SEO with a Small Team Part 2: Making Your Plan

Mark Aspillera

M Posted 6 years ago

t 5 min read

Running an effective digital marketing campaign and SEO with a small team can seem daunting. It's doable, however, with planning, training, and technology. This two-part series will offer advice to help brands see how to maximize the resources they have in their small teams. You can read Part One here.

When you have the members of your team performing different digital marketing skills and functioning as hybrid professionals, you can be sure that time is of the essence. SEO with a small team must understand how to work quickly and effectively. To accomplish this, and to produce content that ranks well and draws in customers, understanding how to make a digital marketing plan with your small team in mind remains a critical piece of the equation. SEO with a small team how to - brightedge

Determining how micro-moments look for your business

In the modern customer journey towards a purchase, there are four main micro-moments that can appear in any order at any time:

Through desktop and mobile devices, customers can make searches that fall into one of these intent headings at any time. Rather than following a predictable path like the customers of the past, the modern, digitally connected consumer will access them randomly and sometimes progress towards a purchase within a few hours, other times not for months.

Google, in an effort to better serve its end users, has worked to better understand the intent behind user queries and where those queries fit within the micro-moments. The search engine then works to take this understanding to create a SERP that displays content tailored towards customers with these understood intentions. Given that the SERP changes depending upon the micro-moment, brands need to understand how these micro-moments manifest themselves for their particular customers and the significance of each for their business.

A local restaurant, for example, might have a big emphasis on that I-want-to-go micro-moment, while an ecommerce store will look at the I-want-to-buy micro-moment with particular interest. A software provider may take a special interest in the I-want-to-do and the I-want-to-know micro-moments. It's important to note that although a certain micro-moment captures the attention of particular organizations, that does not mean that the other three do not also play a role in their customer’s journey. The better you understand how the micro-moments look for your customers and which ones will most closely impact your bottom line, the easier it will be for you to determine where your focus should lie. You will be able to make a better judgement call about the types of content that will be the most important and how you should strategize your campaigns, thus boosting the effectiveness of your SEO with a small team.

Managing priorities

When managing SEO with a small team it's impossible to effectively manage every facet of an online presence, so prioritization is critical to success. Once you know the micro-moments and how they impact your business, you can start to look at the types of content that will have the greatest impact for the brand. Analyze the Google SERP to see how the search engine displays content for the popular queries for your target audience and how you can maximize your brand’s presence. Google often uses a combination of video, images, written content, paid, and local listings in the creation of the SERP. Seeing the prominence of each will shape your strategy. You will also need to prioritize your presence and activity on other online platforms, including social media. Countless social platforms now exist for brands to consider, so think about where your customers most expect to see you. A B2B brand, for example, will likely look at LinkedIn as their top priority, often with Facebook as the second priority, and Twitter behind that. On the other hand, a fashion designer will want to place their emphasis on visual platforms, like Instagram and Pinterest with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter playing less of a role.

Bringing in analytics

For a small SEO team, analytics are a critical means of ensuring that all the energy and time expended to create content is productive and useful. As a small team, you cannot afford to waste time creating content that misses the target audience or does not accomplish the goals designed for it. Incorporating analytics into all website analysis will allow you to see the success of your campaigns as well as weaknesses, so you know where to focus your attention to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your efforts. To productively use analytics, you should look at a variety of different factors, including rankings, traffic, engagement metrics, and the revenue generated from the campaigns. This will provide you with more insight into how to target your audience and create the content they want to see. Keep in mind that you will also find value from not only looking at the analytics of your own site, but also those of your competitors. By looking at their content strategies, you can see what has and has not worked for others within your industry, sparking ideas for you moving forward.

Creating a content schedule

Determine first the types of content that will likely be the most effective for your audience based upon your analysis of the SERP and the analytics you have for your site and competitors’ sites. You'll then want to determine a reasonable rate for the content creation. Remember that you want to focus on balance. Although publishing a few blog posts a week might be ideal, you do not want to spend all the time focusing on blogs to the detriment of other types of content. Have content that is gated as well as some that exists in other formats, such as infographics or videos. Focus on creating quality material that you can be confident will rank well rather than just creating more content for its own sake. SEO success with a small team is totally possible for professionals who stay dedicated and are willing to press forward. By incorporating the proper training and then moving forward with a solid plan, you then just need to focus on incorporating the right technology and coordination to see success that will grow your organization.