Foster a collaborative environment to achieve success

Montse says: “My number one SEO tip to succeed in 2024 is to foster collaboration.”

Who should SEOs be fostering collaboration with?

“I am talking about both SEOs and broad digital marketers talking to each other more, particularly if they are sitting in different departments and different teams. I also mean that they should be talking to other departments such as product, finance, and development.

That is so important. I could recommend embracing Artificial Intelligence, getting to know a bit more about ML, or deep-diving into schema markup, which is so important right now. However, if we approach all of this with a collaborative mindset, it will make things a lot easier when we try to reach our goals and deliver our projects. It will also make things easier from a mindset point of view by reducing your stress.”

Why should SEOs spend time talking to other people rather than doing SEO?

“Other people might actually know what you don't know. It's as simple as that. There are two main reasons for this.

One reason is that there is more specialisation these days than there has ever been before. More and more people are working only on link building, technical SEO, etc. That is very exciting, and it is how we have made so much progress. However, it also makes for a more complex working environment.

The second reason is the need to constantly familiarise ourselves with new concepts and new ways of working. For example, Artificial Intelligence tools and ML have become mainstream fairly recently, and we now have to learn all about them. It's all very uncertain, and we don't really know whether what we are learning today is going to be useful tomorrow. Why not lean on other people's knowledge?

All of this comes on top of having to upskill ourselves. By upskilling ourselves, I mean learning about other things such as GA4 or schema markup, which we may not know much about. That creates uncertainty and anxiety. We might not have the time to learn it all.

Everybody has a remit in their jobs. You might view yourself as an expert in the German market because you have worked extensively in the German market, but it's not within your remit to actually find out more and validate the knowledge you think you have. Why not ask somebody else within the extended team? Why not let somebody else know that you need that knowledge and that skill set? It's going to be really interesting from your point of view because you will be able to learn more as well.

This becomes particularly obvious when you are working internationally. It's not just about the logistics of working internationally and building up an international online business. You think about the logistics side of things, the legality, payment systems, etc. What happens behind all that? What is the story? For example, the German market may prefer certain payment systems that simply aren’t used in other markets. If you don't know that, then you might be making a mistake when you are building your business. Just ask.”

How much time should SEOs dedicate to learning new things?

“We need to learn all the time because everything changes all of the time, but there's a limit. We need to implement what we learn, not just read about it. We need to actually talk to others so that we can learn from each other and implement those learnings.

There’s no particular amount of time that I would recommend. It's more to do with leaning on everybody's learning than anything else. Take, for example, the relationship between SEOs and PPCs. Collaboration becomes very obvious there because organic and paid are different sides of the same coin. They are both search. We may be able to use PPC at some points and SEO at others, but the friction between them has always amazed me. I think this friction comes from the outside, where more budget is allocated to PPCs whereas SEOs have traditionally needed to make do with much less.”

Is it no longer possible to be successful by focusing solely on SEO?

“Collaboration has always been something useful to do. My biggest successes during my career have come from collaborating with other teams and letting them know that they can collaborate with me as well. It has always been like that.

However, the complexity of the work landscape and the high level of competition on the SERPs and in the digital landscape, at this moment in time, make it really difficult to succeed by yourself. Perhaps it was easier before, but I do believe that success has always been achieved through collaboration.”

As an example, how can an SEO reach out and obtain assistance from someone else when they are undertaking a migration?

“When you are migrating your website, you need to look into various aspects. It is not just about SEO; it's about everything else. Depending on the type of migration that you prefer, you may need different professionals to look into a variety of things.

One of those professionals is definitely a development team. It's really important that this team and other professionals are on the same page at all times. What an SEO or a project manager needs to do is, first, validate the idea. Then, you need to make sure that all resources are listed. Once those resources are listed, you need to reach out to those departments and make them aware that you will be making this migration.

Those may be designers, because you may need a new website if you are re-platforming. Those may be finance or sales departments if it is a transactional website because there might be some downtime. Sales might be down for a little bit. Also, developers and engineers as a whole, because there is a specific moment in time when the website becomes more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. All the engineering teams need to come together at that moment. They have to know when ‘moment zero’ will be happening.

Before deciding to do a website migration, one of the first people I would actually go to for advice would be a development team. They will be able to let me know what their concerns might be, the feasibility of doing that migration in that time frame, etc.”

Is this kind of collaboration specific to one form of migration?

“No, I'm talking about every single type of migration. If we talk about the specific types of migration, we might need different types of professionals. For example, a designer might not be needed for a simple change of protocol, but they might be needed for a re-platforming or a rebranding.

Regardless of the type of migration you are doing, you need to make everyone aware, just to be sure. That way, they know they need to plan for this. They need to be allowed to look at their pipelines for their own projects and consider whether they need to hire somebody else to help them out in case they don’t have the resources they need or are working on too many projects at that time. It’s a way to show communication and show that you are able to involve other people and other departments.

It’s also a way to show empathy: empathy for their own projects and empathy for their work life. They're not working for you. They are working for their own boss, and they have their own jobs and their own objectives. Empathy is really, really important. This is a good way to show respect and promote a positive working environment.

A few years ago, when I started to manage people directly rather than indirectly, I ran a private session with developers, product managers, other marketers, PR people, etc. It was really interesting. I wanted to find out whether we could come up with an idea to solve issues and whether those issues were exactly the same as the ones I was coming across. I was really surprised to find out that the number one issue we all had was a lack of respect.

Respect means that, first of all, people are asked for their opinion in the first place, because they have to be able to do their job. Secondly, it means that the right people are deployed to the right jobs. Quite often, I have seen certain professionals doing a job that other people should be doing. For example, people might be in charge of bits and pieces of SEO that they don't know anything about, such as link building or technical SEO. It's not a good idea.

A developer told me privately that they found it extremely annoying and became very nervous when other people, particularly SEOs, would come to them claiming that they could code and that they knew about coding and programming. That could potentially lead to this person taking away parts of the developer’s job for themselves, which should not be the case. Even when SEOs do know about coding and programming, SEO is SEO. If there is a team of developers, they need to do the coding and the programming. They need to do what they are qualified to do.”

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

“Stop and think about what, exactly, is stopping you from doing what you have to do. What is draining your time? It might be a lack of deep knowledge in a key area, or it might be the fact that whatever you are doing is just too big.

In the SEO world, there are people who know a bit about everything, but their expertise lies in one particular area, and that is great. If someone is an expert in schema markup, why not ask them about schema markup? If that is what’s stopping you from achieving and moving forward, then simply ask someone for help.”

Montserrat Cano is an International SEO and Digital Marketing Specialist, and you can find her over at Montserrat-Cano.com.