Over the last few months I've found myself doing slightly less SEO, and in its place I've been thinking about how we can improve the SEO services we offer our clients. SEOs, I've found, tend to be quite a creative bunch, both in the type of work that gets done but also in the way that the work gets done. One of the joys of being in SEO is that the tasks that need to be done and the best way of doing these tasks is permanently evolving. The creative urges mean that often when asked to do two similar tasks a week apart, the tasks are done in a completely different way. From a job satisfaction and creativity point of view, this is fantastic; starting from scratch each time on a task means the creative juices can really flow. From a management and consistency point of view, re-inventing the wheel each time is a nightmare!
In business strategy discussions we often talk about wearing multiple hats to help differentiate between the various roles we have to play. In any given day I can metaphorically wear a number of different hats, ranging from my shareholder hat, to my management hat, to my SEO or developer's hat.
With my management hat on (I picture a bowler hat) I've been trying to get a happy medium between allowing the creative juices to flow freely and being able to guarantee quality and consistency to our clients. It's early days for our more formal processes, and I dare say I'm pushing a bit far towards the consistency side of things, but I thought I'd share a few of my thoughts.
Create a Products and Services List
Our first step towards the management holy grail of consistent quality is to create a list of products and services that we offer. SEO is constantly changing (and salesmen have a habit of selling anything!) so this list is constantly evolving, but having the list makes our life so much easier in so many different areas.
Sales Process
In a small and growing company it is very tempting to do anything for anybody that asks for it. We all want to be able to deliver exactly what the clients want, but without careful specification and handover between the sales team and the operations team this can lead to poorly defined tasks.
We have asked (management speak for "told") the sales team (in our case, Will!) that they are only allowed to sell things that are on our list. These are the things that we are confident we can really excel at. Every task we sell is taken from something from that list. This means that right from the outset everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet (I'm really getting into this management speak).
It's worth mentioning that this hasn't led to us selling things that people don't really want or need. Almost every business and every website is different, so the last thing I'm suggesting is that you just apply a generic product or service to all of your clients' websites. Having said that, when it boils down to it, there are a fairly small subset of tasks that occur on almost every project. Keyword research, anyone? What about a technical site review? To reduce any lingering doubts, we also allow the sales team to list any specific areas of focus or differences from our standard product.
Creating Processes
We have spent time working out what we mean and how we go about delivering each and every task. This is the balancing act I was talking about earlier. If this process is too regimented, all the creativity we enjoy as SEOs is lost and you are just following a recipe. If this process doesn't exist at all, the management structure is lost.
By creating the processes, we have something we can review and adapt over time. When our creativity finds a better way of doing something, we can add it into the process and from that point onwards it improves the product we offer to all our clients.
To ensure that this list is used and is kept up to date, we constantly review it. We have a weekly meeting of the SEO team to discuss the various projects we are working on. Each week we review one of the processes and get feedback on ways we can improve it. There are always new SEO tools that can make a process better or faster. In theory, the days of people shouting across the office, "Does anyone remember the name of that tool that lets me ..." should be gone, since whenever we find a new tool is gets added to the process.
By constantly reviewing the processes and keeping everyone up to date with the latest tools, tactics and techniques, we are always incrementally improving the service that we offer our clients.
Reviewing Completed Projects
Someone called Guy Bellamy once said:
Hindsight is an exact science. [source]
As part of our project management process we run regular meetings to discuss all the projects that we have completed. We only run these meetings when we have enough completed projects so that there is enough to talk about. The first time we ran such a meeting I was shocked as to how much we learnt. Looking back at a project a couple of months after the work has been completed gives you the ability to see what worked and what didn't. SEO is often about trying something, measuring its effect, refining the process and trying something else. Spending the time to look back over a number of projects allows you to spot trends that you might otherwise miss.
Do projects where you start link building before you fix any technical issues work better than those where the order is reversed? Knowing the answer to these sorts of questions feeds back in to the process documents and will make you better as a consequence.
If you only take one thing from this post, I urge you to take a couple of hours out of your day and sit down with your SEO team. Look over all the projects that you have completed in the last few months and dissect and discuss. I guarantee you will learn something interesting. What you do with your new knowledge is obviously entirely up to you.
I think we're all guilty of being 'too busy'; but reviewing and discussing the work which has been undertaken with a focus on key learnings / how could we do this better etc is really important.
I'm loving your management speak too - 'Run it up the flag pole and see if anyone salutes' eh?
Speaking "management" is really rather easy. A lot of the normal constraints such as being right, or making sense seem to disappear.
I read about it from a Mr Scott Adams (a management guru) on an almost daily basis. You might enjoy. ;-)
I <3 Dilbert.
Ah! He's my favourite 'management guru'... we could all learn a lot from him :)
Duncan, you are right - it is sometimes great to think out of the box but process this information to build best practice in a proactive way. This way you get a win-win situation that can be the fast track to return on investment, keeping you client focussed and making sure nobody is out the loop. At the end of the day you need to leverage the synergy in your team to fast track improvements in your core competencies. With this mindset you will have the scope to extend your game plan and benchmark your skills into a knowledge base you can revisit in future projects. In a nut shell, to be cutting-edge you need to stay targetted to your goals whilst reducing your burn rate to allow you to grow an end-to-end solution for your customer.
Bingo!
LMFAO - I got half way through your comment before I realised you weren't making any sense. This management speak sure does work!
It didn't make one lick of sense, but man it sure sounds impressive.
I *really* *really* hope you copied and pasted that from somewhere rather than it being from your stream of consciousness, Stephen!
PS yes, I am replying to your email. Any moment now....
Actually I based it on something remember you saying once Will.
Haha. I didn't say that. I may have evangelised a bit of synergy here and there...
I agree with you.
Your article is very useful and it is worth to read carefully.Pls contuniue to write other news here.Thanks for this valuable article.
Sounds familiar! You're absolutely right with the communication stuff...
Great post Duncan. You're so right about balancing the creative with the management side of things- reinventing the wheel may be fun, but doing it again and again means you never get on to inventing one of these babies.
Having said that, I'm not so sure I signed up for this:
"In a small and growing company it is very tempting to do anything for anybody that asks for it."
So I've sold this "project", right....
The problem about processes are that they are a never ending story. You build a process, then you build another process to improve that process, and another process to make your improvement processes more efficiently,
Mert çok haklısın.Bu işler hiç bitmiyor:))
I completely agree with Mert.This pocess never ends:))
Having an internal process also helps in explaining how you go about doing SEO to clients. It can make everyone's life a lot easier.
Hi there
Excellent post, i have just started out in seo achieving some pretty good results, reading the post inspires me to do more to implement processes and deliver a quality product and peace of mind to the client.
very well said... normally in third world there are dozens of SEO companies who have ten golden points of SEO and they implement them for every client which even understanding the requirement .
A clearly defined statement of work and project plan can go a long way in developing that consistency. It is easier said than done in my experience.
Managing a creative can never be easy, therefore I do not envy you your job Duncan! (is it just me or do most of us tend to suffer from ADD?)
However, as you rightly point out, getting processes right, yet fine tuning them as time goes, really helps brings focus into an areas that has the tendency to be chaotic.
The best thing is, we know how well you guys work over there, by seeing the stuff that you guys regularly churn up, so I can safely say that if you say this is how you do things, I would be very much inclined to believe you. I raise this point because very often people have the tendency to say "I work this way" while in reality the situation is totally different!
Thanks so much for this post. I'm in a company that's still moderately new to offering SEO and this post is exactly the kind of thing we need.
Thumbs up! Thanks for sharing Duncan, keep going with the series of SEO and Internet Marketing Mangagement articles.