SEO & Content Working Better Together

Hello, today we’re going to be talking about how to get your SEO and content teams working better together. So there’s a variety of ways in which we’re going to do this. We’re going to look at project management, strategy, delivery, and results.

So, as we all know, SEO and content teams are now inextricably linked when it comes to the delivery of a digital marketing campaign, specifically an SEO campaign. So it’s important to make sure that everyone working on a campaign is all pulling in the right direction and all singing off the same hymn sheet.

So the best place to start is with project management. Now, it’s always important to get your internal communication, your internal systems and processes in place whenever delivering a campaign. So make sure that you outline a series of meetings and you create a diary of when you guys are going to be meeting up.

So whether you’re in-house or whether you’re agency, it’s always important to keep everyone in the loop who’s going to be working on that campaign, and the best way to do this is to have regular face-to-face meetings. You don’t want to be relying on just e-mail. E-mail can get lost in translation. There could be things that you really need to discuss, where or you need to go to town, go into more depth. So make sure that you’re having that regular face-to-face contact or telephone contact.

It’s important that you don’t overdo it. So it’s important that you make sure that these meetings are ironed out in terms of, let’s say, you have them once a month and then maybe have a quarterly review every quarter to go over the campaign performance to date.

Finally, when it comes to project management, you might want to look at project management tools that work well between two teams or a variety of different teams. So look at things like Basecamp or Trello. There’s a whole host out there that would be applicable to your different needs, but these tools really help to galvanise and help to kind of keep everyone in the loop who are going to be working on that particular campaign.

Now next up is strategy. The best place to start when it comes to creating a strategy is making sure you know the client’s goals. So if it’s the client or whether it’s an in-house campaign that you’re doing, understand, have a starting point of what the goal is or what you want to achieve. Then make sure that everyone in the department, across different departments understand what that sole goal is.

You then want to work out your KPIs. You want to work out how you’re going to measure performance based on those goals. So it could be things like link acquisition. It could be social mentions. It could be rankings. It could be increased organic traffic, referral traffic, direct traffic. Whatever it may be, make sure that you’ve got your goal set and your KPI set.

Understand your audience as well. This is a really key part in that strategy phase. Make sure that everyone understands who it is you’re targeting, why you’re targeting them. Is it B2B? Is it B2C? Do you know their age, their sex, their location? Do you know what types of groups is it that you’re going to be targeting? Either create buyer personas or create a list of audience types. It’s entirely up to you, but make sure, again, that everyone knows who it is that you’re targeting.

Then finally, once you have all that information, do a collaborative brainstorming session with both the DME, with both the SEO team and the content marketing team. Make sure that everyone in that brainstorming session contributes and has something to deliver. Again, just make sure that everyone’s on the same page, and make sure everyone’s pulling in the same direction towards that campaign.

Now, when it comes to delivery, whether you’re working on content or SEO, and whether you’re reporting to a line manager, a project manager, or the client, no one is more important than the customer, the customer of that campaign. So it might be that your client wants to do something, it might be that your content marketer wants to do something, or the SEO wants to do something. Whatever decision that you make, make sure that it has the customer’s interest at heart. Make sure that it delivers value to the campaign and, ultimately, to the customer. So always remember, customer is number one when it comes to campaign delivery.

Make sure you have a series of checks in place as well whenever you’re delivering a campaign. So whether you’re creating content, or you’re implementing a technical implementation, or you’re creating meta, or you’re doing something across both teams, always make sure that you have someone to report to — a senior, a line manager, someone who can spot-check and make sure that there is that level of safety in place. That’s really important when it comes to campaign delivery so that things don’t go undetected.

Ongoing communication is really important during the delivery phase as well. So it’s important to always keep the client in the loop with what’s going on, content you’re creating, implementations that you’re making, that type of thing. And it’s always important for both teams to be as flexible, as agile, and as creative as possible. So if a client has a serious issue with the site, it might be that you need to stop doing what you’re doing and prioritise what needs to be done to ensure that that campaign gets back on track. Or they might want to stop a particular area of the campaign and focus on another area of the campaign. It’s really important that you, working on that client, working on that campaign, are able to facilitate that, as long as it’s for the good of the campaign of course.

So this finally then brings us on to the results phase, and it’s really important that, as two teams working together or a variety of teams working together, when you report your results, it’s a collaborative effort. So make sure that, first of all, you are reporting regularly, and that can either be with a series of monthly reports, or a quarterly presentation, or something like that. It might even be more frequent than that. You might have to have weekly meetings where you need to keep a client or a line manager in the loop with how performance is to date.

Make sure everything that you’re reporting is applicable to both teams. Again, make sure that you understand the frequency of when to report and how to report. Don’t go into too much detail in terms of the hows, or the wheres, or things like that. It’s really important to keep to the point when you’re reporting. So it might be that your line manager, or project manager, or client really wants to see those top level statistics, those KPIs that you’re reporting on and delivering on. Then, if that’s the case, make sure you stick to that. If they need to know more information about how you’ve done it, why you’ve done it, all that type of stuff, that might be a separate meeting, but it’s really important to make sure that your reporting is really to the point and your KPIs are relevant.

And then, finally, it’s really about how you report. So do you put together a report and just e-mail it to your project manager or client? If that’s the case, I suggest following it up with a phone call or a meeting. Alternatively, you can use tools like Basecamp, like Trello, again to make sure that you’re reporting on those top-level statistics, top-level KPIs. Again, if more information is needed, you can follow it up with a meeting.

So that gives you a whistle-stop tour of how SEO and content can work together, how they can be more collaborative, and how they can work better together. If you have any tips you’d like to share, feel free to leave a comment in the section below. For more information, please visit any of our social profiles coming up now.