Category: Articles

HOW TO CREATE CONSISTENT RESULTS COMING OUT OF THE HOLIDAY SEASON

LION stands for Leaders In Our Niche, and we are a team of seasoned and passionate eCommerce marketing specialists driven by performance and focused on providing an exceptional client experience.

We’ll be sharing practical tips that you can take away and immediately apply. We want you to be able to get consistent results coming out of the holiday season! 

2021 was a unique year for businesses – retail sales were crashing before picking up steam this October, and the economy was in decline up until that point. This sudden reversal in buying behaviour and business trends highlight the importance of identifying potential areas of growth and capitalizing on opportunities this 2022.

So, how do you do this? When conducting an annual performance review we look at overall performance across five key metrics (per channel): Sessions, Conversion Rate, Transactions, Average Transaction Value, and Revenue.

Why these metrics? Because you can simplify the formula for generating revenue to this equation:

Sessions x Conversion Rate x Average Transaction Value = Revenue

Improve the performance of a single metric, and you improve your overall revenue by the same amount.

To start increasing your revenue, the first step would be to conduct a channel analysis. This is where you compare the annual performance of each channel, with the goal of identifying the percentage of users driven to a channel versus the percentage of revenue generated for each channel.

The results should be similar for all the channels – any significant differences may indicate opportunities for optimization. For example, a high number of sessions with low revenue generated would indicate a problem with conversion, or a potential issue with tracking.

Channel Performance Average Month (Past 12)

In the example we used, we combined the Organic and Paid channels to measure the “Search” Channel. Why? Because users don’t choose what type of search they do – they just “search”.

You then measure the performance for the past 12 months in order to get a picture of what the average month looks like, and once calculated, there are 2 ways to proceed:

Conducting a Month on Month Analysis

This is done by comparing the performance of each month vs. the average month, with the goal of identifying the cause for the significant differences in traffic or revenue.

By extracting this data, this can be presented in ways that can be easier to understand, or with complex data sets to further identify potential issues.

Benchmarking vs competitors using other important eCommerce Metrics

It is important to measure how your business is performing, but if you really want to keep improving, you should look at your competitors’ data, and compare them with yours in these metrics:

New Vs Repeat Visitors / Revenue

This is used to identify the quality of traffic and any potential issues with conversion.

Repeat Purchase Rate

Can be used to measure traffic, but is mainly used to determine consumer loyalty and the quality of post-purchase marketing and services.

Days / Sessions to Purchase

The number of days or sessions it takes before a consumer makes their first purchase. This is useful for planning out re-engagement opportunities or remarketing campaigns.

Path to Purchase

Most consumers don’t purchase during their first visit to a site – they often visit multiple times prior to making their first purchase. This metric is useful for optimizing your campaigns and identifying the most effective platforms to reach your target customers.

Channel Efficiency

This is computed by getting your total online revenue divided by the amount spent on marketing that channel. The channels which have greater scores are deemed to be more efficient, and are useful for determining channel performance and which ones to spend more on.

Analysing your performance is important to continuous success in the eCommerce industry. This allows you to identify opportunities, optimize resource allocation, and steer your business towards success. 

Want to supercharge your business and implement a measurable strategy?

At LION Digital, we create analytics on a personal level called LION view – a dashboard that collects all your company data and makes your year-end performance review easier and much more comprehensive. This completely customisable, all-in-one and simple-to-use platform gives you an overview of eCommerce channels and metrics, Keywords rankings, Google Search Console data, our 90 day activity plan and your marketing calendar all in one convenient location.

Article by

Christopher Inch – Head of Strategy

Chris is a specialist in eCommerce with over 14 years of experience in Digital & eCommerce Strategy, including Search Marketing, Social Media, Email Marketing Automation and Web Development.

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Let’s face it, SEO is full of cryptic, unusual words and terms that might confuse anyone entering the field. But just like in any other fast-developing profession, in SEO it is important to communicate in the language of SEO Analysts. You don’t need to memorise the exhaustive list of all the field related words in one sitting though, for the beginning, it’s enough to know the very basics. Here’s our guide of the most common SEO words and terms to help you get started!

Advanced search operators –  additional features and commands that can be typed into the search bar to make the query more specific.

Anchor text – a piece of text that links to another page.

Backlinks (or “inbound links”) – links from one website page that point to another website page.

Black Hat SEO – SEO practices that violate Google’s guidelines.

Bots (also known as “crawlers” or “spiders”) – the program that crawls the Internet, finds the content and assesses its quality to place it on the search results.

Cache – a saved static version of a web page that helps to not access the website’s database for every query and thus avoids time-consuming operations.

Channel – different types of media and means to attract attention and traffic, such as organic search, email marketing, social media.

Cloaking – displaying content to search engine bots differently than to real users of the website.

Crawling – the process of finding pages on your website through search engine bots and processing them. It’s the first step in the process of your pages showing on the search engine results page.

Crawl budget – the number of pages a search engine bot will crawl on a website in a certain period of time.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) – a programming language for structuring the website mainly in terms of fonts, colours and layouts.

CTR (clickthrough rate) – the ratio of clicks on your ad to impressions the ad got. 

De-indexing – a page or group of pages being removed from the process of indexing.

DA (Domain Authority) – a ranking score that measures how relevant the domain is for a specific industry or subject area, typically seen in the Moz tool.

Duplicate Content – big pieces of content that are shared across different domains or different pages of a single domain. Having duplicate content is bad for the ranking of a website.

Engagement – a measure of searchers’ extent of interaction with a website from search results.

Featured snippets (often referred to as “Zero Position”) – informative answer boxes that appear at the very top of search results for some queries.

Google My Business listing – a way for the business’ potential customers to get all company contact info through a listing that appears at the top of Google results when a customer searches for business name or services catered by certain businesses.

Google Search Console – a program developed by Google that allows site owners to track how their website is doing in SERPs.

Hreflang – an HTML attribute that helps Google understand what the language of a website is so that a user finds the version of the website in his language.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) – the set of codes used to communicate how to display texts and images on a website.

Image Carousels – scrollable images that appear at the top of some SERPs.

Indexing – organising and storing content found during crawling.

Index Coverage report – a report that shows the indexation status of all the URLs on a website.

JavaScript – a programming language used for integrating complicated non-static elements to web pages.

KD (Keyword Difficulty) – an estimation (typically out of 100) of how hard it would be to rank high for a certain keyword.

Keyword stuffing – a black hat SEO practice that involves the overuse of important keywords in content and links to try and rank for these words.

Lazy Loading – a way of optimising a page load in such a way that the loading of certain parts of the page or objects are delayed until they’re actually needed.

Local pack – a listing of three local businesses that appear for local-intent searches, like the ones that typically include “near me” in the search query.

Long-tail keywords – keywords that contain more than three words and are longer and more specific than short keywords. For example, “cotton summer dresses UK buy online” as compared to short-tail “cotton summer dresses”.

Organic – placement in search results obtained without paid advertising.

Private Blog Network – This is an artificial way of creating content and websites to generate fake backlinks to trick Google. This is, unfortunately, a common practice by most agencies and link providers and can jeopardise revenue and rankings in the longterm

People Also Ask boxes – an element in some SERPs that shows questions related to the search query.

Pruning – is a process of taking down low-quality pages to improve the website’s overall quality.

Scroll depth – a way of measuring how far visitors scroll down the website page.

Search Volume – an estimation of how many times a keyword was searched during the last month.

Sitemap – a list of page URLs that exist on your website.

Personalisation – a search engine feature that customises the results a user gets for his query based on the location of the user and his previous search history.

Redirection – a way of sending search engines and users to a URL that is different from the one primarily requested.

Rendering – an automatic process of turning code into a viewable, usable website page. 

SERP features – search results that appear in a non-standard format. For example Zero Position, Image Carousel, People Also Ask, Adwords etc.

SERPs – short for “search engine results page” – the page with relevant info and links that appears as a response to the user’s query.

SSL certificate (SSL – Secure Sockets Layer) – a certificate that enables encrypted connection between a web browser and a web server. It makes online transactions more secure for customers.

User Intent – the kind of results on SERP users want or expect to see when typing their queries.

Webmaster guidelines – information provided by search engines like Google and Bing on how site owners can optimise their websites and create content that is found and indexed appropriately so that the content does well in search results.

White hat SEO – SEO practices that comply with Google’s guidelines.

Moving or migrating a site is an event that promises significant benefits in the long term and equally substantial troubles in the short term. While it is impossible to avoid the latter, there are ways to minimise risk. 

The site is a very fragile system, and changing or moving any part of it can significantly affect the structure of the site and its performance. But it is pretty common for those who make decisions about a site migration to underestimate the complexity of the work and the associated risks.

An example of how easy it is to underestimate a migration can be taken from one of our larger clients. The client had just engaged a developer to work internally to redesign and rebuild their website. The focus of the work was a simple template change to improve the UX and customer journey throughout the website. Our involvement in the project was kept brief, as the developer ensured the client that there would be no significant URL changes as part of the project.

Two weeks before launch, our team happened to ask for the staging site to check in on the progress, and we found that every category page URL had changed, including the placement within the site, causing some 100,000+ URLs to be affected. Luckily, our team was able to get the migration and web build back on track, ensuring that our client’s revenue and business is protected.  

If not discovered, this could have cost the client significantly, resulting in a potential loss of millions of dollars. Resolving this failure may have taken several months, while the business would have continued to lose organic revenue month on month until repaired. See below the keyword rankings of a past failed migration of a prospective client:

Web development and SEO migration are two different masteries and need to work hand in hand. SEO migration is the most common digital blind spot, needs to be taken seriously and requires the right team of specialists. 

When deployed correctly, a new website can be a great initiative and is an essential part of every online retailer’s digital journey. However, an incorrectly managed site migration often has disastrous consequences for immediate and long term financial performance and can set a business back years.

If you’re preparing to migrate, don’t get caught out and call us today. Let our specialised migration team help support your business through this challenging project.

Article by

Leonidas Comino – Founder & CEO

Leo is a, Deloitte award winning and Forbes published digital business builder with over a decade of success in the industry working with market-leading brands.

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People are looking for human connection, now more than ever. Being stuck at home, working from home, or just a little isolated due to the pandemic is a reality for most Australians right now. 

Brands that have used in-store experiences to create human connections in the past are now struggling to re-create the same dynamics through online purchases and interactions. 

On the upside, consumers are taking the time to open and read emails; both email engagement and performance are up to when people are stuck at home. This trend is independent of other channels, which may be down due to reduced search volume or increasing competition in paid media. 

“Consumers are taking the time to open more emails from brands. It makes sense, considering people have been spending more time at home and less time dealing with the normal hustle and bustle of daily life.” – Klaviyo.com

There’s also many first-time online shoppers who are not digitally savvy entering the market right now as their usual shopping habits have been disrupted. Personalisation and segmentation matter more than ever (i.e. we don’t want to spam our customers if they’re not engaging with our emails).  

Having the right content, for the right audience, at the right time is crucial to getting your message heard, understood and accepted. The number one reason people unsubscribe is that they receive “too many emails” 46% of people who unsubscribe put this as their reason. One reason this number exists is that many brands just email their whole list – all the time. While there’s a time and a place for this, the more personalised the communication, the better your human connection will be with your customer. Don’t fret, though, unless your unsubscribe rate is higher than 0.7%, you don’t need to be concerned. 

Not sure how you can create human connections in a digital world? Below are some practical tips that you can get started on right away. 

Replicate in-store experiences with virtual tours and consults

OneWorld Collection (we work with them) has the right idea, an upmarket furniture brand with eight stores in Australia. Since most of their customers are in metro areas affected by the pandemic, they’ve created a virtual consult where sales staff can be invited into the living rooms of their customers while still being able to demonstrate products on the showroom floor. They’ve used Calendly.com to schedule appointments to ensure all the customers can be seen and no one is waiting. 

Creating ways for customers to experience your product in new and unique ways is what will keep that human connection alive. 

Multi-channel communications with Gorgias

Let customers reach you however they want. Instagram comments, Facebook direct messages, email, live chat, SMS and any other form of communication you can think of. Gorgias can do it all. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to reach a brand that doesn’t leave another method of communication to reach them with. You may even convert more sales! I’ve personally been able to convert 25% of live chat inquiries into sales, working in an e-commerce team.

Reposition products in terms of value for their new routines

Since many lifestyle changes have had to be made for a lot of Australians, consumers don’t think about products and services in the same way they used to. Suppose you can reposition the way that your marketing; this will increase the connection between your brand and your customers. They’ll be saying to themselves, “they get me and the challenges I’m going through.”

This means for abandonment emails, include product comparisons, how-to-videos, helpful blog content or best practices in using your products. It will help the consumer realise how your product is uniquely positioned to support their new lifestyle. 

Pre-orders and back in stocks have also been one of the most successful email campaigns outside of sales or promotions in the pandemic. Don’t just limit these to auto-generated emails from your pre-order app or Klaviyo’s inbuilt back in stock. Use personalisation and customer behaviours to populate your emails with content that will be relevant and timely. 

Projects that you can do at home (or challenges to I imagine) have worked very well in creating connections with your audience. 

Tighten up your shipping notifications

Lastly, and probably most importantly – shipping notifications! Delays are inevitable while we’re all stuck at home, all shopping online. 

So, be especially clear and empathetic; people are stressed about their packages and where they’ll be, or if they’ll arrive in time. You can read more about Klaviyo’s recommended best practices for communicating shipping delays here. 

Not sure what Klaviyo is, or if it’s the right fit for your brand? Take a free trial via this link. 

Article by

Leonidas Comino – Founder & CEO

Leo is a, Deloitte award winning and Forbes published digital business builder with over a decade of success in the industry working with market-leading brands.

Like what we do? Come work with us

Adaptability and growth is part of LION’s DNA. LION Digital was officially launched in April 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic; this allowed us to build the business to solve today’s challenges. Over the last year, LION has created a unique agency model with a Global reach in response to the current business landscape. 

The model consists of five single channel-focused departments, such as SEO, SEM, Email, Social and Development.

Each is designated a Head of Department, a seasoned veteran with over a decade of eCommerce experience enabling LION to provide channel-specific, specialised services within a holistic digital marketing strategy. This structure and approach hyper accelerates success, generates optimal results and creates the best client experience.

Here are the main strengths of choosing LION Digital as your partner of choice during the pandemic and why we are the better choice as opposed to our competitors:

Our team is remote

This is a huge advantage when stacking us up against traditional digital marketing agencies; we are not prone to having our office shut down due to a sick team member which happened recently to a digital marketing agency in Melbourne where 40+ people were sent home. Or does your agency have a big offshore team in a European office, let’s say North Macedonia? The same concern applies there, but the risk of infection rate is higher in countries that have lower health regulations.  Our team members are decentralised eCommerce specialists from across the globe hired based on their experience, not location, so this risk does not affect us. We offer you the best of both worlds, Senior local Australian based team members leading the strategy and the client relationship who are supported by a global team that works round the clock. 

Decentralised from the beginning

Our processes and systems were chosen and developed for a remote working force, this is a major benefit to the success of our clients. Imagine you’ve built an agency for almost a decade, one that relies on your team coming into the office on a daily basis to function. This then forms the culture, processes, systems and methodologies that are all developed around a physical office. The team is hired for and accustomed to working and collaborating in a centralised environment. Many office workers do not have self-motivation and rely on the nature of the office-based work environment and their leaders to encourage performance and set the pace. Now, imagine that local element is removed; this is like removing the foundation of a building which causes significant efficiency deficits. This issue is not remedied easily because and the older the agency is the less agile they are and let’s face it, most people dislike change. Unfortunately, the loser is the client as their retainer charges remain the same and the output and results are less. LION Digital strives to hire self-motivated individuals who have clear expectations, responsibilities and result expectations set with them at the beginning of their employment and on each project. We use strategies and incentives like performance-based SEM services that have certain ROAS goals in a place where team members who work on the project are rewarded for performance, creating a win-win situation for the specialist, the agency and the client.

Elite tech stack

Not having the expense of an office has enabled us to invest heavily into the best technology stack in the market. From the best project management, CRM, accounting and marketing tools; we don’t hold back when it comes to investing in technology. Investing in good tech allows us to improve visibility across our entire operations, enabling us to scale up effectively and efficiently while supporting the needs of our growing clients. We spend more than $50,000 per year and have over 5 SEO systems that we subscribe to, and that’s only one digital channel. Our internal infrastructure is adept, allowing us to reduce risk, improve accountability and productivity to provide an unrivalled client service experience to better our rivals.

Agency scalability

Let’s face it, digital marketing is on every businesses lips who are (especially those who are late to the party) are throwing money at solving their customer acquisition problems. Most local agencies rely on the local digital marketing talent pool in Australia, which has all but dried up and now their hiring efforts have come to a grinding halt. Digital marketing resources are now scarce, and the market is screaming for more people; we sometimes have contractors asking for hourly rates in excess of $400 p/h which is ridiculous. LION is a global business and we hire based on talent and experience, not location. We are not affected by the same barriers as traditional agencies which means that we can still select the creme of the digital marketing community but on a global scale. Most traditional, local Australian digital marketing agencies are now at full capacity and cannot find staff, and yet they still continue to take on new clients. We know of situations in agencies where individuals are managing over 50 clients causing significant neglect and loss of investment. 

eCommerce specialisation

If your focus is eCommerce then your business does not have time to work with a generalist agency. Is your agency partner a true specialist? Try navigating to the client list or case studies section of their website and you will discover that most are not. Imagine the lack of efficiency of a digital marketing specialist from a general marketing agency who start the AM working on a client generating some insurance leads, then home loans and new house sales, and maybe some retail and eCommerce focused client in the afternoon. As you can imagine this jack of all trades approach does create hyper-accelerated growth. LION’s eCommerce brains trust and partner support network and industry knowledge is all eCommerce. This is why LION is exceptional at helping clients navigate the murky waters of digital marketing by also providing trusted advisor recommendations alongside our suite of services. 

It is crucial to understand that moving to a remote model from a traditional one would require a massive adaptation of the established processes. With such a challenging time for all of us, we are keen on embracing organisational agility and helping businesses not fall apart, develop eCommerce and bring the best to this world. We hope that the pivots we’re making now — will allow us to build our best ideas and provide better support for our clients, users, communities, partners, and customers. We will build a strong foundation and ensure responsible and sustainable growth in the long run.

Article by

Leonidas Comino – Founder & CEO

Leo is a, Deloitte award winning and Forbes published digital business builder with over a decade of success in the industry working with market-leading brands.

Like what we do? Come work with us

Do you know your competitors? What strategies are they using for success? The importance of being proactive rather than reactive is essential to your business success. The primary purpose is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your business in comparison to your competitors. You will recognise how you can enhance your business strategy.
In this article, we collected the best tools to analyse the activities of your competitors as well as your business improvements.

1.Google Mobile Speed Test

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-aunz/feature/testmysite/

What is it?

The Google Mobile Speed Testing tool allows you to measure the speed of your entire mobile site. The Site speed results are based on real-world data collected via the Chrome User Experience Report(CrUX). The CrUX report is updated monthly and is the source of both current and historical data.

It provides a rating for your site and identifies the monthly trend, whether improving or getting slower. What’s more, it offers a series of recommendations and allows you to compare your mobile site vs your competitors and even calculate the potential revenue generated if you were to improve the speed of your site.

What is it used for?

Website load speed is critically important to success, generally speaking, the faster the website, the better the user experience and conversion. This tool is valuable because it provides a list of recommendations for improving speed and can indicate the revenue impact of improving site speed based on real users data.

2.Builtwith

https://builtwith.com/

What is it?

BuiltWith is a great tool that allows anyone to analyse the technology that a website is built on; it provides detailed information via the website and has a handy Chrome extension. 

What is it used for?

Built with allows you to quickly analyse a competing website’s technology platform and identify essential tech like –

Content Management System

eCommerce Platform

Email Service

3.Semrush

https://www.semrush.com/

What is it?

SEMrush is a digital marketing tool that is predominantly focused on SEO.  

It includes a massive range of helpful information for analysing Organic Performance like Keyword Rankings, Keyword Research, Traffic Analytics and even Paid Advertising.

What is it best used for?

Semrush is best used to view the keyword ranking data – with a publicly available account; it is possible to see keyword rankings over time. The graph below shows the rankings for the top 20 keywords over the past two years. 

Note, if keyword rankings haven’t grown and a business is working with an SEO agency or consultant, this would indicate a problem.

4. Similarweb

https://www.similarweb.com/

What is it?

Another Digital Marketing tool that can be used to identify traffic volume per channel and compare versus competitors. To provide indicative data, this tool uses a combination of algorithmic data and cookies.

What is it used for?

While only an indication, this tool is best used to compare performance versus competitors. 

5.SEO Peek

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/seo-peek/lkkpfhgjmocgneajknedjhodkjkkclod?hl=en

What is it?

SEO Peak analyses a website page to display the Meta Information in a simple format. 

Meta Information is the code behind the page that can impact what keyword your page ranks for. It is used by Google (and other Search Engines) to understand what a page is about and how it should be categorised. It includes things like:

• Page Title 
• Meta Description 
• Meta Keywords 
• H1 Tags

What is it used for?

While Google is getting significantly better at understanding what content is on a page, providing Google with additional instructions through metadata is critically essential.

Pictured shows a brief example of a site that has limited metadata.

6.Google Trends

https://trends.google.com/trends

What is it?

Google Trends graphs the interest in a search term or topic over a period of time, which can be filtered by region. The graph below shows the Beauty topic in Australia over the last 5 years – the graph shows the topic is gradually becoming less popular.

As per Google – Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.

What is it used for?

Google Trends is an excellent tool for understanding how popular a topic is over a period of time. An increase in popularity would indicate more searches occurring. This is great for understanding seasonality and year on year growth.

Article by

Leonidas Comino – Founder & CEO

Leo is a, Deloitte award winning and Forbes published digital business builder with over a decade of success in the industry working with market-leading brands.

Like what we do? Come work with us

The main power of SEO is to drive traffic and sales to your company’s website. If you’re like many eCommerce online businesses, you may be having difficulty using your website to drive high-value sales to support the organisation’s growth. Your website should be the most powerful tool in your arsenal, but if you don’t implement the correct supporting strategies to generate the visibility the site needs, customers will never see it and instead turn to your competitors for their products.

SEO isn’t only about driving additional Organic visitors to a website, it’s also about improving the User Experience which can improve the results of every other channel. 

One example is that SEO may include the creation of additional Sub Category or Landing Pages to service new customer segments. These new pages can improve user metrics such as Pages Viewed & Time on Site but most importantly Conversion Rate which affects all traffic arriving on your page (and site).

For example, creating a page with content for your range of red midi dresses may help to rank in the organic results for the keyword “red midi dresses” but that same page can also serve as a landing page for campaigns featuring red midi dresses across Paid Ads, Email, Social and Display Ads.

How easy it would be to convince your management to invest in SEO if you’re working at a tech-forward company that understands the value and importance of SEO. But what if the situation is otherwise? Let’s discuss significant reasons for SEO investment and explain how SEO will bring your company higher revenue and help them reach their business goals.

Step 1. Show the outcome

Consider showing the intended result to the management. Make sure to connect your outcome to business goals.

Quote: “We can achieve [outcome] in [timeframe] by investing in SEO.”

Propose a specific outcome and don’t pull it out of thin air. It needs to be realistic. 

Step 2. Explain the logic

The next step would be explaining how and why you believe investing in SEO will lead to the proposed outcome.

Using data at this stage is very important.

If you work in eCommerce, you dig into your Google Ads account and find that you’re bidding on 25 keywords for $15,000 per month. Google Analytics shows you traffic that is responsible for $50,000 per month in sales. And if you can rank organically for these keywords with SEO, you can get that traffic for ‘free’.

Most web pages that rank organically in the top 10 for a popular keyword also rank for 100 of other keywords, which is better because ranking organically will probably drive more sales than ads.

Prepare the top-ranking page for each of your target keywords and check the Traffic Value metric. You could estimate the potential revenue increase from investing in SEO — then present that to your boss. 

Step 3. Create a roadmap

The success of the previous two steps brings you to this level – which is to understand how to achieve the promised results. It’s easy to get confused with SEO jargon here, so try to stay focused on the big picture.

Try to keep things simple. 

Communicate two things here:

1. What you’re going to do and why 
2. What will you need for resources (tools, employees, agencies)

Resources usually include freelancers, employees, freelancers or tools. In other words, anything you’ll need to execute your SEO plan.

It is also worth considering who will manage and train new employees and freelancers. Demonstrate to your management that you have everything planned and that your plan is realistic.

Step 4. Talk about the figures

There won’t be any green lights for a project that’s unlikely to generate a return on their investment. Now’s the time to answer that question.

It won’t be as effective to list a bunch of resources without showing their cost. The process is pretty straightforward: price up all the resources in a spreadsheet. SEO tools and software usually shows public pricing pages. Just pick one that’s right for you. 

It is a good start, but it still doesn’t tell your boss anything about ROI. Check on how to calculate your ROI.  It is harder to figure than it sounds because your SEO efforts will continue to develop after the initial project.

For example, the projected cost of your project is $6,000 per month. SEO takes time, and it is safer to be pessimistic and assume no revenue increase for the first six months before gradually increasing to $40,000 and eliminating the need for ad spend. Remember to use conservative numbers here. 

Step 5. Face myths and dispel them 

By this stage, you will probably still have a few questions and concerns. 

Let’s look at a few of them.

“Doesn’t SEO take forever?”

Surely, SEO does take time. Rankings don’t happen overnight, and anyone that says otherwise is likely selling “snake oil.” We all know that there’s no silver bullet in marketing, so explaining that something takes time isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

“What if we get a penalty from Google?”

Indeed, Google updates and penalties are scary and quite risky. But if you’re following “ethical” SEO best practices, manual penalties aren’t something you need to worry. Google does update its ranking algorithms multiple times a year. It can negatively impact your traffic, but they’re unlikely to wipe you out completely. 

What makes the organic channel so attractive is the ROI you can get from a much smaller investment than paid campaigns. In paid campaigns, the price is dictated by the competition, and you pay for each click to your website. It detracts from the amount of revenue you can make and often leads to spending much money per conversion.

Although SEO is a long-term investment, it is a strategy worth considering as if you are ranking very well for your set of chosen phrases, you can explore reducing specific campaign budgets as you will essentially be getting those clicks for free. The investment with us will be fixed, will not change, and will quite often be much lower than your AdWords spend, so investing in SEO is a fantastic way to generate conversions and a strategic way to save money from other channels. Check out our SEO services page.

Book your strategy session with LION to determine how to make your organisation one of the most recognisable in the organic space.