One of the most common problems that I’ve encountered in my 11 years in organic search marketing is around the operational integration of SEO into web projects. Many organizations have an SEO resource, agency, or department, but still ship websites, redesigns, and products that are not well-optimized. How does this happen so frequently?
Organizations frequently struggle to achieve the full benefits that search engine optimization has to offer, simply because SEO is not well-integrated into existing project teams and workflows. SEO needs to be fully integrated into an organization at the operational level, having touch-points with multiple functional groups across the website’s (or project’s) lifecycle.
This presentation outlines a framework for the operational integration of SEO with existing functional groups / business units that are stakeholders in the success of a web marketing channel. A few notes:
- I outline some “what is SEO?” basics (assuming that it will be presented to a broad audience).
- I address the issue of SEO deliverables early.
- Frequently, I’ve found that project teams need to have defined what the specific work product is that they’ll be receiving to relieve anxiety.
- Because of inadequate information, education, or misinformation, project teams may come into the project with a preconceived notion of what SEO is. As an SEO, your job is to re-frame the discussion and expectations, early.
- I go on to discuss how SEO interacts with each of the more common functional groups that are involved with web projects at 3 phases – project initiation, during development, and at launch / ongoing.
- This is necessarily a simplification of all of the work that will need to occur, but helps to give some shape to the project, what the interactions will be, and the reasoning behind the required interactions.