Let me ask you something…
Do you have the best-in class SEO awareness in your business?
Here’s why I ask this…
In order to optimise your site to generate more organic traffic, you need the best SEO practices applied on your site, by the best SEOs.
Having the best SEOs means supporting them in their development as SEOs.
Well, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for any length of time, you know I’m a big advocate for evangelising SEO.
SEO is a channel that requires more than SEOs in order to be successful.
So whilst SEOs need support, training and development in SEO, in order to be the best-in-class, non-SEOs also need support, training and development in SEO in order for you to have the best optimised website.
So, when I ask if you have the best-in-class SEO awareness, I’m asking you this because I want you to consider the state of SEO in your business, and how you can influence the success of it in your business, for your business.
Now, when I say ‘SEO state’, what do I mean by this?
By ‘SEO state’, I’m referring to how SEO is regarded in your business, which shows on your website, and on the search engines.
You see, it’s very typical for SEO to only be engaged with when a problem, or a need, arises.
Think about this…
When a site is built, it goes through a development stage with Web Developers.
It goes through the different states of web development, until it’s published where marketing of the site begins.
SEO tends not to be the first marketing channel that’s activated.
It’s usually a paid-for channel, where results are more instant.
The site evolves through different states without SEO direction.
In this time, the site receives organic traffic, so there isn’t an urgent need to have SEO in place.
This is the case until there is an issue with SEO traffic, which I’ve referred to in the past as an ‘event’.
Or, it’s the case until there is a mission to acquire more SEO traffic.
Either/or, when SEO is activated, fixing issues on the site is the first port of action.
At some point in the SEO journey, there becomes the need to prevent issues from being created in the first place.
This is where the awareness of SEO, by non-SEOs becomes pivotal in how much traffic a site will be able to acquire through the organic channel.
Now, the less issues for your site – issues that affect its performance in organic search – the less time SEOs have to spend addressing them.
You know what this means?
This means they can spend more time growing organic traffic, rather than trying to prevent it from worsening.
If the state of your SEO is that of SEOs firefighting issues, you’ll be unable to build your website, your business, with SEO.
If you’re redesigning your website, for example, and your Designers do not know how culling Copy on pages may affect organic traffic, this would be something SEOs have to address after the fact.
And by after the fact, I mean after you have lost traffic – when the damage is already done, and there is no going back from it. There is only improvement from its current state.
If you had Designers who were aware of how their actions on a site impact SEO performance, you could avoid, and/or mitigate, traffic loss – organic traffic loss.
Designers wouldn’t ordinarily be aware of this because it’s not their channel.
This would be an unknown, unknown, until they experience the consequence of traffic loss.
Rather than having them learn the hard way, you could encourage SEO awareness.
You see, every single person who deals with your website has the ability to negatively affect your SEO traffic.
This is why awareness of SEO is so important.
Awareness in SEO doesn’t mean everyone in your business has to know how to optimise a site – it doesn’t mean everyone does SEO.
It does, however, mean that everyone should understand SEO and how their department impacts the site’s ranking ability.
Would you believe there are people in Digital Marketing who barely knows what SEO is?
Yet, they impact the direction of the sites they work on.
You don’t want this in your organisation.
You want SEO to have a leading role in your site’s growth because it’s a core marketing channel for your website.
In order to truly optimise your website, to truly improve it, the people behind it, and the way they work together, needs to be optimised.
The less optimised your workstream is, the less you’ll be able to climb up the rankings.
The same issues you face with your SEO, the same challenges and states you have to go through, your competitors face the same experiences.
If they’re able to address and overcome them quicker than you are, they’ll be able to rank better than you, and for more keywords than you, quicker than you.
Having the best SEOs is one thing.
Having the best SEO awareness in your organisation is another thing.
It’s another level of optimisation.
And this is the level you’ll really want to be operating on in 2021 and beyond, if you want your website to evolve with the times.
So, think about this…
Providing SEOs with training and development helps them consistently be the best-in-class so they can perform at their best, consistently, right?
Why not enable non-SEOs with training and development about SEO?
This will reduce the issues non-SEOs cause for SEO and will have SEOs in a position where they proactively work to improve traffic, rather than working to not let the site regress in the traffic it’s able to attain.
