You know, in your SEO journey, there are many barriers to face, to overcome.
After having been an SEO Consultant for over 10 years now, I’m convinced that the most important barrier to overcome, the barrier that usually separates businesses who succeed in SEO from those who don’t quite make it work for them, is the barrier of implementation.
Your ability to implement SEO recommendations is key, no, is VITAL to your success in SEO.
Implementation is everything.
Without it, you will not grow your organic traffic.
Let me tell you something I see all the time.
A business realises they’re doing well in SEO, and wants to grow their organic traffic acquisition.
They hire an agency, or even a consultant, to work on growing their SEO.
The SEO comes onboard, analyses the business’s website, creates several strategy documents (I mean, strategy-galore), provides recommendations, presents them, and then…
…they’re faced with hurdles!
Whether the hurdles are technical, on-page or even off-page (usually to do with budget restrictions), or a combination of all three, the SEO is faced with hurdles.
One thing you have to realise about SEO is that it will take more than SEOs to make it work.
Yes, the channel is still very new, and there is a lot to grasp about it, especially if it’s new to you, but you have to accept that the strategy part, the recommendation documents you’ll receive are only a portion of what you’ll need to do to improve your rankings.
The actions, within all recommendation documents, will need to be acted upon.
This is where the implementation part comes in – the follow-through from the recommendations.
The quicker you’re able to follow-through and tackle the issues identified in any and all SEO recommendation documents, the quicker you’ll be able to gain more traffic from the SEO channel.
Within your SEO journey, you’re likely to uncover several impediments, which you’ll have to address in order to continue on your SEO journey.
A big one, for example, is CMS restrictions.
You may need to further invest in the development of your CMS, even if it’s a CMS you have recently invested in.
You may have invested in it from a development point of view but not from an SEO point of view.
This is very common in SEO – a company hires a development company to custom-build a CMS for them, hires an SEO afterwards, and the SEO has additional CMS requirements IF they are to make the channel a success.
This is an issue pretty much all businesses have faced, or will face in their SEO journey.
It’s a barrier.
The quicker you’re able to overcome this barrier, the quicker you can improve your rankings.
You wanna overcome a barrier like this quickly?
Accept that this was an unknown unknown, which you now have to face!
It’s not enough to commit to investing in the SEO channel.
You also have to commit to investing in the issues uncovered from SEO.
Take my word for it: there’ll be issues uncovered by SEO.
And these issues will most likely be outside of the SEO channel.
The more you’re able to have non-SEOs aligned to making the channel a success, with SEOs, the more you’ll improve your site’s ability to rank for whatever keyword you target.
An unfortunate mistake made by many businesses is that they have too much focus on the keywords they aim to target.
Rather than focusing on keywords, shift your attention to your site’s ranking ability.
An SEO’s job is simply to improve your site’s ranking.
Targeting keywords is just a part of this agenda.
Implementing the recommendations that will help your site to better rank for the keywords you aim to target is essential to improving your SERP visibility.
The sooner you have implementation streamlined in your business, the sooner you’ll see an increase in your SERP visibility.
Implementation is a sign, no it’s THE sign that you have a solid awareness of SEO throughout your business, which will affect your site’s ranking ability.
There is a direct influence here – between the level of awareness of SEO across your business and your site’s ranking ability.
The reality of SEOs working to have recommendations implemented is that people simply don’t want to carry out SEO-related work because SEO is an unknown area to them.
You may have noticed this in your organisation.
SEO-related work is typically pushed to the side, or to the back of the queue, because working on it will require having to take the time to understand the bloody channel, and why do that when you can work on something more familiar, right?
This is the reality of SEO. Operationally, it’s a barrier that SEOs face when working to drive the channel to success.
People would rather not work on SEO implementations because it’ll require them to have some level of understanding of the channel – a channel, which to this day is still seen as a mystical thing.
A dark art – as it’s still regarded.
You wanna help your SEO grow? Aim to facilitate the awareness of the channel across your business.
You’ll be priming non-SEOs, other departments to SEO, to implement the solutions that SEOs make to the issues that they uncover.
And I indicated earlier, the issues SEOs uncover, are very likely to sit outside of the SEO department.
This essentially means SEO and the department in question need to be collaborative in other to have the issues fixed.
This is why you see SEOs collaborating with several departments.
By far, the vast majority of issues that are negatively impacting your site’s ranking ability, which SEOs uncover, will require solutions that sit outside of the SEO department.
You want to succeed in your SEO? Influence the many departments that SEO need to work with, to collaborate with SEO, to get recommendations implemented.
Influence this cooperation .
Influence the board.
Influence heads of departments
Influence operationally, and you will have your business aligned to improve your site’s ranking ability.