it becomes more popular and moves all the way up to the top of the search engines.

How do we get votes? We tell all the other relevant and credible websites out there that your website will be of interest to them as it contains good quality content/products/services, and will be of value to their readers. Once these sites see the value and realise that it will be worthwhile for their readers to visit your site, they will link to your website. Each link is therefore seen as a vote and the search engines count the links coming into to your site as votes. These days the quality of the links are far more important than the quantity and you therefore want popular websites to link to you as their popularity will rub off.

Once you have translated SEO into an easily understandable story, you can get into the details of what is being delivered on a monthly basis. Show all the set of tasks that are involved in the setup and monthly process. You can even show how many hours are assigned to link building and report to clients on how links get built each month. This will quickly translate into a happier client as they can see the physical work that has been invested towards their SEO Campaign.