Building a successful SEO business requires more than extensive knowledge of search optimization. A campaign only becomes successful when your company works like a well-oiled machine whose parts work together towards fulfilling its main purpose. Think of an SEO-centric culture as your oil, and this oil consists of collaboration and communication between all your departments. It’s important to develop and establish this kind of culture in your company to make sure you meet all your functions (critical or otherwise) with ease and efficiency.
Breaking Down Departmental Walls
Breaking down communication walls and allowing collaboration is the first step you should take towards establishing an SEO-centric culture. Compartmentalizing online marketing tasks makes your company inefficient because:
- Processes will have to go through a series of approvals from involved teams before being implemented, which eats up time.
- Compartmentalization means communication lines are only open within a specific team or department which means that the other departments do not know what their peers are doing. This could cause conflict when trying to accomplish tasks that require collaboration.
- You may be assigning tasks to different departments that you can pass on to one department for a more streamlined, centralized system. This wastes your resources and consumes time that your teams can use for tasks that are in line with their expertise.
Open your communication lines with other departments and reorganize if you have to. Your web IT, web design and development, SEO, content, marketing, and sales departments need to start talking about how you as one big team can accomplish tasks in the most efficient manner. Encourage brainstorming sessions, see what assignments you can centralize and how this will give your teams more time to work on what they know best.
It’s important that each department knows what the others are doing because search optimization today doesn’t focus on one facet. Knowing the accepted practices for the specific SEO tasks each department accomplishes helps improve your methodology as a whole. You can create a standard that your company will use as their guideline when working on any project.
Encourage Innovative Thinking
Continuing education is very important in the online search industry. Search is constantly changing, and it is changing at a very fast pace. Encourage your employees to continue learning about SEO and keep them updated with the latest industry news and technological developments.
The brainstorming activity I mentioned previously could be a start. Have your teams learn about the responsibilities of the other teams, and about how their contribution affects your online marketing campaigns as a whole. Participate in free online seminars discussing the latest in the online marketing industry. Join conventions occasionally if you have the resources, both to inspire innovative thinking and to promote your brand as an industry leader among peers. Inspired ideas come from constantly educating yourself and your peers and giving you the chance to see search optimization from a different perspective.
Organize and Schedule Tasks
Organization is one of the most important characteristics of an SEO-centric culture. You need to know which tasks can be scheduled ahead, create a deadline, and make sure the responsible parties meet the deadline. It lets you track campaign progress more effectively, providing information that you can include in your monthly client reports.
Scheduling tasks streamlines your process, allowing you to make improvements like:
- Finding bottlenecks in your process
- Removing unnecessary steps that only prolong the fulfillment of a task
- Modifying your strategy to make task execution more efficient
- Scaling your business by analyzing your capacity to take in new clients and handle more campaigns
Organizing also makes it easier to develop strategies for tasks like link building, funnel marketing, or content development, which makes a very good example. You can create a content calendar in advance, and have people from different departments contribute and write about their expertise. It shows your leadership, highlights your employees’ qualifications, and supports your general marketing strategy. Because you schedule tasks in advance, they will have the time to procure your requirements, and you can create a better funneling strategy using content.
The idea behind an SEO-centric culture is to streamline processes, encourage innovation and continue educating yourself about search optimization. These practices may seem only secondary to expertise and technology, but they are very important at making your SEO company run smoothly and at executing your methodology effectively. This SEO-centric culture is what we practice, and what we encourage our partners to practice as well.
Keep checking back to get more tips on making your SEO business a successful one. Talk to your account manager if you need further help with streamlining your processes. Sign up for a free account today if you’re not yet our partner and learn how our solutions can help.