Finding Your SEO Cheerleaders
Maximizing the benefits of search engine optimization begins when integrating it across departments.
Maximizing the benefits of search engine optimization begins when integrating it across departments.
Many search engine optimization (SEO) professionals at some point in their professional life feel as if no one understands them.
Although SEO should be an integral part of many corporate structures, including marketing, Web design, IT, and content creation, unless you are fortunate enough to work at a big corporation with a team of in-house SEOs, you don’t quite fit in anywhere.
We need to change that in order to reap the real benefits of SEO.
The best way to achieve this is for SEO to be integrated into the process of website design, content creation, and marketing planning, just to name a few, by firstly having “SEO cheerleaders” in a business’s other departments.
SEO cheerleaders are people who understand the value of SEO initiatives, especially those who are related to, or can advance, their own efforts and become SEO ambassadors within their team.
For example, when a certain topic comes up in a meeting that may have some impact on SEO or could benefit from some SEO insights, these cheerleaders would be in a position to remind the rest of the team about SEO best practices, suggest bringing in the SEO team for clarifications or requests for data that can enhance activity.
Potential cheerleader candidates can be found in a variety of departments including:
Having SEO cheerleaders in different departments and teams helps to better connect and inform the rest of the business in overall online and even some offline activities. Think of the reasons why you would want these evangelists in your cheerleading squad, how they can help and support SEO initiatives, and how much of the impact that each cheerleader has based on his/her position and the work responsibilities.
When everyone is already overloaded with work and responsibilities, it is not likely that you will have volunteers lining up to add more to their plate. The best way to get people onboard is to demonstrate what can be gained from adopting SEO and from working with the SEO team.
Prepare some talking points or even a couple of slides showing what is in it for them. Below are some of the benefits that will get people’s attention:
Find whatever motivation works to excite your team to cheer for SEO across your business to deliver benefits that “helps them to help you!”
SEO isn’t about stuffing text and devious tricks to improve rankings, but many non-SEO professionals still think about SEO in this way. Although cheerleaders don’t need to become SEO experts, they still need to be equipped with enough basic SEO knowledge, tools, and success points to create a strong cheerleading squad.
Here are some tools for cheerleaders to use for SEO wins:
All of these are a gold mine of opportunities not only for SEO but content marketing.
Lastly, give some specific examples of how and when you would like help and give the team words to listen for that will trigger them to think of SEO. Talk to them about how SEO should be integrated into each of their work process to improve overall performance. The easier you make it for them, the louder and more enthusiastically they can cheer for you.
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