Ensure that SEO takes its rightful place as a strategic business function

Helen says: “SEO needs to be fully integrated across the whole business. It needs to be considered as more than just a marketing channel and take its rightful place as a strategic business function.

In my experience, if you ask people in your business what SEO is, the answers tend to range from ‘I have no idea’ to ‘It's keywords and backlinks’. SEOs tend to sit in the metaphorical back corner of the office. We do marketing things with marketing people and all we're good for is helping people find our website on Google. That's all the vast majority of businesses seem to know about SEO.

That's a huge shame because the research that SEOs do day-to-day is incredibly valuable to the wider business. It gives insight into the current market, it can measure brand awareness, levels of competition, product-market fit, and all the things that are critical to a well-functioning marketing strategy – and beyond marketing as well.”

Is SEO still a marketing channel that just needs to be involved in other areas of the business?

“SEO is predominantly marketing. It's historically been a marketing channel and to completely redefine SEO would be a larger project.

However, SEO is something that touches on a lot of different elements within a business. There has been a bit of an argument as to whether SEO is a marketing channel or more of a product department. I can understand that argument because we are involved in so much, and we touch on so many different functions of the website, the marketing channels, and business development.

It’s difficult to say that we're only a marketing channel but that’s predominantly what we are and where most SEOs sit within a business.”

Is SEO an internal product that needs to be consulted when essential decisions related to technical infrastructure changes need to be made?

“Absolutely. I see myself as a product manager/owner for SEO. As an SEO, I have ownership over that product. You can see that more when you're agency-side or a contractor/consultant because you're very much offering the product of SEO.

However, when you're in-house, that's also how you need to think. You are likely to be consulting with a lot of different teams and a lot of different departments on SEO, and showing how SEO can help them reach their end goals. You want to change that mindset so that SEO is no longer viewed as a marketing tactic but as a product or a business growth leader.”

If an SEO feels that they're not involved in the conversation, how do they get more involved?

“It starts with education. If your company's overarching understanding of SEO is that it is a marketing tactic – it's something you do to get people to your website and that's all – they won’t know that you should be involved in those conversations.

For example, when a company is looking to move into a new market, SEO can be very valuable. We are able to help people understand the product knowledge and appetite for that product in the new market, what the competition is like, what the current peaks and troughs are with seasonality, etc. We bring so much data, insight, and wisdom across the board. When your company's making that huge strategic decision, SEOs can provide a lot of the intelligence that is needed – but no one knows to ask us.

As SEOs, we have to educate on how we can be useful and be a little bit forceful about involving ourselves in the conversation. You might not get invited to a meeting or be included in a conversation, but if you know SEO can help them achieve their goal, then offer that.

You don't have to be aggressive about it. You can just share that information and knowledge, and explain what SEO is and what you could add to that conversation. The more that you educate people that this is something you care about, are interested in, and can advise on, the more likely they are to include you in future conversations.”

Should SEOs create an internal course and market that to get as many people as possible to attend?

“Yes; use your marketing skills. I am a broken record about SEO. Every time I start a new project with a company or I'm working with a new set of stakeholders, I’m talking all about SEO. People are so unsure about what it is and what value it can add that you almost have to keep reminding them that SEO can help with whatever they are doing. That way, people have SEO at the front of their minds when they're considering data or strategy.

Education can take a lot of different forms. A course is a great way of doing it, but you are never going to get your high-level stakeholders on a course. They just don't have the time. Instead, you could offer them quick snippets of extra context or information in the conversations that you're having with them. If you're in a meeting with a senior stakeholder, and they ask for your opinion, give a little bit more context around why that's your opinion instead of just saying what it is. Try to educate in every conversation that you're having that involves SEO.

Some people don't learn well through courses and other people need to have some written material that they can refer back to. Others like to ask questions, so having a facility where people can come and ask you questions can be very helpful. I host a half-hour clinic once a month where anyone in the company can come along and ask questions. They could be as simple as, ‘What is SEO?’ or as specific as, ‘I'm looking at selecting a canonical tag for this page, how do I go about it?’

There are many different opportunities, you just need to find what you're comfortable with and work within the existing set-up of your company so that you're educating people in a way that they're used to receiving and learning information.”

As an example another area within the business, how should an SEO sell the importance of getting involved in design?

“Designers often have a preconception that SEOs are there to say no to stuff. In fact, a lot of teams and departments seem to think we're there to say no to things. That's something we need to work on.

For design, in particular, we have so much information and data that can be really beneficial for them. We can tell them what people are interested in, what pages people navigate between, and what the end goal for a particular set of pages might be – and we can give them that extra layer of insight that they might not get their hands on otherwise.

A lot of designers won't be using data tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar to see how people are acting on the website and what they're interested in, or even give them that wider context of who their audience is. As SEOs, we can do that. We can talk to them about things like navigation, which is hugely important to designers. We can show them what our ideal would look like compared to their ideal, and where we can find a happy medium.

You can have quarterly sit-downs with the head of design and ask them what their roadmap is, and what the design team is looking to achieve in the next quarter. Then, you can tell them how you will be able to help them achieve that. It changes the conversation from, ‘SEO said no to what I wanted to release’ to, ‘SEO and I discussed this three months ago, we've already found a solution, and we're rolling it out. Here's the data letting us know that it’s going to be successful.’

It's a true collaboration, rather than parachuting in when someone talks to you about something they're working on and you saying yes or no to it. Design is a great opportunity to do that because these are two teams that wouldn't necessarily have a lot to talk about normally. You have to make that effort to invite yourself into those conversations.”

How does an SEO work with a traditional brand team internally?

“Brand isn't what it used to be. Brand is now completely augmented by social media, for example. The concept of a brand, and society's understanding of that brand, can change in a day because of something that went viral. SEOs have a huge part to play in that. We are oftentimes the first introduction that a potential consumer will have to a brand, and we're also there along the journey.

If you are the first touch point that a consumer has with a brand, you need to make sure that everything about the brand in the SERPs is positive. It's traditional online reputation management. Every time someone searches your brand, the People Also Ask questions should be really positive ones. If they're not, you should be the answer to those questions so that you can turn that negative into a positive.

You want to communicate to your brand team that not only are you supplying data, but you're also there to help them understand more about their audience and communicate their brand messaging effectively in places like the SERPs.

There needs to be less siloing amongst these teams. We're all trying to reach the same end goal and we want to remove a bit of that delineation between brand, SEO, PPC, CRM, etc. For a consumer, we're all the same company. That's all they conceive us to be, so we have to be really uniform and aligned in what we're working on.”

How can SEO consult and work more closely with customer services?

“Customer service is such a good ally to have within a company. They can be amazing for insights. You can hear, from customers, what resonates well with them and what pain points they have. It's also very helpful for you to get a little bit more insight into things like complaints.

I mentioned online reputation management before, and it can often fall to SEOs to make sure that the front page of the SERP about our brand is all really positive. If it's not and you've got a load of negative reviews, for example, the customer services team has heard that stuff first. They can tell you how they deal with that kind of complaint internally, which is what you should be saying to people through the search results.

They can also be a great source of information about all the questions or complaints that come through. As SEOs, we can turn that into FAQs that can be served in the search results. Then, we bypass a lot of issues for them by providing that content and making it really accessible from the search results.

It is a two-way relationship with customer service teams. They can help us by giving us the information and insight that we struggle to get otherwise, and we can help them by putting an extra layer of information and customer support online – before they pick up the phone or answer an email.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop chasing the latest algorithm updates. Every SEO says this, but we still do it. Stop chasing all those updates and all of the arguing back and forth on social media about what Google has or hasn't said recently. We spend far too much time obsessing over that and not enough time looking at our own internal data and working out what works well for our particular website in our vertical.

Secondly, we need to spend less time trying to push that one ticket through the development team or the product management team that we think is going to solve everything for SEO.

Instead, work on changing the culture of the company so that it understands the value of SEO. By doing that, those tickets get actioned a lot quicker, and it will open up a pathway for more of your tickets, suggestions, and recommendations to get implemented.”

Helen Pollitt is Head of SEO at Car & Classic, and you can find her over at CarandClassic.com.