Here’s a sentence that some folks out of the know may laugh at: working in SEO requires some serious diplomatic skills. It’s true!
A decade of twists, turns, and algorithmic acrobatics has taught me that SEO isn’t just about crafting compelling content. It’s about walking a tightrope suspended between the demands of stakeholders, each with their own unique priorities and expectations.
From steering the ship through choppy algorithm updates to harmonizing branding desires with technical realities, the journey has been both challenging and enlightening.
Join me as we unravel the layers of SEO diplomacy and uncover the secrets that seasoned professionals use to navigate these treacherous waters.
Table of Contents
- Understanding Conflicting Stakeholder Priorities
- Strategies for Managing Conflicting Priorities
- A Diplomatic SEO is a Successful SEO
Understanding Conflicting Stakeholder Priorities
If you’re going to understand conflicting stakeholder priorities, the first step is to understand and identify what a stakeholder is.
Stakeholders are essentially anybody that hold a stake in the work you’re doing. The people that care about and/or could be impacted by what it is you do. They can be clients, your broader marketing team, developers, leadership, and more.
Because the scope of who could be considered a stakeholder is so wide, it’s not unusual for the goals of these stakeholders to be equally wide.
A developer may be more focused on making sure that additional code doesn’t need to be deployed for a certain initiative that may break existing code.
A leader may be worried about the overall aesthetic of something that’s been produced, and how it may be perceived.
Other marketers may have strict legal guidance that needs to be followed, which may not necessarily match keyword volume.
All of these things and more can throw some wrenches into a thoughtful SEO plan of action. So how do you balance these conflicting needs and priorities?
Strategies for Managing Conflicting Priorities
Stakeholder priorities conflicting with SEO or marketing goals isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. It can be a pain to wrangle sometimes, but handling it is doable!
Balance Short-Term Wins with Long-Term Strategy
SEO is, nine times out of ten, a practice that absolutely requires patience. Page one rankings don’t (usually) happen overnight, and most of us can spot the dodgy agencies promising results quickly with a roll of our eyes because we know better.
Just because you know that though doesn’t mean a stakeholder will.
Because SEO tends to be so slow, it’s your responsibility to do your best to balance short-term wins with long-term strategy.
You may have a great plan that’s projected to 3x traffic over the next year, but a stakeholder wants to know what wins you can pull off this quarter. This is where it’s up to you to show up at the table with things you can do for immediate wins.
Some examples may be:
- Rewriting/optimizing a piece of high-visibility content
- Improving technical SEO factors that increase site performance
- Adding and/or improving linking throughout the site
While these things won’t typically result in immediate traffic increases, they do result in immediate perceptible differences. Stakeholders can clearly look at a before and after and know that something was done.
If you explain the value of content optimizations, technical SEO and site performance, and the need for strong internal linking, these should be pretty obvious easy wins.
Show them off, and in the meantime, keep working on the long-term goal you’ve set for yourself. Advocate for strategies that satisfy short-term stakeholder demands but also contribute to sustained growth over time.
Influence through Data Storytelling
One of my favorite things to do as a marketing professional is put together a story with data.
Spreadsheets full of data may not look like much of a story to the casual observer, but with a little experience, that data presents a tale; you just need to put it together first.
Let’s take a look at a common scenario: you need to tell a stakeholder that organic traffic is down. Nobody enjoys needing to report a decline.
Before reporting the news, take a look at the data. Maybe…
- Organic traffic is down, but rankings are up, which means search volume has decreased
- Organic traffic is down, but it’s up year-over-year, which means you’ve still made progress
- Organic traffic is down, but the period you’re looking at covers a holiday – of course organic traffic would be down!
Always find the why.
Not only will it teach you to be a better marketer, but it’ll help you to better present your findings to the people that care.
A stakeholder might not understand the metrics you’re looking at like you do, but they’ll understand the story you tell explaining them.
Create a narrative. When you’re faced with conflicting priorities, presenting data in a way that tells a persuasive story can help stakeholders see the bigger picture. These data-driven narratives that highlight the potential impact of different choices give you an opportunity to guide stakeholders toward decisions that align with overall SEO objectives.
It’s hard to argue with objective data. Use that to your advantage whenever possible.
Set Clear Expectations
One of the most common sources of stakeholder frustration is unclear expectations, and that will always be on the shoulders of the subject matter expert.
Maybe they thought that it would be reasonable to rank on the first page in a week.
Maybe they thought a new product page would perform organically for keywords that don’t appear on the page.
How could they know otherwise, outside of previous experience?
As the subject matter expert, it’s your responsibility to make sure that all expectations are clearly set from the onset – or during – a project. The more that you can establish earlier, the easier time you’ll have.
Diplomacy thrives on transparency and clear communication. When stakeholder priorities clash, setting realistic expectations becomes paramount.
By openly discussing what can be achieved within certain timeframes and resource constraints, you get ahead of any potential disappointment and create a more collaborative environment from the start.
Not only will this approach help alleviate frustrations, but it’ll also position you as a trusted advisor that understands and respects stakeholder needs – that’s absolutely a win-win from the long-term perspective.
Create the Infrastructure for Feedback
Providing SEO as a service is best accomplished when you’ve got a clear direction to set out on from the beginning; unfortunately, that’s usually a luxury most people don’t have.
When that happens, the next best thing is an active mechanism to receive feedback.
This doesn’t have to be a complicated idea! Some opportunities to do exactly that may include:
- A project kickoff meeting to make sure everyone’s in alignment
- A mid- or end-point meeting to tease results and make sure direction still fits
- Sharing of creative to solicit opportunities to improve
- Post-project surveys
It doesn’t really matter how you go about gathering feedback; the important thing here is making sure you’re creating a culture of collaboration and encouraging it. Asking for feedback shows stakeholders that you value their opinions, which helps the working relationship overall.
It can also help you better anticipate their needs or wants for the next project you work together on.
Focus on the User Experience
Even in the face of conflicting priorities between yourself and a stakeholder, one thing will always be true: you both care about the user experience.
If you’re stuck on a particular point and trying to find a way around it, zoom out a bit and focus on what would be best for the user. Not only does that present a pretty compelling argument for any involved stakeholders, but it’s also one of the main points of doing the work you do.
The best news is, generally speaking, improvements that are better for your users will be the best ones for your SEO too!
Align the team on the user experience and you’ll quickly find it’s the common thread that ties conflicting priorities together. This approach turns the user into the ultimate priority, helping to bridge gaps between stakeholders’ objectives.
A Diplomatic SEO is a Successful SEO
SEOs have a number of things working for them; they’ve got access and insight into all sorts of data that can help other teams take their priorities to the next level, they have both macro and micro views of the user experience, and they’re experts in recognizing patterns and behavior.
On the other hand, it’s not unusual for stakeholders to not quite understand their role, or to have different priorities altogether.
This is where diplomacy comes in.
An SEO that knows how to navigate the murky waters of conflicting priorities knows how to get crucial stakeholders on their side, keep them there, and ultimately set the business (and future projects) up for success in the future.
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