How to Utilize Other Departments for SEO Help
As people come to understand the value of doing quality SEO, it becomes obvious that time and resources should be devoted to doing SEO. What people might not realize, however, is that real success comes when all departments are working together for SEO help. SEO marketing efforts should not be left solely to a digital marketing team because huge advances can be made when other departments are utilized and kept in the loop. Chances are, though, that departments apart from a digital marketing team don't really know how much effect they can have on SEO. While virtually all corporate departments can assist in SEO, several facets of a company, including the PR team, web developers and a content team, can directly influence SEO in a big way.
PR team for SEO help
PR practitioners mainly focus on raising awareness of the company and building quality relationships with others. This can happen in a variety of ways, whether it be through articles written about the company, in speaking at events, or some other way of getting word out about the company. What PR reps might not realize is that these are great opportunities that can be capitalized on to get huge SEO benefits. When articles are written about the company, they will most likely be published somewhere on the internet (and if not, that should change).
There are a few things good PR practitioners can do to better optimize articles for SEO; using effective anchor text somewhere in the article will make the digital marketer's job much easier. Show your PR reps the importance of a backlink to the site and how to know which URL it should point to. When speaking at events, the speaker representing the company needs to optimize their presentation deck with the right links and then share it. Depending on the subject of the presentation, there are a number of places online where a presentation can be shared to get the most SEO benefits as possible; consider slideshare.net and social media platforms.
Web development team for SEO help
As web developers make changes to the company's sites and working on side projects, it's important that they know how to optimize their projects for SEO. There's a lot that goes into this, including understanding how to use title tags, creating effective UX design that contributes to SEO, taking care of 404 errors, as well as the differences between 301 and 302 redirects. You can even teach them about canonical meta data to improve link and ranking signals.
There's a lot they can do to help in a company's SEO efforts, but ultimately the more they are aware, the more they will be able to do before it even gets to the digital marketer's hands. Having the web developers work on these elements of web design from the get-go will streamline the entire SEO process and perhaps save the digital marketers some time in the process. Essentially, there are many different ways to code a website to strictly function properly and to provide for a secure search; webmasters need to know how to make them SEO compliant. The key is to get the marketers and web developers on the same page so that the web developers will know the best practices for utilizing SEO.
Digital content team for SEO help
It's been said that “content is king,” and while this is a heavily debated topic, it can be agreed upon that good content has an effect on SEO. First pick topics that are trending and have a high likelihood of being shared and discussed. Boring, unoriginal and irrelevant content will do little to further your SEO efforts. Make sure that those producing content for the company know what long-tail keywords to include in their posts. Also teach them about internal linking so that they know to which PLPs they should be linking for which keywords. Share the content in places where it's likelihood of being picked up is high, and the optimized content will do its work.
If a company isn't really sure on how to best integrate other departments into the SEO process, BrightEdge has a tool that makes achieving better SEO success as a collaborative effort possible. This project management tool streamlines time and effort spent managing SEO projects and helps make the SEO process more of a team one. So while it's true that digital marketers can work on their own, the results will be different—and not as good—as what could be accomplished should all the departments work together. Real success will come if everyone is on the same page when it comes to SEO practices.
