Step Wise SEO

Marketing, Sales, and Public Relations make up a corporate SEO trifecta. Get all three excited about your SEO campaign and you’ll have built your “brain-trust” foundation for success.

Here’s some food for thought that might come in handy when you need to deal with these departments.

Marketing: VIPs of SEO
In most organizations, the majority of the tasks relating to SEO will be performed by people in the marketing department.

We’re guessing you’re a member of this department yourself. It’s a natural progression: the marketing department may already be handling the website as well as offline marketing such as print ads, television, radio, billboards and online marketing such as banner ads and direct e-mails.

The marketing team will likely be instrumental in the SEO tasks like keyword brainstorming and research, writing text for descriptions and page titles, writing pay-per-click (PPC) ad copy, managing PPC campaigns, and executing link-building campaigns.

The individuals on the marketing team have, quite literally, the skills to pay the bills, and they probably don’t need any convincing that SEO is a worthwhile effort. What they will need, however, is some organization and some focusing.

We have found that marketing staffers are almost always open to a little education about how the search engines work, as long as the information is provided on a need-to-know basis.

For example, whenever we brainstorm for keywords with a marketing manager, inevitably their list contains terms that are extremely vague (”quality”) so specific that nobody is searching for them (”geometric specifications of duckpin bowling balls”).

When we trim down that list, we always explain the basic concept of search popularity vs. relevance. But when it comes to educating the team, a little bit of - formation at a time is key; you don’t want to drown your colleagues in too many details.

But what if you’re not working in such a receptive environment? Maybe you are one only one convinced of the positive powers of SEO.

Perhaps, for reasons of budget of time, you don’t have the buy-in you need to move forward. Perhaps other marketing programs are taking precedence or the department can’t seem to make the leap from offline to online marketing.

If that’s the case, it’s time to convince the marketing manager of the importance of your SEO project!

Here’s one way to approach it: Focus on the needs of the marketing department. Yes, it’s time for you to go into therapist mode and do a whole lot of listening.

Is there something that they’ve been dying to get done? A new tagline, perhaps? Maybe some changes to the corporate website? Are they feeling overworked?

Do they secretly want to drop one segment-say, billboard advertising-out of the marketing mix? Are they having trouble getting help from the IT department? Tell them SEO can help.

SEO can provide the trackability that they’ve been waiting for. It may provide justification for dropping less-successful advertising venues.

It can forge new alliances between Marketing and IT. On the “warm and fuzzy” side, it may provide an outlet for a creative soul who feels trapped in marketingspeak and wants to do more creative writing.

And SEO is an extremely telecommuting-friendly enterprise. Is there a new dad in the department who would love to spend a portion of his week working from home?

Once you’ve found some common ground and the enthusiasm is starting to grow, look through your conversion goals “Clarify Your Goals,” and consider starting Your SEO Plan with a a pilot project that you can focus your SEO efforts on together.

Pick something close to the hearts of the marketing staff: a recent or upcoming launch, a section of your site devoted to a special event, a promotion, or a product line that’s down in the dumps.

What if you’re at the Bottom of the Pecking Order?
If you’re on the bottom of the food chain in your organization, you may be either ignored or micromanaged by the people you answer to.

Here are some tips that might work for you no matter what department you’re dealing with:

• Create monthly reports, even if nobody’s looking at them. As consultants, we have often asked ourselves, “What’s the point of documenting everything if nobody reads our reports?”

But it always comes down to this: we need them for our own reference. After a couple of months, search engine results begin to blur together-don’t expect to keep this stuff in your head.

• Keep your reporting to a monthly schedule, even if you are asked for more frequent data.

There are rare exceptions to this rule, such as extremely short-lived promotions or unusually volatile PPC campaigns.

But for almost everything else, it really is helpful to set expectations that SEO is about long-term trends, not daily numbers.

• Deliver meaningful information. When you e-mail your boss a spreadsheet detailing your ranks for the last six months, you’re delivering necessary information.

But you can turn that into meaningful information when you summarize it in your e-mail:

“Dear Boss, This month, three of our top-priority keywords made an entry into the top 30 in Google.

Five of our keywords improved in rank, but our ranks for the term ‘industrial strength pencils’ continued to slide.”

• Likewise, if you have to deliver bad news, always deliver a plan of action for addressing it.

You’re the in-house SEO expert, like it or not, and your boss is looking to you for guidance.

The boss doesn’t want to hear, “Holy moly! Google dropped all our pages! “The boss does want to hear,” It looks like our pages have been dropped from Google.

This is probably a temporary problem, caused by Googlebot trying to crawl our site during our server outage last week.

I’ll resubmit the pages using Google’s free submittal form and keep a close eye on the situation.”

• Don’t take all the credit for your success. This is not just to be humble, it’s also because you actually aren’t responsible for every SEO success.

Even if you do everything right, you can’t control what your competitors are doing or the nature of the next big search engine algorithm change.

If you set your boss’s expectations along these lines, you won’t be blamed for every little failure, either.

Selling SEO to Sales
Your sales department will be happy to hear that your SEO campaign will be bringing in not just traffic, but targeted traffic that leads directly to sales.

You will be looking for their help in the following areas of SEO: keyword brainstorming, assistance with conversion tracking, competitive analysis, and insight into the customers’ Web habits.

Since Sales often has the most direct contact with customers, they will have excellent ideas to add to your keyword brainstorming sessions.

And if your conversions are of the easy-to-measure variety, such as online purchases, they’ll probably enjoy monitoring conversion rates on a PPC campaign and adjusting accordingly.

On the other hand, you may have a harder time getting help with conversion for transactions made over the phone or in person.

The sales department may not want to make the effort to figure out exactly how the person on the other end of the phone got their number,

or they may feel that grilling the customers about how they found you will interfere with the sales process.

You need to convince your sales team that incorporating this sort of follow-up into the sales process is not a waste of time because it’s important for everyone to know whether the website is generating profits.

The key to bringing your sales team on board for these more difficult tasks is educating them on the connection between targeted search engine traffic and bottom bone sales:

How can you make it easier for the sales team to track conversions to the website? One way is to set up a special toll-free number and display it prominently on our website-but nowhere else!

In this way, you can easily tell which customers got the number there. It’s not a perfect solution because it doesn’t tell you which search engines and keywords were used, but it does succeed in connecting the dots for the sales department:

SEO - Website Traffic - More Phone Calls - More Sales - Bigger Bonus!

SEO and Public Relations Can Relate
If your company has a public relations (PR) department, you’re in luck. If not, think about this:

If you got a phone call tomorrow from a radio station wanting to do a Story on your company, who would they speak with? That’s your PR department.

PR folks are very well suited to work with you on your SEO campaign. They’re careful about words, they’re excellent communicators, and they probably know how to take the time to track their results.

They are the “keepers” of the brand, creating and monitoring the face that your organization puts forth to the public.

Look to PR for help with keyword brainstorming, optimizing press releases, link building, and keeping your search engine listings and other links in line with your branding.

A typical PR department is primarily concerned with getting your company mentioned in the media and making sure that the publicity is accurate and-ideally-positive.

Many newspaper and magazine articles, not to mention blog postings, are triggered by press releases or other forms of contact from a PR department.

And it’s fair to say that search engines deserve a place among these media sources: just like magazines, newspapers and the like, search engines provide a free, ostensibly unbiased third-party source of publicity for your organization.

Your PR department can think of search engines as a particularly big media outlet.

Even more important from a PR point of view, search engines have become a key research tool for those very journalists, bloggers, and thought leaders PR is chatting up in the first place.

You might meet some resistance from a PR department that thinks of SEO as strictly a form of advertising.

In truth, SEO often does walk a fine line. A PPC campaign is most clearly within the advertising classification,

but other SEO tasks, such as including target keywords in press releases or gaining incoming links from business contacts, fall more directly into the PR bucket.

Once you explain to your PR folks that you will be seeking their assistance only with organic SEO activity, they should be more open to the possibilities.

As the department that protects the company brand, PR will likely have a great deal of interest in the brand maintenance tasks that fall under the SEO umbrella:

monitoring search engine listings and other online mentions for currency and accuracy. You may need to educate the PR team about how to find outdated information online,

but once they know where (and how) to look, don’t be surprised if they develop a passion for rooting out the “uglies.”

What if your website is not trying to sell anything or gather leads, or run advertising for revenue?

What if the only goal of your website is brand awareness? This is when you need your PR department most of all.

The folks in PR are already skilled in handling those difficult-to-measure soft targets offline through clipping services and surveys.

They may even be doing some tracking of online mentions. Now you need to tie their tracking efforts together with the SEO campaign to make sure that SEO gets credit where credit is due.

Fortunately, PR people are generally very comfortable with documentation. You shouldn’t have too hard a time convincing them to document their SEO successes.
Why is it, after all, that organizing an SEO team is so hard?

What does your marketing team know about the importance of robot-readable text, keyword placement, and PPC campaign management?