To make a valuable impact, SEO has to be understood by more than just an organisation's search marketers. This post suggests how to explain the concepts, and get buy-in, from different people within an organisation.
I've chosen some of the standard roles that you may find in a company or organisation with a web-presence and for each one have listed:
- Their role: a description of their position within the company and their responsibilities.
- Persuade them: once you've described SEO, this gives something extra to get them excited about the possibilities of SEO for them / their department, to help get them on side.
- Ask them: I've tried to list one particular request you can make to people in each role to benefit the SEO process within your organisation.
In addition, you should remember to give back to each of these stakeholders. There'll be some metric, data or graphs that will demonstrate to them the ongoing effect they are having on the project, how it has benefited the organisation as a whole, and (for bonus points) how their role has benefited from SEO success. Inspiring people in this way leads to their ongoing commitment, and a successful organisation full of motivated, happy people.
CEO
- Their role: Responsible for the whole company; interested in the 'big picture' and needs to be able to justify decisions and costs to the board and shareholders.
- Persuade them: SEO gives a competitive advantage in attracting visitors and customers. Though it requires an initial push of effort, and ongoing resource, the work will show a demonstrable ROI, they'll be provided with regular figures for the board about the profit generated by SEO efforts.
- Ask them: if there are any questions or objections they have, so that you can answer / resolve them. It can be important to get senior management to understand and appreciate online marketing, both so that they can approve investment in it and so that they will enthuse about & promote the project internally.
CTO
- Their role: Responsible for developing technology within the organisation and we'll assume in this case responsible for the organisation's website and online development.
- Persuade them: There is a large technical aspect to optimising a website for search engines - lots of information is available (both officially from the search engines, and recommendations from third parties) but there is work to be done in adapting this best-practice advice to the organisation's unique needs. However, it's not an entirely technical process, and much of the ongoing work will be done 'off-site', by those in the advertising / promotions teams.
- Ask them: to assign a proportion of their team's time to SEO - ideally including members from both web development and R&D departments.
Web Designer
- Their role: Designing the look and branding of the organisation's website
- Persuade them: Designing websites that will adhere to SEO principles need not be a significant constraint. There's a significant overlap between designing human-usable and SEO-friendly sites, and many of the most well designed & stylish sites follow the appropriate guidelines.
- Ask them: to spend time talking to developers and SEOs about design practices that may harm or hamper SEO, and use this knowledge in their online design work.
Web Developer
- Their role: To turn designs for web pages into code which can be published online.
- Persuade them: By following some relatively straight forward (and typically common-sense) practices when writing code, developers have a vital role in creating pages that can be easily read and understood by search engines. They'll see the impact of their work very visibly, as pages from the site get indexed and returned in appropriate search results.
- Ask them: to read lots! They can start with SEOmoz's guides and blog posts (espec. pages from the technical issues category) and should print out the web developer's SEO cheat sheet. Also, remind them that as easy at this basic best-practice stuff is, lots of people do get it wrong, so they should be prepared to get mad-props from their SEO colleagues for not fouling up this stuff as much as some of the competitors.
Sales Manager
- Their role: In commercial organisations, they're responsible for the journey through the funnel from enquiry to sale.
- Persuade them: We can use data from the website and experience from the SEO community to target phrases which will generate visits & enquiries from the people most likely to convert into a sale. Their feedback about new enquiries and leads, combined with analytics data, will help tailor the products/services and marketing messages to minimise poor lead for the team and maximise sales profit.
- Ask them: to help with keyword research by giving you the words and phrases that potential customers use to describe their problems or to ask for product types.
Marketing Manager
- Their role: Responsibilities can include product development, advertising, press and promotion.
- Persuade them: Highly ethical SEO can be undertaken by following all the marketing best practices they're familiar with. Giving a positive experience before and after purchase, creating and fostering conversations around the brand, getting coverage on trusted websites, etc can all contribute to improved rankings. In addition, search engine marketing produces very clear returns in terms of number of visitors, their activity on the site and purchases made / revenue generated - so they'll be able to demonstrate value and justify ongoing investment in this activity.
- Ask them: to get up to speed on the importance of inbound links, and discover ways that their teams' activities can help to generate links.
Content Editor
- Their role: Responsibilities may include any of creating, commissioning, editing and publishing content on the site.
- Persuade them: As well as being able to attract more visitors to your content, we can use SEO insights to help generate ideas for new site content that could be particularly successful. We can produce guidelines for your writers to help their content be more successful in search engines, and we can provide statistics that show how successful different pieces of content or different writers have been, to help inspire them to create more great content.
- Ask them: to review analytics and link data with you, to look at what has been particularly successful (in terms of total traffic, links and search traffic) and to try creating copy and content that is more SEO targeted. In addition, talk to them about writing great headlines and about linkbait' show how their team can create content that goes wild on social networks and gets loads of links.
Community / Outreach Manager
- Their role: Responsible for the organisation's relationships with individuals on and/or off the site, often with a view to generating conversation about the brand.
- Persuade them: By reaching out to people elsewhere online and encouraging them to mention us & link to the site, you / your team will increase the strength and trust of the site - this increases its ability to receive traffic for relevant search terms. Using tools such as Linkscape, we can show the value of every link you create and help you find new opportunities for outreach and linkbuilding.
- Ask them: to try requesting links from a few people they have close relationships with. Demonstrate how to find new places and people to reach out to and reasons to contact them (such as sharing content, offering resources, writing guest content, offering prizes etc.)
More
Every organisation has different roles, and the roles may have different responsibilities, but this gives some idea of the ways you might persuade different people that they can contribute to and benefit from SEO.
Feel free to use the comments to share any particular advice you have for explaining & promoting SEO internally. If you have any particular objections that come up, do mention them and we'll see if we can come up with suitable responses.
Great post, Rob, and something both consultants and in-house SEOs have to deal with quite frequently in my experience. As a CEO, it's been really interesting to observe how, even with my background, I won't always make the decision to prioritize the SEO upgrade or option and instead try to push product or upgrade some other part of the business.
The only comment I'd add is that CTO, at least in the US, is often more of a strategic role than an operational one, and much of the time, it's the VP of Engineering that actually runs the dev team and thus needs to be on board and fully understand the SEO issues.
Hi Rob, good post!
Couple of points to add:
1) CTO
Yes Rand is correct, even in the UK CTO is a more strategic role, whereas CIO or Director of IT may have the actual resource for Web dev/research.
2) CTOs or CIOs
One key value adder is you can help them get bigger budgets by helping prove the ROI on their various projects, afterall analytics & ROI is what we do daily so this can easily be transfered, along with the knowledge of "sexy" subjects like Social media, usability & pretty good knowledge of the web. All this helps their projects gain traction & them budget.
3) CEOs
Agreed, however if your org. is parter of a greater corporation (or has shareholders/stakeholders) then good reports/audits/evaluations of your company/industry/competitors tend to go down quite well.
4) Web Developers & Marketing/Sales Managers
Here I think you've missed a key one. Sympathise with them - too often the web dev's end up in conflict with the Marketing./Sales/PR teams - due down to one side doesnt understand IT & dev processes, the other doesnt understand fluidity of PR or the demands of marketing etc. So a key role/advantage here is to play peacemaker as SEO's have a great advantage in being that middleman who understands the Dev's as well as knowing the PR/marketing/sales needs.
*edit stupid formatting.
If you're dealing with a small business, talking to the owner covers everyone on this list - you just have to pause as they change hats.
I believe that this is one of the key things SEO 'experts' forget. How to explain to and persuade those who don't know much about SEO.
Fantastic and amazingly detailed article.
I think another thing we forget, which this post reminds us, is to ask other people to take personal responsibility in any SEO endeavor. Too often, I find myself guilty of just giving instructions. When you can show an otherwise non-interested person how their work directly affects traffic or conversions, they become much more engaged.
I am always amazed by pushback from sales managers to rolling up thier sleeves when it comes to SEO. They seem to have the most to gain from looking at analytics and user data for tailoring sales pitches, funnels etc.
The resistance from all manner of people in a business is amazing considering the tremendous value to SEO.
What a great post. It takes a village to be doing SEO properly, right? The best part about the post is the Q and A tips that you list for each role.
Great advice, Rob. As experts of all sorts, we tend to sometimes get caught up in our own intellectual superiority and go off and pout when people disagree with us. The best advice in the world is useless if you can't get it implemented. In a large organization, that means understanding the people who you need as allies and learning how to work with them.
Very very very useful guidelines. A sort of "memorandum" that should be to read before replying to a potential client and, especially, to mantain your clients up with your services.
And it's really useful for internal SEOs, who (as my personal experience teached me) could have even more problem that an external SEO agency in convincing and obtaining the collaboration of all the figures of a business company.
The only 'but' is that these guidelines are not focused to very small companies (self-entrepenuers or up to 10 employees), when many of these figures are resumed in one person of the organization or outsourced (for instance web designer and even the technical administration of the website... relation with other companies with which we could have clients in common could be worth a post here). But they can be quite easily 'tweaked' to this kind of reality.
Thanks
I like this.
I find people/companies fall into 3 catagories:
Depending which catagory the potential client falls into will require a different tact on how they should be approached.
Failing to highlight which catagory the potential client is in could be the difference between getting the job...and not!
Paul Martin
Cube3 Marketing
Great Post - Very useful
Thanks!
I liked this post. When you give eveyone a sense of "ownership" it seems alot easier to build as a team instead of as one.
Teamwork makes the dreamwork!!!
Best
It's always difficult to explain what you do to someone who doesn't have the technical know-how. In my opinion, as you move further down the list, the more people know about SEO.
What I mean is the CEO is less likely to take an interest in SEO than the Web Designer, Developer and Marketing Manager - so it's important to know what to say and where to each layer of management.
Thanks a lot for the post, really interesting read.
Complete understanding of SEO is limited in most organizations and yet it effects each of these stakeholders' goals. For instance, although you state that SEM produces very clear returns, marketing managers sometimes don't know how to estimate the value of SEO or to put a value on an organically-generated lead, as opposed to a paid search lead, or a lead that comes through some other marketing activity. (We have found this to be particularly true in business-to-business markets with long sales cycles, making it difficult to tie traffic or even leads to revenue.)
The task for a internet marketing company is to demonstrate the benefits of a good SEO/PPC campaign and how it will help them meet their perspective goals. This blog does a great job in describing how to tackle just that. Excellent post.
To promote SEO internally, I ask the following set of questions. In the past 2 months how many times have you responded to direct mail? In the past 2 months how many times have you purchased something because of an ad in TV, radio, or newspapers? In the past 2 months how many times have you researched a product or service in Google? Hat tip to David Meerman Scott.
Good post :-) I think it will helpful for all readers
Wow that is one detailed list! As a small seo company, it's fun to see the organizational distribution on bigger cases.https://www.usa-jordan.com
7 Years on and still relevant.
I deal with small business owners. Explaining the long game is very difficult to a small business owner who has only a minimal budget for website design/development, and possibly startup for some PPC. SEO is def seen, I believe, from a purely marketing perspective, and if it doesn't pay for itself in a month or two, even if you break it down to the owner at the beginning, the perception is one of wasted money.
Great post Rob, please forgive the late, late, LATE comment.
This is a fantastic resource for startups and small businesses as they grow in to a larger company.
It really breaks down and shows how SEO must be understood at every level within the company in order for it to be done effectively.
This is a good outline for anyone getting started. I'm working on structuring my business and hiring good team members and this was very helpful.
Just became a member, looking to learn some good information about building and expanding my SEO business.
Getting buy-in from the whole organization is key to a successful SEO campaign. Nice post identifying specific roles. This will be good to share with clients.
Thanks for helping make our jobs easier!
Great article, It's not always that easy to explain how each individual should help towards making websites not only search engine friendly but also user friendly. IMHO It all depends on how stubborn the people your trying to teach are.
I shall be forwarding this article on to my co-workers to help them understand why SEO is needed.
Very usefull post!
It will also help SEO consultants / Internet Marketing company's to better explain the importance of company wide commitment!
Such cool post man thx a lot!!!
Good post Rob!
I would love to hear how to manage CEOs, web devs and other to work together. With more than 5 projects in one company I see the tendency to give least priority to SEO
Maybe the key could be to make them all understand that SEO can be the 'glue' that can integrate all the projects and all the departments, as it need the intervention and collaboration of practically every area of a business company (Marketing/Pr, Technical/Devs, Commercial/Administration and Direction).
It's hard... and can be even harder, but it's something that is possible to achieve thanks to tips as these ones by Rob.
Then there's the wishful position that would be nice to invoke upon uncooperative team members: GTE (Guido the Enforcer)
If all else fails with communication of your needs as an SEO, it sure would be nice to send cousin Guido in with his set of brass knuckles to ensure cooperation.
Good post. This should be an essential tool for every In-House SEO.
Thanks a lot Rob! As a new SEO it is always good to have a better idea of what other people are doing and what other titles there are out there (at other companies and what not). It's also nice to have a handy link to point people towards when they ask me what I do and I simply don't feel like explaining it again.
Thanks!
Interesting how many of these fit under the general heading of 'Promotions.'
Wow that is one detailed list! As a small seo company, it's fun to see the organizational distribution on bigger cases.
Great post :)