What’s the state of your SEO, operationally?
This is often overlooked, and I think it’s a real shame because it’s an indicator to how successful you’ll be in the SERPs.
As I like to say, SEO starts way before your state in the SERPs is achieved.
To realise rankings, in the top zone, you really have to work on the way SEO is regarded in your business, both on a business level and on an operational level.
So, what is the state of your SEO, operationally?
If you find that your SEOs are firefighting issues, addressing them only after they’ve occurred, your SEO requires improvement in-house, before you can realise higher traffic growth, via the organic channel.
One reason why I say this is because the typical way of treating SEO in a business, is to invest in it, and then expect results to be achieved instantly.
The hard work is often overlooked, and the area that’s overlooked, is indeed, the operational work of SEO.
The operational work of SEO is seen when it comes to implementing SEO recommendations.
This is where you see and get all sorts of issues with the channel.
Why?
Because this is the part of SEO that requires non-SEOs to collaborate with SEOs.
When it comes time to implement SEO recs, you almost have to reform your team, don’t you?
You have to ensure your teams are working well together, in order to perform with SEO.
Isn’t this the case with all new teams, groups, gatherings, that come together for a common goal?
You have the storming, forming, norming, performing phases with all new teams.
Once you reach that performing phase, the goal is to keep everyone in this phase.
However, this isn’t to say that people don’t, and can’t, regress.
What can cause a performing team to regress?
The addition of a new element, right?
Add something new to a performing team and the new element opens up the possibility of changes to occur.
Well, isn’t SEO a new element in businesses?
SEO, even in Digital Marketing, is new and more importantly, unknown.
SEO is unknown. To non-SEOs, it’s unknown – it’s a mystical marketing channel, right?
What do you get when you add an unknown element into a performing team?
You get a regression of the performing state, don’t you?
How much progress do you expect to make with your SEO when there is a lot of infighting, preventing SEO recs from being implemented?
How do you expect your search visibility to grow?
In order to improve your organic market share, you need to implement changes to your website.
In order to implement changes to your website, you need to have SEO recommendations worked on.
In order to have SEO recommendations worked on, you need to have non-SEOs onboard.
You need non-SEOs to buy into SEO.
The unfortunate mistake businesses make with SEO buy-in is thinking buy-in is only applicable on the business level.
There is this thought process that once the board buys into SEO, that’s all that’s needed for SEO to be a success.
This is far from true.
If SEO isn’t bought-in, operationally, you’ll have your SEO in a state of constant firefighting, and/or, infighting.
SEO firefighting will be SEOs reacting only when there is a known problem.
What is the well-known problem with SEO? The one everyone grasps? A drop in rankings!
This is what gets everyone to react because it’s an easy aspect of SEO to quantify.
Well, by the time your rankings have dropped, whatever caused the drop has already happened.
In order words, you’ll be busy firefighting the issue to get back to parity, as opposed to preventing any and all issues that’s jeopardize your website’s ranking ability.
To have your SEO in a state of firefighting is not what you’ll want for your business.
To have infighting with your SEO, is just as unfortunate, especially because it’s avoidable.
How is it avoidable? Let’s quickly touch on this.
Investing in SEO is an important business decision.
Incorporating SEO into your business requires work to ensure it functions, operationally.
In order to improve your market share in the SERPs, you need to have your SEO recs implemented.
In order to have your SEO recs implemented, you need your SEOs and non-SEOs to perform together.
In order to have your SEOs and non-SEOs perform together, you need to have both integrated.
This integration happens on an operational level.
A common mistake is to think SEO integration, in a business, happens on a business level.
This is one type of buy-in into SEO – an important one, yes.
A much often forgotten buy-in into SEO is on the operational level.
How much progress do you think you’ll have with your technical SEO when your Dev team don’t care to work on SEO requests?
How much SEO work do you expect to get through when every department, every team, every non-SEO individual push back on anything SEO-related?
And, frankly, you really can’t blame non-SEOs for not caring much about SEO when they haven’t been integrated with SEO.
Internalise the situation, would you rather work on something you know, or on something that you’re unfamiliar with, which, frankly, you don’t care about – yet?
How do you expect your SEO to perform when your SEOs and non-SEOs are not performing, operationally?
This is an important consideration you’ll need to address if you want to see a growth in your search visibility.
Whilst there is infighting, on an operational level, your competitors may be making headway with their SEO.
And sometimes, winning in the SERPs, comes down to who’s able to implement their SEO strategy the quickest.
