If you run a small or mid-sized company with lots of different departments and employees, you might be having a hard time implementing an effective SEO strategy. While you might think that SEO is just a matter of updating your existing content with a few keywords, SEO should be a group effort.
That means different departments like marketing, IT, product data, and UX/UI all need to be on the same page for your SEO strategy to be effective. Remember that 45% of all companies say content marketing is ‘highly integrated’ with their SEO strategy. Learn how you can get everyone on your team on the same page, so you can take your SEO strategy to the next level.
Educate Your Team on SEO
Before your team starts collaborating on and implementing an effective SEO strategy, you need to make sure that everyone speaks the same language. If your team is just starting to learn SEO, you can try organizing a group seminar that teaches everyone about the basics of SEO and what they’re used for.
Even if you have a few team members that are well versed in the mechanics of SEO, there are bound to be some team members in your marketing or IT department that can’t even tell you what SEO stands for. To fix this issue, bring everyone together in the same room so your team can learn as a group and get access to the same information. If you have a few experienced team members, encourage them to stand up and offer some helpful insights on the topic.
Every department is going to look at SEO from a different perspective. For the marketing department, they’ll need to understand how SEO affects content creation, social media, and every other creative decision. As for your IT department, they’ll need to know how SEO will affect the customer’s experience.
The same is true for sales, UX/UI and virtually every other department at your company. You can try structuring the learning session so that each department understands how SEO will affect their operations and how they can leverage some of these changes to their advantage.
You might need to have individual sessions for each of your departments, but it’s best to make sure everyone gets the same introduction to SEO by hosting a company-wide meeting. Everyone will feel like they’re on the same page and the meeting will increase cross-department collaboration.
If your team is skeptical of SEO, change their mind with a statistic: marketers see SEO as becoming more effective, with 82% reporting effectiveness is on the rise and 42% of this group stating effectiveness is increasing significantly.
Creating an Efficient Workflow
Once your team understands the fundamentals of search engine optimization, they can start implementing some SEO best practices into their daily workflow. It’s best to have your team think about every task from a SEO perspective.
Instead of drafting an email newsletter or a new web ad and then having to optimize it for SEO, your team should get in the habit of doing their SEO due diligence before starting the task, so they can implement some best practices throughout the creation process.
If your marketing department needs access to some SEO-related information before starting a task, they should be able to quickly send a request to the SEO professional you have on staff. This person can find info on the best keywords or the latest SEO best practices.
All departments should feel comfortable reaching out to the SEO professional for advice and support, as many of employees are bound to have questions along the way. Some team members may be resistant to these changes, but as long as they have access to support, they should feel confident in their ability to get the job done.
Improving Cross-Department Collaboration
Creating an efficient workflow also means creating effective lines of communication between different departments. A certain member of your team is going to need to make changes to a piece of content or a new web feature based on the recommendations of another department.
When this happens, you and your team should get in the habit of documenting these footnotes or requests. Regardless of what kind of messaging platform you use, every request or SEO development should be documented. This helps your team become more familiar with the SEO process.
When a SEO request is made by one department and sent to another, it helps if the sender includes information as to why these changes need to be made. For example, if your SEO expert wants your UX/UI department to change the interface of your new website to improve its search rankings, they should include their reasons for doing so.
A request for changes might include a memo like this: “Include a menu bar at the top to improve user navigation. Google ranks webpages based on how long the users stays on the website. Creating a menu bar encourages the user to spend more time clicking around.”
This gives context to every request, so every team member knows what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Don’t make the mistake of skimping on SEO. Companies spend $65 billion on SEO in 2016 alone.
Hiring an SEO Consultant
If you plan on hiring an outside freelance SEO consultant, make sure that every department has access to the same information. You can have one person in charge of corresponding with your SEO professional, who then dissipates this information to the rest of your team. While this person can get bogged down by endless messages, it prevents your staff members from overwhelming the SEO consultant with too many requests. This point person should also be well-versed in SEO, so they can quickly respond to internal requests and make sense of the SEO consultant’s comments and advice.
You should also have your SEO professional introduce the topic to the rest of the team, so everyone knows who they’re dealing with.
Keeping everyone informed on the latest SEO practices can be a challenge but opening the doors of communication will only make this transition easier. Give people a chance to ask questions and give them the tools they need to build a brighter future for your company.
Get in touch with Paul for a free SEO consultation to lead your business to SEO success.