Is your business committed to the management of SEO?
You may have invested in it. I’m not talking about the investment in SEO, I’m talking about the management of SEO.
Is your business committed to the management of SEO?
Let’s delve into this topic.
If you have a website, a website where you’re reliant on traffic via the organic channel, you need SEO.
There’s no two-ways about this, there are no exceptions to this, you need SEO.
You don’t just need to invest in it, you need to take charge of shaping your appearance in the SERPs.
Leaving it to Google to determine what’s best to rank, is not the way to take ownership of your SEO.
Likewise, simply convincing the board to invest in SEO is not taking ownership of your SEO.
With all due respect to the amount of work it takes to influence the board to invest in SEO, this is the easy part.
The hard part comes in working the channel.
The hard part comes in integrating the channel.
The hard part comes in getting people to give a damn about SEO.
Why is this the hard part?
Let’s examine what SEOs face once a business has decided to invest in the channel.
They face an uphill battle where they have to do a lot of influencing throughout the business.
Don’t underestimate how difficult of a task this is.
In order to improve your rankings, your website has to go through changes.
These may be small changes, these may be big bold changes, but they are changes.
This work, making changes, requires implementation – implementation of the recommended improvements, right?
In order to have implementations carried out, SEO has to convince the appropriate department to make the necessary actions.
Why do they have to do this? Because SEO requires more than SEOs to make SEO a success.
For example, let’s say an audit of the content on existing pages is carried out.
You have recommendations to make adjustments to the Copy on-page, and the typical SEO elements – the meta titles, meta descriptions, H1s, etc.
You’re also advised to place canonicals on your pages – there are none, sitewide.
These recommendations, are transposed into the following two projects:
- On-page recommendations
- Canonicals development
These 2 projects requires buy-in from different departments.
You may have invested in SEO but SEO currently doesn’t have any authority to make any changes to the website.
They do not have ownership of the CMS and are not permitted to actions any changes.
Ownership of the CMS belongs to a specific department, and have had this authority for many years now.
This department has their specific way of working.
Anyone who wants changes made to pages, has to put in a request.
This request must be authorised before it is actioned.
OPRs, on-page recommendations, requires this department to action the recs.
Before they do so, they need to see the proposed business value of making such changes.
Now, what is it you have, here?
You have a situation where SEO not only have to audit and optimise the site, they also have to create a case as to why what they are recommending is going to be beneficial to the business, and also why it’ll be beneficial to the department carrying out the implementations.
How much time is scoped in for SEO to carry out this business value case?
How much time will it be before the initial SEO recommendations are implemented?
Is your business committed to the management of SEO?
Let’s take the 2nd project, canonicals development.
Pages across the site do not contain any canonicals.
This is a sitewide issue. Web Managers are happy to action this, however, currently, this functionality doesn’t exist in the CMS.
Before determining the pages that should contain self-refs and those that should be canonicalised, the canonical function itself, needs to be created and enabled in the CMS.
This calls for Devs to execute this recommendation.
The Dev department have their own way of carrying out work.
They have a 2-week sprint cycle. Work that’s actioned in that cycle is determined 2 weeks in advance. Up to 5 projects are worked on per sprint, depending on the scope of the projects.
For this canonicals project to be prioritised, SEO has to propose it to the head of the department.
The Dev department head already has a backlog of 15 projects. They already know which projects will be worked on in the next several months.
It’s not a case of what will be worked on. It’s a case of where the work will be prioritised.
Any new work, i.e. the SEO canonical project, if approved, will be placed in ticket no.16.
Is your business committed to the management of SEO?
You see, SEO is rarely the first channel that’s invested in, and is never the first department a business has.
As such, by the time SEO is invested in, brought in, departments, teams, individuals, already have established their way of doing things.
With SEO requiring them to have recs implemented, SEO involvement is a change to the way they do things.
This change can be seen as a disruption to the status-quo.
What usually happens when a department, a team, an individual faces someone who’s perceived as being disruptive? How is this someone (someone new) treated?
This is why SEO often gets push-back to the implementation of recs.
And the more push-back an SEO receives, the more the SEO is eager to ‘have their way’.
Why? Because their very worth depends on it.
Their value depends on how quickly they can have changes implemented, changes which will see the website rank higher, which will see the site acquire more traffic, which determines the worth of the SEO.
How are departments, teams, individuals in your business equipped to deal with the business’s investment in SEO?
Is your business committed to the management of SEO?
