Proving SEO Structured Data Value: How To Convince Top Management

Table of contents:

1. Building SEO reputation and trust through observation, listening and documentation
2. Structured data value through data analytics and data dashboards
3. Prove structured data value through case studies and A/B testing experiments

Proving SEO structured data value to management can be hard if you know nothing about it. Especially if you are new to SEO and do not have a lot of experience, an established process, or a framework to follow along the way. We have all been there and we have seen it happen to our clients, their internal SEO teams or independent SEO consultants. It gets even more difficult when you do not have a data-driven strategy for how to approach it in a more structured way. That’s why we want to help you overcome this problem. So, let’s go!

Building SEO Reputation And Trust Through Observation, Listening And Documentation

First of all, it is OK to know that you are not the only one dealing with these issues. All SEOs struggle with proving value to top management for different reasons. However, the most important reason is that you may have just joined the company and have not yet earned a reputation among your colleagues. You need to find a way to prove your expertise and show your “I know what I am doing” attitude.

One way to do this is to observe. Familiarize yourself with your company’s values, business model, stakeholders and “influencers.” Understand the structure of your team and others. Listen to what people have to say, especially when it comes to marketing, user experience, sales departments and SEO teams in particular.

They are the ones who interact with users or potential customers on a daily basis – they know their pain points, desires, and user personas best. If you take a genuine interest in what problems other teams and customers are facing, you can accumulate a lot of knowledge, which will speed up the integration process.

Document what you have learned. There’s nothing like bringing structure to your learning process. Open your Confluence page or Google/Microsoft document and start jotting down your observations. Small to medium sized companies often struggle to establish a proper documentation process. So if you can document your findings in a way that everyone can understand in plain English, you’ll be ahead of the game.

Structured Data Value Through Data Analytics And Data Dashboards

At first you have no idea how Google Data Studio or Tableau works? We know from practice that many SEO professionals share your feelings! We do not know how many people can really claim to be masters of using Google Data Studio (just so you know, we struggle with it from time to time too) or mastering creating smart data visualizations and proving SEO structured data value.

Working with this type of software can be like dealing with a two-year-old child that you do not really know what they are trying to tell you, but they always want to be right somehow, so you have a sort of passive-aggressive relationship: You insist on “telling” the tool what kind of report you want, and unfortunately you’ll find that you do not get what you planned on the first try. Playing with the elements, styling and some nuances of UI in general can sometimes be complicated…

The secret is to not give up, be persistent and patient. These tools are designed to help you make sense of your data from multiple data sources. If you can not do it on your own, try contacting the engineers on your internal SEO team and asking for help there. You’ll find that with the right approach (e.g., “Hi, I’ll buy you a beer if you can help me with this”), they’ll actually be happy to help you out and give you something back. Just try it out for yourself – as long as you respect the engineers’ time and tasks, you’ll be fine.

We at WordLift, tend to plan for projects and tools that help us automate our work. That is why we developed the Google Data Studio Connector, which in a few steps makes it possible to collect data from different resources, blend them together, and as a result obtain reports that clearly show the value of entities. This tool has a double value: to understand how to improve the strategy you are following. So it has a double competitive advantage.

Stay genuinely interested and engaged. That will be your competitive advantage over the others. Management wants data-driven, sound strategies. So whenever you have the ability to quantify your efforts, you can be sure you are on the right track. Once you get it right, you’ll feel a sense of exhilaration when everything is going well and you’ll want to refine and improve even more. Do not give up💪

Prove Structured Data Value Through Case Studies And A/B Testing Experiments

The quickest way to prove SEO structured data value to top management is to find similar cases where other companies have used structured data (schema markup) to improve their SEO performance. Top management wants to see a comparison with the competition. So if you can prove that others are already using this as a competitive advantage, it will be easier to sell this to your top management.

If you want to learn more about the top 5 underutilized schema markups for e-commerce and classifieds websites, I recommend you read my article.

In any case, the fastest way to prove the value is to choose a concrete schema type, select your variant and control groups of URLs, run a test on a small sample of correctly selected pages, and analyze the result. This approach is even better than collecting case studies, because you directly conduct experiments and measure the results on your SEO platform. In other words, we know from practice that it’s better to collect first-hand data so you can say, “Hey, this works on our pages,” so we should implement it site-wide.

Free Demos And Trials

Sometimes it’s difficult to just observe or run A/B tests if the development team has not allocated you resources. In this case, it’s always a good approach to play with some product demos and product testing phases. You can use them to run initial tests, try out new features, and use that knowledge to strategize how to sell something internally. Most test phases are free. So take advantage of being able to play with a particular product before you actually buy it.