I talk about this quite often, and the more I do, the more I’m convinced that it’s a big part of a company’s success with SEO.
The success of your SEO is largely down to non-SEO.
What do I mean by this…?
SEOs solve SEO problems. They don’t create them.
Or, at least, they bloody well shouldn’t.
They fix the issues with a site that prevents the site from performing well in search.
How do these issues come to be…?
By far, in the vast majority of situations, site issues that impact SEO performance are caused by non-SEOs.
Now, before I go any further, let me state this…
The intent of that statement isn’t to blame anyone, team, or department.
An SEO’s mindset is to acknowledge the state of a site, and make a plan to improve the site.
The ‘acknowledging’ part involves figuring out what’s causing issues on the site so it can be addressed.
So, let me just say that there –
It’s not a blame-game, it just is what it is.
Now, you can hire an SEO to fix your website issues but until the cause of the issues are addressed, they will continue to reoccur.
You might think, we’ll keep an SEO at hand to always work on SEO.
This type of optimisation is just surface-level.
It’s the type of optimisation that’ll have your SEO in a firefighting state.
In this state, SEOs will always be addressing issues.
But you’ll soon realise it’s difficult to grow in this state, not to mention, hella expensive.
You don’t want to be stuck in this state.
This is the state most businesses find themselves in when their rankings suddenly tank and they need to repair whatever’s broken on their site to regain their rankings.
You’re far better off, deep diving into the cause of an SEO issue to find a solution – a permanent solution that doesn’t cause the issue to reoccur.
If you deep dive enough, you’ll discover that the root of the vast, vast majority of SEO issues comes down to non-SEOs being unaware of how their actions on a site, or indeed for a site, impact the site’s SEO performance.
This is why I say the success of SEO is largely down to non-SEOs.
It’s down to non-SEOs understanding how their involvement in a site may impact the site’s visibility in organic search.
So, let me give you an example.
The Ads and Partnerships department at Company X have a deal with a new partner to show interstitials on several key pages of the site, for new visitors.
They go-about pushing the deal live without SEO involvement.
The interstitials covers the entirety of the pages they’re placed on.
The interstitials show on desktop, and show on mobile.
These full page interstitials are considered, by Google, to be intrusive ads, which makes the pages drop in rankings, especially on mobile.
Now, you can call this an oversight by the Ads team but it’s really just being unaware of what they’re not aware of –
It’s one of those unknown, unknowns.
By the time SEO start working to fix this issue, it’s:
- Already too late – i.e. the loss in rankings have already happened
- An issue that will take weeks or even months to resolve
Getting back to parity after something like this can take well over a year. This is not hyperbolic.
And this is just one example – of many situations where SEO is impacted by non-SEOs!
Think of every department in your business that contributes to the shape of your website.
I assure you every single one has the potential to negatively affect your SEO by being unaware of how their involvement with the website impacts the site’s SEO.
How do you expect SEO performance to improve when SEOs are constantly firefighting?
You see, this is why people find SEO so frustrating.
Even SEOs get frustrated with SEO, sometimes.
It’s not SEO in itself. It’s the monumental task of trying to stop people from messing up the bloody site!
Whenever the site is optimised, it’s regressed. You then have to optimise from its new state, which is worse than its previous state.
It’s like being on a journey where you take one step forward, and several steps backward.
It’s so arduous. And it really doesn’t have to be.
It absolutely doesn’t have to be.
But this is how it is when SEOs are in a constant state of firefighting.
You could get more SEOs to tackle the challenge of getting SEO to improve its performance.
But this isn’t the root of the problem.
The root of the problem is that non-SEOs are unaware of how their actions on a site affect the site’s SEO performance.
This will be the root of the problem until it’s addressed.
Simply ensuring everyone (who impacts your website) understands SEO, as it pertains to their department, goes a long way to solve this problem.
It’s evangelism. SEO evangelism.
The more non-SEOs have an understanding of SEO, the more likely you are to be successful with the channel.