EP 7: Enterprise SEO Needs a Top Down Approach

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Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill

A new SEO book is recently released and I’ll admit that I had to buy it as soon as I saw someone mentioned it on Twitter. The book is called The Executive SEO Playbook and it is written by a woman named Jessica Bowman. I ordered the book via Amazon Prime as soon as I saw it and I had to crack it open as soon as it arrived.

When I say right away, I mean I had to read it in the car on the way up to our cottage. Yup. I admit I am that much of a nerd. I was super excited about the book and I couldn’t wait to dig in.

And the book didn’t disappoint. In fact, I like it so much. As soon as I got to our cottage, I went back to Amazon and I ordered two copies for some executives I know that really needed to hear its message.

What I love about the book is that it doesn’t tell you how to actually do SEO. Instead, it teaches you the importance of weaving SEO into all levels of the organization. So instead of leaving SEO to a marketer or to an IT person, the book states that you have to have all departments and all parties involved so that SEO is part of the organization. And that the organization as a whole is responsible.

I believe in this theory because I know SEO particularly, enterprise SEO is bigger than one person or one department. I’ve watched large organizations have their SEO plummet because its implementation is haphazard and without strong backing from the organization as a whole. It really has to have multiple departments to make it successful.

Some of the common problems I see over and over again are these:

The first one is that SEO is done in a silo. And by that I mean you don’t have all of the available skillsets needed to make it successful. So for example, the marketing department is responsible for SEO and it doesn’t touch the IT department or the IT department has to step in to help out with the technical aspects of SEO. And there are a lot of them.

Another area of issue is that SEO is given to employees who are unprepared or uneducated. I literally watched large organizations hand SEO over to the intern because the intern swears they know what to do.

I’ve been working with SEO for over 15 years and I still don’t know everything. That means your intern really isn’t prepared to know enough about SEO to make it successful or to respond to the challenges that are going to show up and present themselves. There will be challenges and you need someone experienced to be able to manage them.

Another issue is that SEO a lot of times lacks executive buy-in and support. When this happens, SEO requests made from like the marketing department to the IT department or to graphic design are not addressed. They don’t get done. And that’s a problem because for SEO to truly work, it has to have executive buy-in. It has to have a top-down approach so that everybody in the organization knows SEO is important and they have to do their part to help make it a success.

Having an executive champion of SEO gives that opportunity to be successful. If you’re part of an enterprise SEO project, know that you need to have an executive champion. You need someone high up on your side that believes in the project and that will root for the project and illustrate its importance to the organization.

OK. A final issue I commonly see is that there is budget for SEO or if there is a budget, it is low. SEO requires money to make it successful. You have to invest in both human resources and technology. SEO requires someone particularly at the executive level to allocate those funds to say that it’s important so that those funds can go towards education and training, SEO software, and the time and resources involved in making it successful. That all cost money.

In a small business, one person is usually responsible for SEO and they outsource bits and pieces of it to third parties or companies and consultants.

In a large organization, SEO is usually done in-house. And the problem is that those tasks still need to be outsourced to other people within the organization. There are various components within the process that are going to touch different departments. And in a lot of organizations, this doesn’t happen. SEO just die in a vacuum and it falls apart and it underperforms.

What drives me crazy is that the management will assume SEO isn’t working when in fact they really haven’t even given it a fighting chance.

In Jessica’s book, she talks about the various pillars of SEO, and there are six of them. They are crawling, indexing, content, internal links, external links and mentions, social activity, and the user experience. Those pillars might sound insignificant. But when you think about the departments they cross over, you’ll see that they’re far-reaching and that SEO does really touch all areas of the organization.

Let’s look at a few different examples. So crawling and indexing would belong to the IT department. Content would fall over to the marketing department. The internal links within the website would belong to both IT and marketing because both of them are going to be creating them, some in codes, some in content.

External links and mentions would fall under marketing and public relations.

Social media activity which is very important in today’s SEO would fall under the responsibility of marketing, public relations, social media.

And the user experience is going to touch everybody from graphic design and IT over to marketing and social media.

All of these departments and people can either work together in harmony or they can work in silos. If they work in harmony, SEO is successful. When they work in silos, everybody works against each other and SEO starts to fall apart.

In most cases, it’s the latter. And this is the common reason why SEO fails to produce adequate results in large organizations.

When I was competing against large organizations, I won against my competitors because they were not well-oiled machines that worked in unison. They were just the opposite. Their SEO was all over the place and none of it was executed with a long term strategy or a cohesive plan.

In Jessica’s book, she mentions an example in chapter 5, and I love this because it shows how good intentions can go wrong in an organization. Her example is about the design of an e-commerce site and how tab content was used within the online store. It created a cascade of SEO issues. And this type of blunder is something I’ve seen and experienced over and over again. And sadly, it’s both at the small business and the enterprise level.

What seems like a small and insignificant decision can have a major and long term set of ramifications on SEO. When I read this section of her book, I thought, “Yes!” This is exactly what happens and why SEO needs to be an organizational activity with a lot of parties involved and understanding how their role will affect their results. This requires strong leadership and a strong executive backing of the SEO process and the long term objectives that SEO has within the organization.

My takeaways from the book and my experiences are these. SEO doesn’t need an army to be successful. It can be successfully executed by a small team or an outside consultant. But, and this is important, SEO does need the support of the organization. And even more important is the fact that SEO needs to have an executive champion who make sure the organization is behind the SEO team and helps make sure that SEO is done right and that the right parties are involved. This is true regardless of the size of the company or the organization.

SEO fails and fails quickly when the following occurs. It lacks executive support. It lacks budget authorization, it lacks resources, it lacks visibility, it lacks strategy and planning, it lacks data, and it lacks accountability. That last one is really, really important.

If you’re an executive listening to this podcast, I encourage you to read the book. If you’re a marketer who is responsible for SEO at your organization, I encourage you to read the book as well. And even if you’re a salesperson who just doesn’t have enough leads to fill your sales funnel, I think this book would be great for you too because you would see what is most likely lacking at your company.

Read it and use the words to energize your organization. Get them to focus on what’s really important and get them to rally the necessary players needed to make SEO a critical part of your marketing efforts and your incoming revenue.

If you’d like to buy Jessica’s new book, I will provide a link in our show notes.

Thank you so much for joining me today. I look forward to continuing our SEO journey next week.