Get buy-in from your stakeholders despite the changing SERP

Sally says: “Achieve stakeholder buy-in in an ever-changing landscape, especially with the introduction of SGE looming on the horizon.

Stakeholders do not understand SGE at all. There's a lot of good material out there from other SEOs in the field – Aleyda Solis being one of them. She's published loads of material about SGE and the effect that it's likely to have on the SEO landscape and how we do SEO as a business, especially in the e-commerce space.

Obviously, this is an update that's going to reach different countries at different times so it might not be affecting your marketplace yet. It might be something that you're preparing for the future. It might only be affecting a small proportion of your marketplace as it is still in beta. It's not part of every user experience yet.

Use a data-first approach, keep your ear close to the ground, and be prepared for the changes that are coming. Try and keep plan B in your pocket. For example, SGE might give a product listing page (PLP) experience, and many marketplaces and e-commerce sites are actually noindexing those PDPs for canonicalization and cannibalisation issues. You might need to think about how you can change that experience without losing too much value in your site.

You may need to think about how to add first-hand experience to your site. Is your authorship tagging up to best practice? Do you have enough information about your authors? Are you tagging authors with experience within your business or copywriters who may not be an authority on the subject that your site is talking about? EEAT is an integral part of this as well.”

What stakeholders are you talking about here?

“It may be marketing directors who are leading a big team in-house. On the agency side, it might be your clients, and getting them to think about how things are going to change and how you’re going to mitigate losing any search volume within that process. If you do lose search to the site, how are you going to gain that back? What metrics are you going to look at? What do you need to measure to ensure that you learn something from that process?

Until we really get a tangible sense of how our content performs with SGE, it might be hard to gain search volume back through the SGE itself. There might be certain searches that are absolutely perfect for you to gain it back, with clear ways to make quick wins, or it might be looking at other parts of the site and how you can gain it back there.

It might mean optimizing for new features or adding new features to your site such as video or user-generated content, which is performing really well in the last update.”

Are stakeholders feeling that the overall value of SEO is diminishing?

“From my experience, they're not at the stage where they can, or are ready to, make that decision. It's something that they don't want to think about right now.

There are a lot of priorities that they want to think about first. It's about the traffic they're getting to the site right now, rather than traffic they're getting to the site six months or a year down the line – when some of these effects trickle through.

As SEOs, we know that what's happening in a year's time is very much going to impact what we're doing now. We're not working for tomorrow’s deliverables. We're working for the results a year from now.”

Are many SEOs changing their focus toward optimizing for Google Perspectives?

“Not just yet. It's a very experimental space at the moment. However, I'm certainly seeing SEOs being more conscious of first-hand experience on-site and how they communicate that to Google.”

How does an SEO agency make a client feel more comfortable about the future?

“If you're an agency and you're concerned about the unknown effect this could have on SEO performance in the future, it might be safe to place your eggs in more baskets. You could become more involved in other aspects of the business to mitigate the risk of losing a client.

However, you can reassure the client that this isn't going to be a massive loss for them and there are other ways to achieve their goals, even if they might see a dip while you’re analysing them.

Build that relationship before you begin any of these discussions. Make sure you've proven that you can get the results and you are an authority in SEO before even broaching the subject of SGE and the effect it might have on their particular niche.”

How can SEOs get better at communicating using traditional business metrics?

“SEO KPIs and our usual metrics – how many clicks we're getting, what position we are, or what share of voice we have – have a place, but they don't deliver on the end objectives for a business. In the last year, as things have got tougher economically, businesses have turned to the bottom line and they're asking SEOs to deliver on that, whether it's in-house or agency-side. From the outset, start with what impact your efforts are going to have on them as a business, rather than what position it’s going to get, or how many clicks you are going to get. If it's not turning into sales or conversions, it really isn't doing anything for the business anyway.”

Should SEOs make their stakeholders aware of the longer sales cycle and the value of traditional SEO metrics?

“Absolutely, SEOs should push back on being judged solely on their impact on the bottom line, to a degree. However, you shouldn’t ignore the fact that your client or your business wants to look at the bottom line.

Embrace that, but also embrace the fact that SEO does play a larger role in the sales funnel. Be clear with your communication, including in all your reporting. Segment your keyword data, segment your clicks, impressions and sessions, and paint a really clear picture of what stage those users are in and where SEO plays a role in that acquisition.”

Should SEOs host regular training sessions for their stakeholders and other people within the business on things like SGE and potential changes to the SERP?

“Definitely. It's something I do quite regularly. I like to hold workshops or afternoon learning sessions within the business to help them understand an aspect of SEO, especially if it's a big move for the business.

You want them to understand what's coming when there's a big update looming. That could be SGE, or it could be the new Core Web Vitals metric INP, which is coming in 2024.”

How else has the SERP changed significantly over the last few months?

“We've seen FAQs completely stripped from most businesses, and this happens quite a lot. If you look over the last 4/5 years, we've seen FAQs completely stripped from the SERP on a regular basis – and then People Also Ask coming in and FAQs being taken out. We've definitely seen this happen in some specific SERPs but not in others.

Years ago, we had one SERP for all, and now we've got very different SERPs depending on the type of search that you're putting in.

There have been a lot of changes to the SERP recently, and it might not necessarily be new features appearing for every search you're making. It might be a local search which has far more advertising than it did last year, or it might be the fact that we're not seeing as many SERP features as we used to in certain spaces.”

Can SEOs do anything to future-proof their content, so it will still be featured highly and consumed by the right target audience when the SERP changes?

“If you've got good content that is comprehensive and actually talks to the user, matching user intent, it's highly likely that it's still going to perform well. In terms of the SERP features, I always optimize for as many as are appropriate for the type of content that I'm writing.

SERPs do change quite a lot. If you optimize for as many appropriate features as possible, it doesn't matter if one feature falls out and you don’t see it for a few months. You will gain a different SERP feature in that place, and you’ll regain the original SERP feature when it comes back in 3-6 months’ time.

If you’re targeting a keyword phrase for a piece of content, always look at the SERP before you start creating.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop doing tasks for the sake of doing tasks. Start thinking about what your result-driven tasks are, what's really going to drive impact, and where your highest impact lies.

Prioritisation is key. Make sure that you're focusing on the areas that are going to get you the most bang for your buck and avoid doing a lot of admin tasks for the sake of your processes.

Knowing which tasks to prioritise really depends on what type of task it is. From a technical perspective, it's always down to visibility and accessibility. You want to make sure that search engines can crawl your site and crawl the important pages so they’re getting indexed, and it's meeting user intent. Prioritise from the very first step – from indexing down to users actually interacting with your site.”

Sally Raymer is an SEO Consultant at SEO in Motion, and you can find her over at SEOinMotion.com.