With some hard work and a little strategic marketing, you can have all of the employees within your company actively applying SEO within their daily work lives.
Too often, companies view SEO as, ‘an option instead of a mandate,’ as Marshall Simmonds stated in his article, Why So Many Companies Fail At Enterprise SEO. With a well-developed SEO campaign, you can show your company how SEO is easy to implement (when broken up in different segments), and how it can generate revenue with hardly any money put into it.
How My Organic Search Team and I Made It Happen
I am an SEO for a medium-sized, international e-commerce business and recently (along with my small organic search team) put together an Organic Search/SEO Awareness Campaign within the company. When we launched our guide sheet and online support links for each SEO-centric topic, we were rocked by an enthusiastic wave of support. Only a week into the campaign and people were contacting us with questions on how they could help.
The other day, a member of our Graphic Design Team asked me what he should use for “alt text” in one of his images. It was very exciting to hear. The main thing to remember about your campaign: It’s good to see the trees for the forest. Not the other way around.
One of the main reasons we succeeded was from our easy-to-follow guide sheet, which we leveraged from Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors. With this Periodic Table, along with our own ideas of how SEO affects our company, we created a long list of different “tasks” and sorted them by broad organizational group.
Here is a small snippet of what our chart looks like for our Marketing Solutions segment:
MARKETING:
Each element within the chart can be easily referenced with more information in our online company database. On the actual sheet, we had the headline “Marketing” designed in the style of the Bing logo to make it more engaging. Along with the guide sheet, there are three basic tactics to creating a killer SEO campaign.
- Ease
- Call-to-Action
- Planning
Make Each SEO-Centric Task Easy To Understand
SEO as a whole is…a bit…comprehensive. It’s super easy to get your company involved when you break down individual SEO tasks for them. With smaller categories (i.e. keyword research, unique content, anchor text, link building) it’s much more interesting and easier to manage.
Although creating mandatory classes would get the message across, it’s good to respect your employees’ time. Instead, present the facts to them and keep the door open for questions. It’s like James Earl Jones should have said: If you make it accessible, they will come.
Here are two examples of how we were task-specific. The green button is for our Creative Content group and the purple one is for our Quality Assurance team:
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Give Them A Reason Why They Are Doing It
When you give your fellow employees a good reason why they should use these best practices, they will. Not only why it’s important for our organic search team, but why it’s important for their team as well.
Putting these tactics into context is always better.
Like the example I gave before about the graphic designer, showing him that implementing alt text is easy would show how he can greatly improve my life with such a small and quick task. We made it clear that it’s a much simpler task to do before the image is placed live on the site. In the online database we added how if the alt text was not placed in the code, after our next page audit we would find out and make sure the graphic designer implemented it.
With each person adding a few pieces, the puzzle will be completed. Like I mentioned before, if the sheet doesn’t help out, an online guide can go more in-depth about each topic. Here is a snippet for our quick-fix solution to product naming in our guide:
Map It Out For Your Own Sanity
Creating a roadmap for success and receiving early feedback from various sectors of your company is the best way to end up with a well-polished product that everyone will enjoy. Whether you use a guide sheet and online support database like my team did or go with something more creative, always stress that SEO action must be taken. Look at this campaign like a journalist would, using the five “W’s” and the “H” (who, what, when, where, why and how) to make sure you understand everything you need to do to succeed.
To be clear, this sort of project won’t happen overnight, especially if you’re the only person in charge of SEO within your company. Set aside a little of your time each day to turn your campaign idea into reality.
And remember that planning includes a little bit of fun. Launch the campaign with a company-wide get-together to eat, drink and talk about SEO! (We kicked off our campaign this way, ordering in some yummy organic beers to match the concept.)
Yes, It’s Worth Your Time
Like all great things, carefully sculpting your plan will take some time. But just think of the end results! You won’t have to fix certain issues on your site, and these problems exist in the first place.
That being said, your co-workers are not all SEO experts like you may be. You are still the SEO doing the vast majority of the work and making sure traffic still flows in. But with an awareness campaign, you can work with your entire organization towards the common goal of excellent SEO.
