Brands rely on SEO best practices, endless checklists of issues to fix, and have access to more data and insights than ever before. Yet, many still fail to gain stakeholder buy-in and unlock the growth their competitors are achieving.

Over the last 15 years, working with +6,000 enterprise brands, we have identified what holds companies back and what helps them succeed when it comes to SEO. 

In this webinar, seoClarity's Chris Sachs, Vice President of Client Success and Jeff Smith, VP of Product, Technical, share insights from the top SEOs at the world’s largest traffic-driving websites. They reveal the strategy for growth through reliance on data, instead of blindly following best-practices and guesswork. 

Webinar Overview

Table of Contents:

1. Stop Rolling the Dice When It Comes to SEO
2. How to Set Up Hypotheses, Build Business Cases and Win Stakeholder Buy-in
3. Building 5 Example Hypotheses and Business Cases: 
4. Use Cases and Challenges from SEOs
5. Strategy for Success
6. The Secret of Enterprise SEOs:
7. Unlock Your Growth in 30 Days with seoClarity:
8. Free Framework Download

Stop Rolling The Dice When It Comes to SEO

• SEOs often rely on best practices and checklists for their SEO “strategy” because it’s difficult to prioritize.
  • Data is endless or sometimes there isn't enough data to make a decision.
• If you don’t focus on the “WHY” behind tasks, it’s impossible to get stakeholder buy-in, you lose credibility, you can’t prioritize and will not have insights for future projects.

How to Set Up Hypotheses, Build Business Cases and Win Stakeholder Buy-in

• Successful enterprise SEOs use data to prioritize, build business cases and gain buy-in.
• The framework for building a hypothesis requires the SEO tactic that will change an SEO metric, which, in turn, will change a business metric, all backed up by data to provide the reasons why.
• This hypothesis framework helps SEOs think with a “testing mindset” that build business cases based on data.
• For any SEO tactic you’re considering implementing:
  1. Build a hypothesis based on your site’s data,
  2. Show the business impact,
  3. Test on a small dataset (if you can),
  4. Gain stakeholder buy-in
  5. Implement.

5 Example Hypotheses and Business Cases 

Use the table of contents here to jump to any of the use cases featured in the webinar:

1. Adding / Optimizing H1 Tags
2. Title Optimization and CTR
3. Increasing Content Length
4. URLs to the Sitemap
5. Inventory on Page Impacts Indexation

Hypothesis 1: Adding / optimizing H1 tags to pages will improve rankings and impressions and grow traffic because it adds relevance and context to the pages.

Calculate estimated business impact of optimized H1s based on data over assumptions:

Hypothesis 2: Pages with optimized titles will have higher CTR and drive more traffic because they grab attention and match keyword intent.

Use data to decide whether to invest in optimizing titles

Compare which tactic to invest in based on business impact:

Hypothesis 3: Increasing content length on pages will improve rankings and increase impressions to drive more traffic because of deeper authoritative content.

Use current data for determining optimal content length and apply a test to selected URLs

Hypothesis 4: Adding URLs to the sitemap will improve indexation to drive more traffic because more frequent & efficient crawls keep index freshness.

Use data to break through the developer queue by aligning technical issues to traffic & revenue impact.

Hypothesis 5: Inventory on pages for eCommerce or travel sites impacts indexation and rankings which improves traffic because of data richness and fresh content.

Rely on data to understand multiple stakeholders’ competing goals and choose the best inventory quantity option based on most important metrics.

Based on data from hypotheses, determine the order of prioritization for SEO projects/tasks or to go ahead with them at all.

Strategy for Success

For any given SEO team with a list of potential projects always:

• Answer the “why this matters” question.
• Determine what’s causing the issue/the thing you want to improve.
• Prioritize based on your site’s data and the estimated business impact.
• Develop a business case to get stakeholder buy-in.

The Secret of Enterprise SEOs

The secret of successful enterprise SEO teams is that they prioritize and build business cases and hypotheses based on data, they test and validate their hypotheses and they gain stakeholder buy-in by demonstrating their projects’ impact for growth.

Unlock Your Growth in 30 Days with seoClarity

At seoClarity we have built a platform that highlights the most impactful optimizations, to move from random fixes and best practice lists to focused, effective strategies that deliver results. Aggregate, align, and surface insights from every piece of your SEO data or metric available – all in a single view. Sign up for a demo today.

Bonus! The Clarity Framework

Download this free template for creating your own SEO hypotheses and business cases!