Skip to main content

Search Engine Optimization (SEO),Social Media, Article Submission

Loading...

Maximizing the potential and value of your SEO team


The complexity of working an SEO program has grown exponentially over the years, creating both challenges and opportunities for search marketers.

SEO professionals today cannot simply rely on their marketing skills to drive a program. User experience, front-end development and data analysis skills are essential for success today. Honing these skills as part of your professional development can pay dividends, both for yourself and your employer.

Managing SEO programs requires that we not only drive SEO results, but we must also drive growth opportunities for our teams. Growth opportunities and career progression are core concerns for employees. Investing in the growth of our personnel allows for driving significantly more impact across the organization.

Laura Dillon, a senior analyst on our Walgreens team, is a prime example of how SEO expertise can be leveraged to build stronger relationships with internal customers while driving value for the company. In addition to her SEO responsibilities, Laura owns the SEO contribution to site internal search.

Internal search for many websites is a key interaction and discovery tool for the consumer, but it requires management. SEO professionals understand at a deep level how a term search creates an experience path for the customer — and that path can be enhanced.

Laura works with the product, merchandising and IT teams to improve the search experience by providing trend analysis, developing strategies for holidays, working null results and improving site messaging.

Exposing partners in the organization to the value of our SEO teams builds support for our SEO initiatives. In addition, the exposure reinforces the strategy of driving SEO through experience gap analysis and an understanding of the customer’s intent.

Seek out opportunities for your team members to participate more broadly across the organization, but remember that this requires a commitment as a manager as well. The commitment we have as managers is to grow our personnel, maximize their potential, expose them to areas where their expertise can drive value and take a vested interest in their career path.

Areas where you may want to broaden the growth of your personnel to create opportunities to expand organizational impact are as follows:


  • Content strategy. SEO professionals have access to tools and data that can help drive content decisions with a meaningful impact: analyzing the engagement metrics of existing content, determining content that resonates on the site and analyzing off-site content impact at a social level.
  • Internal search. As explained above, we in SEO live in the world of terms and intent. Assisting in the site search analysis to determine improvements can be extremely helpful in helping other teams to achieve their internal search goals.
  • User experience. Identifying the various intents a consumer may have based on the term or phrase searched allows us to analyze the path against the outcome of each intent. Through this analysis, we can uncover barriers or areas of friction in the journey and partner with our user experience and web design teams to eliminate experience gaps.
  • Front-end development. Many web developers and front-end coders absolutely love learning about how they can amplify their impact by embedding SEO best practices in the code. Conduct routine training sessions, and partner with the department managers to supplement guidelines to include SEO best practices for coding.

Partnering well within the organization and driving impact external to SEO are primary tenets to building a best-in-class SEO program. Investing in your personnel and providing them ownership in areas where they can realize the impact of their work while growing as professionals will drive retention goals.

With every team member, I stress that SEO is not about what you know or what you can do — it is what you can get done. Partner well internally, leverage your team to their potential, and you will be amazed at how much you can actually get done.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SEO Tools: The Complete List (2018 Update)

SEO Tools: The Complete List (2018 Update) on  July 18, 2018 If you want to see the best SEO tools in one place, then you’ll LOVE this (updated) guide. I personally tested and reviewed  188  free and paid tools. And you can filter through the list to find the best SEO software for you. Check it out: I want SEO tools that help with: Link Building     Technical SEO     Keyword Research     Rank Tracking     Content Optimization     Backlink Analysis     Video SEO I want tools that are: Free     Paid     Freemium     New    Show only Brian's favorite tools: Yes     No    LINK BUILDING TOOLS AuthoritySpy Link Building Paid AuthoritySpy is designed to help you find the top influencers in your space. It discovers these movers and shakers by searching in places like AllTop, Twitter and Followerwonk. Officia...
Post a Comment
Read more

Google My Business API v4.2 released Today

Google announced the release of version 4.2 of the Google My Business API , a way for developers to quickly make modifications to Google My Business listings programmatically. The API can be accessed here but is not open to all. You need to request and be granted access to this API in order to use it. The new features include: Verification Third-party platforms integrated with Google My Business can now offer their merchants the ability to verify their Google My Business listing directly on their native platform. This includes pulling the list of verification options available for a listing, triggering Google My Business verification such as sending a postcard, getting a phone call, and submitting a PIN code for verification. Third party platforms will now be able to fully onboard and verify merchants directly on their platform instead of interrupting their workflow and forcing merchants to Google My Business. Google Locations API users are now able to better identify if a listing alre...
Post a Comment
Read more

Google updates user management and rights in Google Search Console

Google  announced  some important changes to how user management and rights work within the  Google Search Console . Here are the important changes happening now and in the near future: All users, no matter if they only have the lowest level of permissions or the highest, will be able to see critical site messages. Google added better history tracking to show which individual performed which significant property-affecting modifications. These modifications include changes such as changing a setting, validating an issue or submitting a new sitemap. The new Search Console enables you to share a read-only view of many reports, including Index coverage, AMP, and Mobile Usability. A new user management interface enables all users to see and manage (if they have rights to do so) user roles for all property users. A simpler permission model where Google will limit the “restricted” user role to read-only status. Read-only users will no longer be able to perform any state-changing...
Post a Comment
Read more