When organizations start with SEO, they often start with a professional who specializes in SEO.
This person’s responsibilities are usually broad and include a range of duties.
They often work alongside commercial-priority content teams, who drive content and work separately from the SEO teams.
The biggest challenge, then, is getting the content team to take care of SEO.
Just as you need your development team to understand your SEO priorities, it is imperative that you inspire your content professionals to support your SEO goals.
Here’s how.
Why content teams need to care about SEO
Some of the tasks may include:
- Measure and understand search engine optimization and reporting on performance.
- Technical SEO assessment of the website(s) They work and work with the development team to address challenges.
- Create an organization strategy For search engine optimization.
- and identifying high priority risks and opportunities To improve and create new content.
Since teams outside the SEO team manage all other content creation and optimization processes, there is a risk of missed opportunities for new content, superficial understanding of user requirements, and unintentional de-optimization of existing content via search engines.
SEO professionals and teams can respond to high-priority content risks and opportunities, and embed SEO understanding and considerations into their operations.
It is one of the most effective ways to improve the depth and breadth of a site’s organic search presence and maximize its potential.
Demonstrate that SEO search data is user intent data
To see how closely the SEO and content teams can work together, you first need to understand where their interests align.
KPIs for content teams often focus on engagement metrics:
- How many users have entered the site through their pages?
- How long did they spend on the page?
- How did the content of that page influence where they went next?
Content creators must be very tuned to the needs of the people they are writing for to maximize all of these areas of measurement.
At this point, it’s an SEO cliche that “nobody lies in their search box,” but there’s a reason it gets repeated so often.
The data in search engine queries helps reveal exactly what people are searching for, how they are searching for it, how many people are searching for it, and SEO teams hold the keys to all this information.
By giving content teams access to user search data, both teams can increase their traffic and – most importantly – provide more value to their customers.
Initially, this will often involve providing keyword research directly, but to avoid your team becoming a bottleneck in this endeavour, you’ll need to provide tools to do their own research.
Teach them how to improve their content
Once they know what users are searching for and how, your content team will need to know how to get their work to be found: the first page of search results.
As a former SEO guru and professional, the biggest piece of advice I can give is to keep it simple.
We know that every part of SEO is steeped in nuances and the answer to every question starts with “it depends”.
But your goal here is to make creators feel confident to start improving their work, so keep some basic guidelines easy to follow.
They should know best practices for optimizing metadata, structuring a piece of content, and how to parse the top-ranking results of a term to gauge the ideal length and format of the top-ranking content.
Tools such as browser extensions can make this easier by providing header tag and word count information.
Demonstrate the benefit of considering search engine optimization
At this point, if you’ve done your work well, it’s likely that one or two members of the content team have shown a particular interest in SEO.
They will be the ones to ask the good questions and follow up with you to validate their research and plans.
Keep these people by your side!
Now that the team has done the basics of content optimization for search engines, you’ll need to encourage them to keep going and keep building on their skills.
The best way to do this is to show results.
As already discussed, KPIs for content teams typically include the traffic that enters the site through their pages.
Demonstrating that their efforts are increasing these numbers by benefiting from research interest will renew and enhance their enthusiasm.
Plus, this would be a great case study to encourage others to do the same.
Tracking keywords and showing changes in ranking will allow to see tangible improvements from their work, as well as tracking and reporting changes in organic sessions and clicks from Google Search Console.
This is where having an enterprise SEO platform proves its value by working with the team to create dashboards that curate all content-related SEO data, facilitating self-monitoring and identifying gains and areas for improvement, including SEO metrics In understanding and reporting the success of their work.
The broader benefit of content teams includes SEO
The most obvious and immediate effect of a content team incorporating SEO into their workflow is that more content on the site will be optimized than can be achieved by the SEO team alone.
This helps make the site’s SEO more fluid, as its presence in the search results will be less dependent on a few pages and high-priority keywords that the SEO team has time to prioritize, along with all their other responsibilities.
In addition, paying attention to search and understanding users often leads to SEO data being the impetus for creating new content. Content that is created with users in mind (and with actual data to enhance understanding of what users want and need) is often much better engaging and engaging than if it were based on assumptions.
As the team realizes the value of the new approach, SEO metrics will likely make their way into case studies and reporting.
This, in turn, will be fed into more senior stakeholders, elevating the SEO’s interests through internal advocacy, which can lead to increased profile and support, and greater investment – without having to hand out a single envelope stuffed with cash.
More resources:
- How to enable content teams with real-time log file insights
- 5 On-Page SEO Factors To Check Underperforming Content
- Completely optimized content from start to finish
Featured image: Jacob Lund/Shutterstock
