I’ve worked with a variety of enterprise enterprises throughout my SEO career, including big CDNs, encrypted email providers, American insurance companies, and passenger airlines.
The management of stakeholders and broader support for SEO initiatives is a fundamental difficulty in big enterprise organizations.
I have gained knowledge from and worked with organizations that use various team interaction, communication, and internal culture strategies.
This includes everything from holding monthly town halls to filming client meetings and publishing them publicly on the business’ YouTube page. This is known as a “total transparency” consulting method for a company that invests in the community.
I’ll discuss my ideas and strategies for encouraging non-SEO stakeholders to adopt an SEO-forward culture and mentality below.
I’ll also talk about ways to help non-SEO marketing teams build their websites while maintaining organic KPIs.
Recognize the techniques and information used in SEO nowadays
For the majority of businesses, organic search has the potential to be a major source of traffic, brand awareness, and revenue.
There is often a history of SEO efforts in mid-market to enterprise-level firms, whether it was during the website’s early creation in terms of architecture or through content-related methods used by teams.
For team members to follow, some firms have built checklists and protocols or have internal documentation on SEO practices.
Your initial exploration encounters with various teams and stakeholders are a terrific chance to:
- Determine any current procedures.
- Determine the extent of internal SEO knowledge.
- More importantly, determine whether the opinions expressed about specific SEO techniques are in line with your own.
You can understand the various SEO expectations across various corporate levels and stakeholders at this point, allowing you to interact and communicate effectively with them.
At this point, identifying and praising current outstanding practices is sometimes forgotten.
It doesn’t take large gestures or overly enthusiastic comments on calls for simple gestures like comments on project management tools, Slack channels, and highlighting in analysis to be effective.
Align with corporate aims
It is essential to align and report SEO impact against company-wide measures like shareholder or investor KPIs and OKRs (objectives and key results).
Take advantage of the 7 Cs of communication, consistent reporting, and information flow, specifically:
- Clear
- Concise
- Concrete
- Correct
- Coherent
- Complete
- Courteous
Keep in mind that the C-suite or VP-level stakeholders in charge of the business’s overall OKRs and KPIs are probably time-poor. Therefore, it’s crucial to make sure communications meet these seven characteristics if you want to create strong partnerships.
Align with the goals of the team
Understanding and working with non-SEO stakeholders in the organization is essential.
For instance, you might need to improve the website and conversion rates without affecting any SEO-related variables by focusing on brand and customer interaction.
Insights on the natural user journey, potential pain areas, and incompatibilities between query intent and the displayed material are likewise provided in the other direction by this.
To achieve the best outcomes, SEO cannot be handled separately by the marketing team. Collaboration is required between community managers, sales representatives (both online and offline), customer success specialists, developers, and UX designers.
Disseminate task-level goals
Emphasizing their business effect and prioritization outside of ranking is important when communicating SEO-focused advice.
This includes their impact on more general measures like brand visibility for generic searches and the user experience of the website.
Get leadership support
Executives and managers need to be aware of the importance of SEO and support efforts to improve the website’s content and technical elements.
This can be done by concentrating on five main areas:
Education
- Describe how SEO aims to create a fantastic user experience that performs well in search engines.
- Describe how SEO increases organic traffic, sales, and conversions. Give examples and figures to illustrate the impact.
Highlighting the relevance to business
- Consider SEO in terms of attaining important business goals like:
- Taking up more market share.
- Increasing brand recognition.
- Lowering the acquisition cost.
- Connect revenue and ROI to SEO best practices.
Evidence of concept
- Run a small-scale SEO campaign to demonstrate its worth before requesting significant adjustments or resources.
- To garner support for a larger program, evaluate the pilot’s performance and disseminate the findings.
Respond proactively to issues
- Be prepared to address any concerns or inquiries the leadership may have concerning SEO.
- Discuss hazards and potential solutions.
- Describe how SEO enhances other marketing strategies.
Strategy iterations
Include the leadership in the selection of high-level SEO priorities and KPIs to:
- Make sure the business goals and SEO objectives are in line.
- Give the program’s leadership a sense of pride in its accomplishment.
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Include SEO in your organization’s overall strategy
Improving internal procedures is essential to developing an SEO culture within a big business.
The sharing of knowledge and the completion of duties can be streamlined to make SEO best practices automatic.
Open channels of communication
Any new initiative in a large firm must be implemented with open communication.
To make sure all teams are on the same page, regular cadences, internal newsletters, and presentations outlining SEO objectives and strategies are used.
Talk about how SEO affects each area, and give recent successes and important metrics to show its worth. Ask for comments to resolve any issues right away.
Publish documentation
Employees can use the documentation of SEO standards, rules, and workflows as a tool to guarantee consistency.
Make manuals, cheat sheets, and checklists that cover topics like internal linking, technical SEO audits, and more.
Keep these in a gateway that is accessible to everyone in the company. Standardized documentation expedites the training of new team members and helps prevent duplication of work.
Storage needs to be managed proactively in a central, reachable location like Confluence or Sharepoint.
As the documentation repository may assist with onboarding and bringing new employees up to speed on ongoing and prior activities, documentation is also a beneficial tool for the business should it need to hire new employees.
Identified obligations and accountability
Each department and team should be given specific SEO duties and KPIs to maintain accountability.
Put web developers in charge of resolving a predetermined number of technical difficulties, and assign content writers the task of optimizing a specific number of pages each month.
Accountability is required at all levels in order to truly transform culture.
A RACI or RASCI chart makes it simple to accomplish this goal of maximum transparency throughout the organization.
Post is situated so that everyone can view their project status and develop an accountable self-governing culture.