Implementing enterprise-level SEO standards is no easy feat. It sounds simple enough, but there are a lot of stakeholders, a lot of people who own areas that heavily influence SEO, whose best practices may not be in line with SEO best practices.
Jessica caught up with Markus Renstrom, Head of SEO at Yahoo, to talk about how to bring new ideas in this 6 minute video. Without further ado, meet Markus:
Taking Markus’ comments to the next level:
1) Implementation is always a hard thing to do successfully. Prepare yourself and management for the road that lies ahead. The number of stakeholders, number of people and departments involved, corporate politics, and openness to change will determine your level of challenge.
2) It’s easy to do trainings, but you need to make sure people practice what they learn in training. Too often companies hold SEO trainings, but neglect to assign accountabilities and hold people responsible for executing what they learned. The result is a training that was interesting, but never executed properly. (Part of this is often the result of poor training in the first place – more on this in a future post.)
3) In an enterprise-level organization, take control and own the SEO process to create a standard within the company, and let others do the executing. This allows the SEO team to spend more time on execution and less time on negotiating SEO tactics and prioritization with other teams. In essence, make SEO part of the guidelines for how you make a great product.
4) Take ownership of SEO. Push SEO and make noise in the company to help them realize what they are missing. Standardize everything onto the same platform to allow SEO to run smoothly across all divisions. Our founder, Jessica Bowman says, “a good in-house SEO can, unfortunately, get a reputation of sticking their nose in everyone’s business.” This is because most activities executed by other departments can help or hurt SEO, they just do not realize it.
5) Work with all the teams to make sure what you want to do will actually work. If you start as a team with input from the beginning it will help avoid issues arising later and get people on board and changes implemented much quicker. Too often we see SEOs pull together magnificent plans, and present them for the first time in front of EVERYONE. This isn’t how it should work. Instead, pre-sell everyone before the meeting, make adjustments along the way and when you walk into the meeting with everyone, everyone will have already bought into your ideas.
6) SEO is a discussion process, not a dictatorship. You need to work and talk with everyone about the process and create a standard. Make it a group activity, but avoid analysis paralysis. If you don’t have time, then bring in a third party to help drive this to the finish line for you.
Want to learn more about how successfully implementing in-house SEO at an enterprise-level?
Attend the Enterprise-level In-house SEO Exchange.
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