Before you can implement the carefully crafted, data-backed digital marketing strategies your wellness practice needs to succeed and grow in 2024, you first need to get your plan and marketing budget approved.

If you’re involved in your wellness practice’s digital marketing planning, you may be tasked with preparing a CFO-defensible SEO budget that your chief marketing officer or director can present during the annual budgeting process. Today we’re sharing ideas on how to demonstrate the importance of investing time and resources in your wellness practice’s SEO strategy in 2024.

Importance of Wellness SEO Testing

To convince a CMO to allocate or protect your budget, start by providing data to justify the decision. This is where SEO testing comes in. Many companies offer tests to determine best practices for optimizing your website and digital assets to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO tests help build your case by showing how many impressions your pages might receive given the implementation of a full SEO strategy. Once you have those results in hand, though, you will still need to leverage the data to make your case as strong as it can be.

Tips for Building a CFO-Defensible Wellness SEO Strategy

There are different approaches to building a case for protecting your SEO budget. We’ll start by looking at three of the simplest.

1. Bring Urgency to Your SEO Initiatives

You must balance how quickly you act on your SEO strategy with how certain you are about effectiveness. But in tough economic times, speed is key. This means being aggressive with your SEO testing-to-deployment strategy often pays off.

Let’s think through an example. If your testing reveals a cheap SEO strategy with a high probability of success, you’d likely be happy to launch in any economic climate! For a strategy that is more expensive with a high chance of success, or cheaper with a lower probability, you may want to wait. A speed-first strategy instead pitches both these two areas as deployment-ready—as long as they’re not trending negatively.

What’s important here is building a methodology prioritizing the speed of implementing new SEO strategies. Show the challenges your digital strategies may face if you delay your SEO optimization. Research how your competitor’s websites are performing and where you can make up ground or even overtake them to grow market share by starting on your SEO plan.

With heightened urgency at the forefront, securing the sign-offs you need to fund your initiatives won’t be a problem.

2. Show Efficiencies in Your SEO Planning

Wellness practice executive leadership want to ensure they’re getting a good ROI for any budget initiatives they approve. Make a case for doing more with less by leveraging SEO testing results. Start by comparing your initial SEO strategy to an optimized, post-testing strategy.

Say you show an executive an initial SEO budget containing a dozen initiatives. Testing data will reveal which of these initiatives will yield the lowest returns. Using this information, you can present several different versions of your digital marketing plan at different price points depending on which initiatives are included.

3. Lean Into Loss Aversion in Your SEO Strategy

Humans naturally put more effort into avoiding loss than pursuing gain.¹ And this dynamic can help when you’re building a case for SEO strategies with executives. Ask yourself: how can I shore up the losses that aren’t so easy to see?

A big SEO shift going wrong is unfortunate. But it’s also obvious. These are the sorts of changes leading to, for example, a 20% decrease in organic traffic. Look at the problem and take steps to fix it. Marginal losses of 2% or 3%, by contrast, are harder to spot. But they add up all the same and can seriously hamper your SEO strategy.

SEO testing helps find the causes of these marginal losses and the solutions for eliminating them. Presenting these strategies to a CMO activates their loss-aversion instincts while also showing thoroughness in your budget-making. This can make a difference in securing or protecting your SEO budget.

Beyond these three tips, remember to think like an executive when making your case. Can you tie your use cases to specific business goals? Are you able to use information coming directly from leadership, such as your CEO on earnings calls? The more you point your SEO strategy toward your wellness organization’s “big picture,” the more successful your appeals will be.

Whether you’re looking for expert advice on polishing your SEO budget proposal or need help getting started with your SEO planning research, Dreamscape Marketing can help. Contact us at 888.307.7304 to schedule a discovery call and learn more about our wellness digital marketing services. 

 

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