The Challenge of SEO Team Building

You’re busy, and SEO isn’t your only job, so we’re pretty sure you won’t be thrilled to hear this:

Your SEO campaign will incorporate a wide variety of tasks: writing and editing, usability and site architecture, coding, ad copy creation, landing page optimization, research, web analytics, and interpersonal communication for link building and social media. If you’re doing this all yourself, bravo! you’re just the sort of multitasking do-it-yourselfer who thrives in SEO. If your entire company can’t ride to lunch on the same motorcycle, we’re putting you in charge of coordinating the SEO team. Either way, once you’ve read this book, you’ll be the in-house SEO expert, so the responsibility for all these tasks ultimately falls on you.

Before you close this book forever and run for the antacid, let’s clarify a bit. We’re not saying that you have to be the one to code the website or set up the analytics software. We’re saying you need to know enough to be able to speak intelligently to the people who do these tasks. And here’s the hard part: you also need to convince them to spend some of their precious time working on your SEO Plan.

Why is it, after all, that organizing an SEO team is so hard? We have observed four common reasons:

• SEO requires effort from multiple departments and a variety of skills, such as marketing, sales, IT, public relations (PR), and creative/editorial.
• SEO is a relatively new discipline and doesn’t have established processes within the corporate system.
• Measuring return on investment (ROI) on SEO - especially the organic variety is no cakewalk, and predicting ROI in advance is even harder. 
• The SEO industry carries around a bit of a bad reputation—and some folks still think SEO is about tricking or spamming the search engines.

This chapter is here to guide you through the SEO crusade within your organization. There are some common patterns of resistance you might meet in each of the departments discussed here, and we’ll share with you the most effective ways to counteract them.

As with any team-building effort, building your SEO team will be an exercise in communication:

But remember this: they’re probably just as busy as you are, and that’s why we advocate a pace yourself approach. Don’t overwhelm your team with information just explain the SEO best practices that pertain to the task at hand.

We have worked in many situations in which team participation was less than ideal for an SEO campaign, and we know how this can reduce the campaign’s effectiveness. What happens when those carefully prepared page edits aren’t implemented, keywords aren’t incorporated into site rewrites, or a planned-for paid search budget never comes through?

What follows are some thoughts for keeping the enthusiasm going in all your departments.