The Executive SEO Playbook: How to Integrate SEO Company-Wide for Increased Profitability

By Jessica Bowman

Your SEO team has stellar skills, motivation, and the discipline needed to get it right. SEO revenues are growing, but you feel it could be better...and you're right, "it" can be a lot better.

Doing "it" right is simple in theory, but few companies have been able to do "it." The secret to "it" is

• Language: English
• Publisher: SEOinhouse.com
• Release date: Jun 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781949639919

Book preview

Chapter 1

Before We Begin

It is likely you already know that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is absolutely vital to the success and even the survival of any company of any size. Your company probably has a person or team of people whose primary focus is SEO. Maybe you’re one of those SEO people. If so, don’t worry—this book isn’t a rehash of what you already know. This book is going to help you be more effective at implementing your SEO tactics and strategies. And for many of you reading this book, what you will learn will help you grab the millions in SEO revenue currently left on the table due to problems created by SEO operations.

This is not an SEO how-to book. The assumption of this book is that you already know at least some basics of SEO. It’s crucial to have a basic understanding of SEO practices for this book to serve its purpose, so if you’re a beginner, please check out an SEO how-to book and then come back (see Appendix A for recommended SEO resources). We plan to hit the ground running.

Who should read this book? Anyone who is tasked with doing anything that impacts a large company’s web presence should read various portions of this book. It is written in a way that will give you light bulb moments and help you understand the many facets of the complex discipline of SEO. It will also help you understand how you influence multiple pillars of SEO every single day, even when making seemingly unrelated decisions.

This book is an essential read for executives who are responsible for web presence, and for members of SEO teams. It will get you thinking differently about how you need to manage SEO at your company.

This book will best serve companies with large development groups and many different roles that influence all online activities (on and off the website). It is specifically for enterprise-level organizations with extensive web presence and proportionately large web development and marketing staff. Your organization probably has roles with these titles—each of which needs to be involved in SEO:

• Team Leads

• Product Managers

• Project Managers

• Merchandisers

• Business Analysts

• User Experience Designers

• Developers

• QA Testers

• Social Media Marketers

• Public Relations Specialists

If you equip these roles with the information in this book and the right skills, tools, and metrics, you will have dozens to hundreds of people pursuing SEO every day. That is the dangling carrot to pursue in enterprise SEO, and it will exponentially grow SEO revenue.

Is this book only relevant to large corporations? Not at all. Everything addressed in this book applies to companies of all sizes. Even the agencies you engage to build your websites can benefit from its solutions.

However, the aim of this book is to implement an SEO strategy in a large enterprise-level organization. Keep in mind that many of the specific recommendations and the SEO Gold Mine (discussed in Chapter 2) are based on the challenges and opportunities unique to large corporations; small and mid-sized companies face different challenges and opportunities.

Let me tell you a little about my experience. Enterprise-level SEO has been putting bread on my table since 2002. My career has included stints as an in-house SEO manager at Yahoo! Inc., Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and Business.com.

In 2008, I launched my own SEO consulting firm, SEOinhouse. com, which was uniquely designed to help companies do better SEO in-house. Today our selective roster of clients includes the biggest brands online. Between my in-house SEO experience, clients, and network of in-house SEOs, there is little I haven’t seen.

I learned how to do it trial-by-fire—and developed a well-honed system. Back in 2002, when I started working in SEO, there were few people who knew how to do it, the je ne sais quoi of SEO—how to execute on SEO in a large corporation. The big it of enterprise SEO, I’ve discovered, isn’t about what you need to do, but how you get those things done. For over a decade I’ve been tweaking a methodology for doing "it. This book is my revelation—how to do it"—and it presents a well-honed system broken down into understandable chunks.

It is the invisible fence that’s holding you back in ways you are and are not aware of. It is what drives you bonkers, causes SEO to get missed, and frustrates everyone from developers to QA testers to executives. It is SEO Operations.

Many of the solutions for doing it well are a bit of a no-duh. It’s funny; people know a lot of what needs to be done, but knowing what to do and effectively implementing a course-correcting plan of action to fix problems are very different things. This book gives you a framework for how to fix and most effectively do it in your large, politically charged, and siloed organization. Doing it right will make your SEO run like a well-oiled machine.

Why does everyone struggle with doing it? In a large organization, SEO is a collaborative effort. The SEO team can’t actually do everything that needs to be done for SEO themselves; there are many tasks necessary for SEO that are controlled by other departments. Often, people working in other departments don’t have a vested interest in doing SEO tasks because SEO is not part of their own team’s performance metrics, and they haven’t been shown (or they do not yet appreciate) the value of adding SEO into their processes. This makes SEO tasks, for them, more of a favor or best practice, not a must-do activity.

THIS IS IMPORTANT: A critical takeaway for executives is that at far too many companies SEO is not a must-do activity. Instead, it’s perceived as a favor or best practice, the bells-and-whistles that can be descoped with little investigation to the short- and long-term risks (despite what the executives say). Why is this? Read on.

People do the SEO team favors when they can, and when they do, they get a warm, fuzzy feeling from having done something for the greater good. This works well until conflicts arise between the SEO team’s requests and the non-SEO teams’ mandated priorities. When the road forks between helping SEO and meeting the goals management has set for them, SEO gets dropped like a hot potato. The next thing you know, SEO is descoped or avoided altogether because there is little reason not to (the decisions makers are not held accountable for any form of SEO results).

When SEO priorities are descoped, the SEO team is forced to chase the project decision makers to try to get SEO priorities back into projects. This keeps them from doing revenue-generating activities. There is a better way.

How do you do it better? Simply integrate SEO tasks combined with metrics-driven accountabilities throughout your company’s everyday business operations to the point that SEO is systematized and it happens at the right time, almost every time.

THIS IS IMPORTANT: Metrics-driven SEO accountabilities across the organization are what will make SEO just happen, the way it ought to happen, in your organization.

That’s right, the COO, CMO, and CIO need to have SEO in their purview. You will be able to do it better than your competition once everyone influencing your online presence:

• Knows how to act on SEO.

• Is given toolkits to do SEO on the fly (and also to know when to pull in the SEO team for help).

• Is held accountable for getting SEO done correctly for the current SEO Strategies.

Metrics-driven accountabilities are the foundation for great enterprise SEO Operations.

SEO Operations are measurable? This book will offer SEO checks and balances to ensure that your SEO strategy is on the right track and make corrections to smooth out the ride. You need this because being ineffective at SEO Operations can hurt you—even if your SEO revenue is growing despite the operational glitches.

Executives, SEO teams, and non-SEO teams need measurable accountabilities. In Chapter 8 you will be introduced to a new type of metric that will radically change how SEO is managed organization-wide. Chapter 8 has some very critical takeaways for you, so don’t stop reading before you check it out.

Managing SEO operations metrics is the only way to get things done in enterprise-level companies with SEO challenges due to multiple business lines, complicated websites, legacy systems, and more website cooks in the kitchen than you’ll find on the Iron Chef season opener. And of course, half of them are creating more fires than finished dinners.

Fires? Did someone mention fires? SEO managers, like most managers, hate fires—and yet, chasing projects and putting out SEO fires consumes much of their time (often up to 60–80 percent). Having effective, integrated SEO will get the SEO team out of chasing and into performing. Getting there is exciting and revenue catapulting, but it’s time-consuming.

This is why you need a proven approach for getting it right the first time. That’s what this book is—a clear, defined methodology for integrating SEO into your operations and bringing your company into Synergy (aka, SEO Nirvana) with the rest of the organization.

Easier said than done? True … unless you get upfront and consistent, metrics-driven, executive-level support. Injecting SEO tasks into non-SEO team processes is not a new recommendation. It’s just that in the past you could more easily pull off great SEO without this level of integration, so SEO integration wasn’t vital enough to pursue.

That really isn’t true anymore. This means the SEO team can no longer go solo—what’s needed now falls within the purview of other departments. As this SEO Operations methodology unfolds, you will learn what will work to get the non-SEO teams happily pursuing their share of SEO at the right time, almost every time.

Because you need to rally such diverse departments around SEO, getting SEO Operations right is not an instant fix. But when you do the right things in the right order, there will be a pivotal moment, and POOF! People are starry-eyed in love with SEO (you’ll learn more about this phenomenon in Chapter 4). That’s when people become open to integrating SEO—and it’s when SEO gets fun again.

Easy or not, you need to integrate effectively so that you only do it once and reap the rewards quickly.

What is the payback? The answer is simple: Fewer handoffs, fewer reasons for exclusion, fewer SEO mistakes launched, risks and opportunities will be found early, and faster response time. When all the players know how to do the 20% of SEO that makes 80% of the impact for their role, they can make SEO decisions on the fly and not have to wait for input from the SEO team for common, simple SEO tasks.

When SEO is integrated into the non-SEO team’s processes, the SEO team doesn’t need to sweat the small details of SEO. This will free up the SEO team’s time, enabling them to work on the bigger, more important, advanced-level SEO projects. Read the SEO Case File It’s the best thing we have ever done for SEO for a peek into what can quickly happen if you implement the recommendations in this book:

SEO Case File:

"It’s the best thing we have ever done for