This article is from our Agency Growth Handbook—a collection of guides created to help local SEO agencies grow and succeed. It is chapter two of ‘Part 3: Retention & Growth’.
Whether you’re launching a local SEO strategy for a new client or planning the next quarter for a long-term term one, stakeholder buy-in is essential. For most marketing professionals, at some point in your career, you’ll need to present to executives to gain support for your initiatives.
This is especially important when finalizing marketing budgets or securing resources from other teams within a company. This could be prioritizing web tickets for technical updates or ensuring that content writers will be available to help with on-site optimizations. Gaining support beyond your direct client contact and team, including company executives, is key when SEO efforts require cross-functional collaboration and is a general occurrence when planning programs.
Stakeholder approval is often necessary for timelines, budgets, and resource allocation. These conversations typically happen during quarterly brand reviews (QBRs), annual planning sessions or strategy check-ins focused on “what’s next” or program progress against planned goals. Since time is limited, success depends on effectively communicating SEO’s value, defining key success metrics, and aligning SEO with the company’s broader goals.
Why Getting Buy-In Is a Key Part of the Process
How can you prepare for a meeting with leadership? It starts with understanding the importance of the conversation ahead. Remember, SEO is an investment for a business that takes resources, time, and often cross-team collaboration to be effective. You may have already worked diligently with your direct client team to put together an SEO strategy focused on meeting all of the established KPIs.
Getting buy-in from key team leaders can be beneficial in a couple of ways:
- Resource allocation: This helps ensure that SEO initiatives have the proper resources for projects, such as developers, content writers, or analytics support.
- Prioritizing updates: This can ensure that SEO-related tasks are prioritized against other marketing initiatives and into workflows such as IT or development backlogs. Often, this can lead to faster implementation of items identified as having a high impact on SEO.
- Cross-team collaboration: Support from leadership can ensure that the SEO team is brought in during projects or planning conversations that might impact organic results, such as making changes to the navigation, content updates, web planning, or UX testing.
Understanding Your Audience
When putting together a pitch or presentation, you must tailor your message to the people you are presenting to. This boils down to understanding what stakeholders and executives care about, often high-level business outcomes, and how SEO contributes to them. Some questions that might come up regarding SEO might include:
- How does the ROI of your SEO program compare to other marketing channels?
- Is organic traffic translating into leads or long-term customers?
- How do we adapt to changes such as Google algorithm updates, LLMs, or AI?
- What risks are there for not investing in SEO?
- Is SEO contributing to revenue growth?
| Know Your Audience | |
|---|---|
| Stakeholders/Executives | Marketing Contact/Team |
| Focus on business growth, ROI, and revenue impact. | Focus on traffic, conversions, engagement, and brand visibility. |
| Want to see financial impact, competitive advantage, and cost savings. | Interested in tactical execution, content strategy, and campaign performance. |
| Worry about budget and resource allocation. | Worry about content production, technical implementation, and daily SEO tasks. |
| Need reporting on business impact, revenue attribution, and competitor benchmarking. | Need reporting on keyword rankings, organic traffic trends, and engagement metrics. |
| Prefer high-level, outcome-focused and data-driven communication. | Prefer detailed, tactical, and process-oriented communication. |
Keep in mind that executives don’t need SEO deep dives. Your main point of contact needs to understand those types of in-the-weeds details.
Instead, when tailoring presentations for executives and stakeholders, remember that they want clear insights on how SEO will help to reach business goals and support growth. Yes, the two audiences are different, making it important to know your audience so that you can anticipate questions and touch on important points in front of them.
Stakeholders & Executives vs. Marketing Teams
For example, stakeholders and executives care about:
- Staying aligned with the market, beating competitors
- Company growth
- Revenue growth
- Efficiency and resource allocation
Defining What Success Looks Like
As a marketer, defining success helps ensure that strategies align with business goals, providing clear metrics to measure performance and ROI. Defining success can help gain stakeholder support by showing how initiatives align with overall company objectives. This sets expectations for the SEO program and shows how projects align to reach the set goals.
Defining success starts with identifying some of the key metrics that your team will report on. These can include metrics that are reported monthly to the marketing team and KPIs that can relate to the larger goals set out by the company.
For example, some typical key metrics of an SEO program can include:
- Organic traffic: Sessions, new users, clicks, website visits
- Engagement metrics: Pages per session, engagement rate, engaged sessions, GBP profile actions
- Leads/Conversions: Form fills, free trials, click-to-calls, survey completions, newsletter sign-ups
- Visibility: Impressions, overall keyword rankings, captured SERP features, profile views
Examples of items that may be called out in a presentation to show the scale of projects, but not used as performance measurements, include:
- Number of pages that were optimized or updated.
- Number of net new content written and pushed live.
- Number of web tickets created and resolved.
- Number of broken links fixed on the website.
Understanding Company Goals and Key Objectives
Company goals and key objectives are typically going to be tied to growth, revenue, maximizing ROI, market share, and edging out competition. Depending on your business, this can include driving more website traffic to a specific site section, creating an expansion plan to help with business growth in new markets, or driving more sales/conversions for a specific product or service.
Examples of some company goals can include:
- Increasing online sales for X product by 10% this year.
- Increase the number of returning customers.
- Opening new locations and increasing visibility in those markets.
- Increase web traffic by X% this year.
Aligning SEO Goals With Company Goals
Once you understand the company goals, it’s important to show how organic efforts can help reach those goals. Tying SEO goals directly to revenue growth and key business objectives can help show the impact on the company’s bottom line, which in turn can make it easier to get buy-in and resources.
Example Goal: Growth In New Markets
The company plans to open up new locations in a market where a top competitor already has a footprint. With this expansion, the company’s goal is to grow business visibility, reach new audiences, increase market share by cutting into competitor’s share, and drive more traffic to the website.
To achieve this goal, the SEO team plans a couple of key initiatives:
- Creating and optimizing local listings such as Google Business Profile to secure top positions in the local pack, grow localized keyword rankings, drive engagement to profiles, and attract branded and non-branded search traffic.
- Conducting a competitor backlink audit and targeted acquisition strategy will help establish local authority, increase brand visibility where competitors are already listed, and drive referral traffic from local sources.
- Working with web and content teams to develop optimized local landing pages with strong call-to-actions can improve organic rankings, drive additional traffic, and generate leads through on-site form fills.
These initiatives work together to strengthen the company’s local presence in the market, compete effectively, and drive business growth.
Building The Case For SEO
To start the conversation around SEO, there needs to be a clear understanding of what SEO is—and what SEO isn’t. It is critical to explain its role in the marketing mix and how investing in SEO can drive more traffic, capture different audiences within the customer journey, reach new users, increase brand visibility, and support business growth.
Another key point is that, unlike other marketing channels, such as paid, SEO is a long-term strategy and may take time to see the full impact of efforts. Setting these expectations upfront helps navigate discussions around performance impact and timelines.
When building your case for SEO, it’s important to touch on a few key items:
- Define value and business impact by demonstrating how SEO supports company goals.
- Present a high-level SEO strategy or roadmap focusing on main initiatives and how each project ties back to established company goals.
- Focus on the big picture rather than getting lost in tactical details.
- Communicate ROI by outlining expected outcomes, explaining KPIs, and showing how success will be measured.
- Be transparent about the resources and budget required for specific initiatives, clearly explaining why they are necessary and how they will be used. Executives will want to understand the rationale behind these allocations.
- Example: You need content writers to assist with updating on-site content for product pages. This should improve keyword rankings for a specific product to help drive more traffic to pages and reach those ready-to-purchase audiences. Learn more about this in Melissa Popp’s guide to mastering content creation for client success.
- Set a project timeline, ensuring you cover everything from planning to execution.
Client Relationships & Partnerships
Before preparing to present strategies and goals to executives and stakeholders, ensure you’re fully aligned with the marketing team that you’re directly working with. This is the team you’re directly working with to solve their problems and achieve the goals you’ve set out together. They should be aligned on upcoming initiatives and serve as your partners and/or advocates during the conversation with larger teams.
Whether it’s a newly signed client or one you’ve worked with for years, data can support an SEO strategy. Highlighting past success—whether with the specific client or when implementing a similar strategy—can help show opportunities and ease doubts. This could include successful past initiatives within your SEO program or a case study highlighting effective tactics for a similar client. A proven track record of success and a strong client relationship built on trusted recommendations help establish credibility and reinforce the effectiveness of your approach.
Getting Ready For Your Next Presentation
Building a strong case for SEO is essential to securing the resources and support needed to reach goals and drive meaningful business impact. Gaining stakeholder buy-in ensures alignment with company goals, helps with implementation efforts, and fosters cross-team collaboration, which can drive long-term success for an SEO program.
When planning your next presentation to executives and stakeholders, remember the audience, what they care most about, how your SEO strategy aligns with company goals for the year, and the effort required to reach those goals. When executives understand the value of SEO, the team can be better positioned to executive strategies, adapt to the changing search landscape, and sustain growth in competitive markets.
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