enterprise seo & stakeholder buy-in floq.co Boostroas SEO Weekly 2 Dec 2022

My Country, Anna Price Petyarre. We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.

floq.co what’s what the foundations 01 stakeholder buy-in 02 talking to developers 03 proof of concept 04 impact of changes 05

The hardest thing about enterprise SEO isn’t scale (IMO) but rather mindset and politics.

Mindset because you need understand 2 things: 1. You are a cog in a much larger machine. 2. Changing the title tag on one page is really unlikely to move the needle.

Politics because people are hard, particularly if they feel you’re threatening their job or questioning their authority.

Very rarely is anything a “simple ask” or “low hanging fruit.”

Stakeholder buy in

9 Know what your new initiative / financial request process is – and follow it! Know when you need to have proposals ready by to plan for the new year. Particularly if you’re looking for a big budget or a lot of people… Process, process, process

Getting stakeholder buy in essentially requires some light stalking.

Because in order to get someone to buy in, you need to understand what matters to them.

Get to know them as a person.

Hint: even when you start the conversation, it’s never about you.

● Sarcasm and humour rarely land the way you want them to, particularly in virtual or asynchronous channels ● Speak to their level (technically and metaphorically) ● Sometimes the best way to build a relationship is to ask for a small favour A few reminders about communication in general

In house process • How do they report on value internally (ROAS, revenue, profit, CLTV) • Does the legal team have a cheatsheet? • What are the brand dos and don'ts? • What are your release cycles, financial years? How do they determine priority of work? • How do things get approved in and out of budget cycles? Stakeholder preferences • Follow them on all public socials (Linkedin, Twitter) • Lean into the banter • Ask questions, rather than make statements • Ask them what they care about (no reason to hide it, it benefits you both if you have a clear understanding) • Get to know their team, including PA’s • How do they talk — do they focus on competitors, the customer, or their revenue? Business Cases • Brand team (brand and customer sentiment) • Customer service team (NPS and direct customer feedback) • Paid media team (revenue impact) • Competitors • Industry studies and stats from Google and others getting to know you…

Educate yourself about empathy, understand how people (including yourself) make decisions, what we’re motivated by, and the different ways people communicate, because we aren’t rational creatures, as much as we say we are

When you’re looking to get buy in from anyone, you’re essentially tapping into and manipulating behavioral science to understand what types of levers to pull, and then learning the specific triggers for each person. TL;DR we fool ourselves into thinking we make decisions rationally. We make them emotionally, then justify them rationally. Use this to create an emotional, aspirational story when looking for buy in as well a providing the numbers to later justify it.

what should be BAU is an easy shortcut to build trust Do what you said you’d do by the time you said you’d do it. Respect their time, because it’s probably more valuable than yours.

Talk to their level, and never punch down. Everyone has valuable feedback or knowledge that has the potential to make or break your partnership. The SEO world is full of weird and often childish jargon (link juice, anyone?). Speak in the most straightforward language possible and use metaphors if needed — some common ones include: ● Going to the doctor ● Going to the gym ● Moving house What’s your favourite metaphor?

Having relatable metaphors everyone can immediately understand is clutch, this is mine.

• Ask to be introduced to as many people as possible. • Run training sessions — at least for those teams that will be executing your work — as a mandatory. • Present and talk up SEO at all-hands meetings for your department, showcases, and QBR’s. • Use the rule of three: if by the third email you still aren’t getting the information you want, pick up the phone. • Be useful outside your specific job description how do I expand my stakeholder circle

treat the time you have with them as a rare and valuable thing Be Organised Before you get in touch with any stakeholder You should make their lives easy by: • Respect your stakeholder’s time − For emails, get to the core of your ask quickly and be clear about what you want from them, and how it’ll help them − For meetings, set a clear agenda, and use the shortest amount of time possible, 15 mins is ideal • Have a business case ready if you’re going to be asking them to do something (and as their agency, you probably should be, otherwise, why are you getting in touch?) • Remind yourself of what you’re getting in touch with them about so it’s fresh • If you can’t explain it in 30 seconds using simple language, revisit and make sure you can • Be clear on how it’ll benefit them 1 Know Your Stuff 2

and make sure you’re fully engaged when working with them. Anticipate Before you get in touch with any stakeholder You should make their lives easy by: • Come up with answers to their likely objections • Know their KPI’s and what matters to them • Have data on hand to reinforce your business case • “Strong convictions loosely held” • Be fully present in the moment and genuinely take on any feedback they offer • Re-educate gently if it’s needed – ask questions like “Where did you hear that?” 3 Listen Actively 4

24 How to educate gently 1:1 or small department sessions • Helpful for stakeholders you’ll be working with more frequently • Allows for more specific questions and less public embarrassment • Takes more of your time New starter or onboarding packs • Get them while they’re fresh • Relatively low effort, potentially high impact • Asynchronous communication can be impersonal Create advocates • Creates a network of SEO advocates you’ve trained and who understand the benefit for their department • Have “office hours” for questions • You can’t directly control what they say, where or how they say it

my not so secret weapon in getting buy in Proof of concepts. Why? Because it’s a low stakes ask. “Hey, I’ve got this idea and all it’ll take is one writer and your third most popular product to prove. Should take 6 weeks to validate my hypothesis.” is an easier as than “Hey, let's spend 100K on this wild idea that may or may not work”. Think iteratively rather than waterfall.

you aren’t there to decide on the solution. you’re there to clearly articulate the problem and what a good solution should look like. when you’re talking to developers

talking to devs using their language: JIRA tickets & user stories As an {role}, we want to do {goal} in order to {benefit}.

find patterns where you can find patterns and articulate scale ● Most of the time different subdomains or subdirectories will be owned by different teams ● Break up the issue into business lines ● Learn regex, tap someone who knows regex or include it as acceptance criteria for your JIRA ticket

technical issues at scale (bloat, cannibalisation, crawled not indexed) ● Assume it’ll be difficult to get access to crawl logs ● Develop a hypothesis to fix the problem (e.g. The index is bloated because the old version of the site never got fully redirected) ● Justify a proof of concept through case studies or competitor research ● Get a pre-yes from developers ● Write a JIRA ticket geared towards shared understanding

there’s no one way to analyse at scale. I relied on time, proof of concepts and screaming frog. learning python is useful, as is sql.

python https://www.seopythonistas.com/hamlets-contributions

Never underestimate the impact of humility, asking for help to scope a build, being curious, and asking questions.

Proof of concepts & impact

DEV COORDINATION Consulted with dev team about how best to put content in the product hierarchy Technical buy-in TARGETED TOPICS Reviewed topic intent, historical opportunity and vendor positioning to write Matching keyword intent LIMITED WRITERS With limited capacity from the editorial team, it got done through the willingness to do the writing myself. JFDI challenger telco builds longtail through product content incremental increase in purchase when content was a part of the journey 21% DUE DILIGENCE Worked closely with legal team to understand their red flags in order to write and publish content smoothly. Understanding risk

industry case studies & stats https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/mobile-page-speed-ne w-industry-benchmarks/ https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUMqH8IyzOMBc_Z8i-S 6-tVJ

competitor research ● Use a combination of The Wayback Machine and third party tools (ahrefs, SEMrush) to line up changes in the market to changes in strategy as evidenced by changes to the website ● Use your own historical clients in the industry ● Be a forensic investigator, be curious and follow the white rabbit ● Know when your client has changed their market proposition ● Use Google Trends to gauge brand interest ● If you can, get ahold of their brand sentiment research, including historicals

Back yourself when you go into business impact conversations, a few guidelines ● Have multiple sources for an impact estimate, one of which is ideally a proof of concept. ● Proof of concepts are a shortcut to trust. This happened to you on your website. Not a competitor. Not a random talking head saying so. ● K.I.S.S. (Keep it Stupid Simple) ● Always bring it back to what’s important to the business: the strategic focus, how they talk about value. ● Build the emotion in the pre-yes and present both emotion & logic in the justification.

38 5 takeaways It’s never about you. 1 Learn as much as you can about what makes your main stakeholder and the business tick. 2 Make no assumptions, always validate before presenting something back to the team as an opportunity. 3 Strip out the jargon and speak in the business’ language. 4 Proof of concepts may just be your new BFF. 5

about amanda email: amanda@floq.co SEO Consultant Seasoned Has worked in the SEO industry since 2010, across agency, in-house enterprise and start-up, in the US and AU. Process-compliant Working enterprise for a highly regulated industry means there’s clear understanding of different compliance processes Data- & product-driven Built, led and executed on the Data & Analytics product offering. Including executing CRO. Solution-focused There’s no assumption the solution I’m putting forward is the best one. The goal is to find the workable middle ground. 01 02 03 04

questions? Amanda King 0403815087 amanda@floq.co