The Challenge of SEO Team Building
You’re busy, and SEO isn’t your only job, so we’re pretty sure you won’t be thrilled to hear this:
Your SEO campaign will incorporate a wide variety of tasks: writing and editing, web page design, programming, ad copy creation, research, web analytics, and inter- personal communication for link building. If you’re doing this all yourself, bravo! You’re just the sort of multitasking do-it-yourselfer who thrives in SEO. If your entire company can’t ride to lunch on the same motorcycle, we’re putting you in charge of coordinating the SEO team. Either way, once you’ve read this book, you’ll be the in-house SEO expert, so the responsibility for all of these tasks ultimately falls on you.
Before you close this book forever and run for the antacid, let’s clarify a bit. We’re not saying that you have to be the one to code the website or set up the analytics soft- ware. We’re saying you need to know enough to be able to speak intelligently to the people who do these tasks. And here’s the hard part: You also need to convince them to spend some of their precious time working on Your SEO Plan.
SALES IT MARKETING
Pearl of Wisdom: SEO requires you to be proficient in several different areas.
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Why is it, after all, that organizing an SEO team is so hard? We have observed four common reasons:
• SEO requires effort from multiple departments and a variety of skills, such as marketing, sales, IT, public relations (PR), and creative/editorial.
• SEO is a new discipline and doesn’t have established processes in the corporate system.
• The SEO budget will have to come from somewhere. That means somebody may have to give up some funding.
• The SEO industry carries around a bit of a bad reputation—and some folks still think SEO is about tricking or spamming the search engines.
This chapter is here to guide you through the SEO crusade within your organiza- tion. There are some common patterns of resistance you might meet in each of the departments discussed here, and we’ll share with you the most effective ways to coun- teract them.
As with any team-building effort, building your SEO team will be an exercise in communication.
But remember this: They’re probably just as busy as you are, and that’s why we advocate a pace-yourself approach. Don’t overwhelm them with information—just the SEO rules that pertain to the task at hand.
“But I Don’t Have One of Those!”
In this chapter, we discuss ways that you can approach various departments within your organization to get help on your SEO campaign.We are well aware that, due to size or focus, your organization may not include each of the separate departments described here. If this is the case with you, fig- ure out what entity takes on these roles: Who is it that closes the deals with customers? That’s your sales department.Who edits your website? That’s the IT department. Look to that entity—be it a small staff, an entire department, or Erica on every other Tuesday for the SEO help you need.
Even if you’re planning to go it alone with your trusty hour-a-day book and a cup of coffee by your side, this chapter should offer some insight on approaching the work with the right “hats” on.
Pearl of Wisdom: Educate your team about SEO, and you will be rewarded with their participa- tion and enthusiasm.
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We have worked in many situations in which team participation was less than ideal for an SEO campaign, and we know how this can reduce the campaign’s effective- ness. What happens when those carefully prepared page edits aren’t implemented, key- words aren’t incorporated into site rewrites, or a planned-for PPC budget never comes through?
Besides being frustrating for you, it can be a huge waste of time and money. What follows are some thoughts for keeping the enthusiasm going in all of your departments.
Marketing, Sales, and Public Relations
Marketing, Sales, and Public Relations make up a corporate SEO trifecta. Get all three excited about your SEO campaign, and you’ll have built your “brain trust” foundation for success. Here’s some food for thought that should come in handy when you need to deal with these departments.
Marketing: VIPs of SEO
In most organizations, the marketing department serves as the hub of SEO operations.
We’re guessing you’re a member of this department yourself. It’s a natural progression:
The marketing department may already be handling the website as well as offline mar- keting—such as print ads, television, radio, billboards—and online marketing—such as banner ads and direct e-mails.
The marketing team will likely be instrumental in SEO tasks like keyword brain- storming and research, writing text for descriptions and page titles, writing sponsored listings, managing paid search campaigns, and executing link-building campaigns.
The folks on the marketing team have, quite literally, the skills to pay the bills, and they probably don’t need any convincing that SEO is a worthwhile effort. What they will need, however, is some organization and some focusing.
What does your marketing team know about the importance of robot-readable text, keyword placement, and paid search campaign management? Maybe a lot. Maybe nothing. Maybe they know something that was worthwhile a few years ago but is now outdated. Since you’re in charge of the SEO team, it will help you to know what the general knowledge level is and then think of yourself as the on-site SEO educator.
We have found that marketing staffers are almost always open to a little educa- tion about how the search engines work, as long as the information is provided on a need-to-know basis. For example, whenever we brainstorm for keywords with a mar- keting manager, inevitably their list contains terms that are extremely vague (“quality”)
Pearl of Wisdom: Without your team on board, SEO suffers.
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or so specific that nobody is searching for them (“geometric specifications of duckpin bowling balls”). When we trim down that list, we always explain the basic concept of search popularity vs. relevance. That lesson is easily delivered in a two-paragraph e-mail or a three-minute phone call.
But what if you’re not working in such a receptive environment? Maybe you are the only one convinced of the positive powers of SEO. Perhaps, for reasons of budget or time, you don’t have the buy-in you need to move forward. Perhaps other marketing programs are taking precedence, or the department can’t seem to make the leap from offline to online marketing. If that’s the case, it’s time to convince the marketing man- ager of the importance of your SEO project!
Here’s one way to approach it: Focus on the needs of the marketing department.
Go into therapy mode: “You seem a little stressed. How can SEO help?”
Here’s how: SEO can provide the trackability that your colleagues have been waiting for. Or justify an overdue website revamp. It may provide an argument for dropping less-successful advertising venues. It can forge new alliances between Market- ing and IT. On the “warm and fuzzy” side, it may provide an outlet for a creative soul who feels trapped in marketing-speak and wants to do more creative writing. And SEO is an extremely telecommuting-friendly enterprise. Is there a new dad in the department who would love to spend a portion of his week working from home?
Once you’ve found some common ground and the enthusiasm is starting to grow, consider starting Your SEO Plan with a pilot project that you can focus your SEO efforts on together. Pick something close to the hearts of the marketing staff: a recent or upcom- ing launch, a section of your site devoted to a special event, a promotion, or a product line that’s down in the dumps. Cherry-pick if you can! It’s important that these early experiences be positive ones.
What If You’re at the Bottom of the Pecking Order?
If you’re on the bottom of the food chain in your organization, you may be either ignored or micro- managed by the people you answer to. Here are some tips that might work for you no matter what department you’re dealing with:
• Create regular reports, even if nobody’s looking at them. As consultants, we have often asked ourselves,“What’s the point of documenting everything if nobody reads our reports?” But it always comes down to this: We need them for our own reference. After several months, stats begin to blur together—don’t expect to keep this stuff in your head.
• Don’t report too often. We recommend at least a month between reports, even if you are asked for more frequent data.There are rare exceptions to this rule, such as extremely short- lived promotions or unusually volatile PPC campaigns. But for almost everything else, it is helpful to set expectations that SEO is about long-term trends, not daily numbers.
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What If You’re at the Bottom of the Pecking Order? (Continued)
• Deliver meaningful information.When you e-mail your boss a spreadsheet detailing your ranks for the last six months, you’re delivering raw information.You can turn that into mean- ingful information when you summarize it in your e-mail: “Dear Boss, This month, traffic to three of our top-priority pages increased across three search engines. Five of our pages improved in rank, but our traffic for the term ‘industrial strength pencils’ continued to slide.”
• Likewise, if you have to deliver bad news, always deliver a plan of action for addressing it.
You’re the in-house SEO expert, like it or not, and your boss is looking to you for guidance.
The boss doesn’t want to hear, “Holy moly! Google dropped all our pages!”The boss wouldn’t mind hearing this explanation: “It looks like our pages have been dropped from Google. This is probably a temporary problem, caused by Googlebot trying to crawl our site during our server outage last week. I’ll verify that there are no indexing errors using Google’s Webmaster Tools and keep a close eye on the situation.”
• Don’t take all the credit for your success.This is not just to be humble; it’s also because you actually aren’t responsible for every SEO success. Even if you do everything right, you can’t control what your competitors are doing or the nature of the next big search engine algo- rithm change. If you set your boss’s expectations along these lines, you won’t be blamed for every little failure, either.
Selling SEO to Sales
In Chapter 1, “Clarify Your Goals,” you gave a lot of thought to the fundamental goals of your business. Your sales department will be happy to hear that your SEO campaign will be bringing in not just traffic, but targeted traffic that leads directly to sales. You will be looking for their help in the following areas of SEO: keyword brain- storming, assistance with conversion tracking, competitive analysis, and insight into the customers’ web habits.
Since Sales often has the most direct contact with customers, they will have excellent ideas to add to your keyword brainstorming sessions. And if your conversions are of the easy-to-measure variety, such as online purchases, they’ll probably enjoy monitoring conversion rates on a paid search campaign and adjusting accordingly.
On the other hand, you may have a harder time getting help with conversion tracking for offline sales—transactions made over the phone or in person. The sales department may not want to make the effort to figure out exactly how the person on the other end of the phone got their number, or they may feel that grilling the customers about how they found you will interfere with the sales process. You need to convince your sales team that incorporating this sort of follow-up into the sales process is not a
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waste of time because it’s important for everyone to know whether the website is gen- erating profits.
The key to bringing your sales team on board for these more difficult tasks is educating them on the connection between targeted search engine traffic and bottom- line sales:
How can you make it easier for the sales team to track conversions to the website?
Tracking paid ads with a pay-per-call payment model is one option to explore. But to track offline sales from organic sources, you’ll have to dig deep. Some companies set up a special toll-free number and display it prominently on their website—but nowhere else! In this way, they can easily tell which customers got the number there. It’s not a perfect solution because it doesn’t tell them which search engines and keywords were used, but it does succeed in connecting the dots for the sales department: SEO →Web- site Traffic →More Phone Calls →More Sales →Bigger Bonus!
SEO and PR Can Relate
If your company has a PR department, you’re in luck. If not, think about this: If you got a phone call tomorrow from a radio station wanting to do a story on your com- pany, who would they speak with? That’s your PR department.
PR folks are very well suited to work with you on your SEO campaign. They’re careful about words, they’re excellent communicators, and they probably know how to track their results. They are the keepers of the brand, creating and monitoring the face that your organization puts forth to the public. Look to PR for help with keyword brainstorming, optimizing press releases, link building, and keeping your paid and unpaid search engine listings and other links in line with your branding.
A typical PR department is primarily concerned with getting your company mentioned in the media and making sure that the publicity is accurate and—ideally—
positive. Many newspaper and magazine articles, not to mention blog postings, are triggered by press releases or other forms of contact from a PR department. And it’s fair to say that search engines deserve a place among these media sources: Just like magazines, newspapers, and the like, search engines provide a free, ostensibly unbiased third-party source of publicity for your organization.
Pearl of Wisdom: Your PR department can think of search engines as a particularly big media outlet.
Pearl of Wisdom: SEOwillbring in sales if it’s done right!
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Even more important from a PR point of view, search engines have become a key research tool for those very journalists, bloggers, and thought leaders PR is chat- ting up in the first place.
Did someone say “bloggers”? Our elbows are sore from bumping into our PR brethren as we navigate the blogosphere, asking for a little recognition for our clients.
We’re all essentially saying the same thing: “Hey, can you link to our site?” “Hey, would you mind spreading the word about our new product?” And on the flip side of that coin, there are lots of PR folks working as “ghost bloggers,” crafting the oh-so-casual- yet-always-right-on-the-company-line postings that emanate from slick corporate blogs.
(Oh, don’t look so surprised—we told you blogging was a business!) If you have a PR team doing these kinds of activities, your challenge will be to inject some SEO best prac- tices into their work without overstepping your boundaries. Give your ghost blogging colleague a little list of keywords to consider using. Offer to run your eye over casual communications to make sure PR is asking for links to the best landing pages. Your SEO skills can fit nicely into their procedures.
You might meet some resistance from a PR department that thinks of SEO as strictly a form of advertising. In truth, SEO often does walk a fine line. A paid search campaign is most clearly within the advertising classification, but other SEO tasks, such as including target keywords in press releases or gaining incoming links from busi- ness contacts, fall more directly into the PR bucket. Once you explain to your PR folks that you will be seeking their assistance only with organic SEO activity, they should be more open to the possibilities.
As the department that protects the company brand, PR will likely have a great deal of interest in the brand maintenance tasks that fall under the SEO umbrella: moni- toring search engine listings and other online mentions for currency and accuracy. You may need to educate the PR team about how to find outdated information online, but once they know where (and how) to look, don’t be surprised if they develop a passion for rooting out the “uglies.”
What if your website is not trying to sell anything or gather leads, or run adver- tising for revenue? What if the only goal of your website is brand awareness? This is when you need your PR department most of all. The folks in PR are already skilled in handling those difficult-to-measure soft targets offline through clipping services and surveys. They may even be doing some tracking of online mentions. Now you need to tie their tracking efforts together with the SEO campaign to make sure that SEO gets credit where credit is due. Luckily, PR people are generally very comfortable with documentation. You shouldn’t have too hard a time convincing them to document their SEO successes.
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“Jill-of-All-Trades” at Tachyon Publications
Tachyon Publications, a small fantasy and science fiction press, is lucky to have Jill Roberts as managing editor.
Jill is bright, hardworking, and multitalented.“I do everything,” Jill says cheerfully,“from book production to bookkeeping.” Depending on the day, you may find Jill coordinating cover art for an upcoming release, representing Tachyon at a convention, or arranging the cookie tray at a local author appearance. Jill is also the keeper of Tachyon’s mailing list and in-house editor of the web- site. She explains,“I write the text for the site and enter it into the templates in the content man- agement system, using some HTML tags.”
By our count, Jill fits into several classifications, including marketing, sales, PR, editorial, and IT.
And by writing the website text and e-mail newsletters, Jill is doing her part to influence SEO.“The website is one of the ways that Tachyon is most visible, since we don’t have a storefront,” says Jill.
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