The Commercial Case For SEO: Introducing Named Project Workflows

This article is kindly contributed by StudioSpace agency, BuiltVisible

Organisations everywhere are facing broad challenges which impact their bottom line.

Competitive markets, rising costs and shrinking profits all put pressure on senior leadership to prioritise revenue-generating workstreams. Be they internal initiatives or marketing tactics. Typically, this means an over-reliance on paid performance channels which provide immediate results and the neglect of organic channels which can take some time to prove their worth, but which provide a cost-efficient long-term solution to rising CPAs.

As a direct result of the pressure businesses are facing more broadly, we’ve seen an increasing number of in-house marketers subsequently struggle to execute their carefully considered (and paid for) SEO strategies. Reduced headcounts mean limitations on development resource and increasingly distracting strategic initiatives (like the incorporation of AI into organisational workflows) can mean important organic workstreams sit unimplemented – long after they were originally relevant.

With that in mind, we’re today announcing a change in the way we design and deliver workstreams for our clients.

Our goal in developing these changes has been to reframe SEO from a series of tasks into strategic initiatives that drive real business growth, in language the whole organisation can understand. We’ve already seen success with a select number of clients and now intend to roll this initiative out to all our client base, over the coming months and into 2025.

Named Project Workflows
Outside SEO or digital marketing teams, the tactics we use – like keyword research or technical audits – aren’t often understood or fully trusted, leading to scepticism among executives essential for supporting SEO initiatives. This approach of communicating granular SEO tasks has unintentionally siloed efforts, mystifying executives and creating barriers to collaboration. These challenges hinder our ability to integrate SEO into a company’s strategy, diminishing the perceived relevance of our work and making it difficult to convey the true value of SEO within the organisational context.

To bridge this gap, we’ve transitioned from discussing individual tactics to presenting our work as cohesive, Named Project Workflows with clear, stated aims. While audits, research, and other tactical elements remain crucial components of our strategy, grouping them under accessible project titles allows us to use language that is more broadly understood across the organisation.

This shift not only demystifies our work but also facilitates more meaningful discussions, aids in prioritisation, and ensures better alignment with the wider marketing strategy. By adopting this approach across all clients, we’ll make it easier for stakeholders to grasp the significance of our SEO initiatives and their direct impact on business objectives.

Clear Business Impact
While broad forecasts offer valuable insights into the overall direction of SEO efforts, they often lack the specificity needed to drive decisive action. To ensure that SEO initiatives are prioritised correctly within organisations, we want to illustrate the business impact at a more granular level.

To do this, we’ll attach detailed impact forecasting to each of our new Named Project Workflows. This means that for every project – be it enhancing user experience, launching a digital PR campaign, or creating comprehensive guides – we’ll attach projections of the expected impact.

With clear projections to hand, we’ll facilitate better decision-making and ensure that resources are allocated to projects that offer the most significant return on investment.

Testing As Standard
Too often in the industry, the recommendation is: “Here’s a massive change to your website that you now need to implement.” That’s a big ask when the value of the activity has yet to be truly tested. As a result, everything grinds to a halt here and the strategy is never executed properly.

In 2025, we will include testing as a standard in our SEO workstreams. Where appropriate, we will default to offering test implementation on a section of the site as part of an SEO A/B test process. We will integrate our proprietary SEOCausal technology to demonstrate the statistical significance of the results of our A/B test, to prove our strategy works.

Making testing a standard part of our process validates proposed changes and fosters a culture of experimentation, in turn, building confidence in SEO among stakeholders. This approach will ensure that our SEO recommendations aren’t simply theoretical, but are backed by empirical evidence.