A great SEO team is essential for successful digital marketing. Their job is to get more views on a webpage. This needs skills such as understanding audience behaviour, cracking the reader’s patterns and AI Algorithms.
A recent study shows that 93% of online experiences begin with search engines. This number should be good enough to encourage any business to hire and build a great SEO team. This blog will provide you some tips on how you can do that.
1. Hire a complete Team
The first step in building an SEO team is to hire the right people. This hiring has to be done by keeping the positions and work responsibilities in mind. The following experts are required to build a quality team:
Manager: Like every team in a company, SEO team also needs an effective manager. The manager must understand the roles of SEO employees in his team.
A varied experience in web development, content creation, social media marketing and other areas of digital marketing is beneficial as right SEO strategy requires knowledge of many areas of digital marketing. Your manager will also be responsible for making an SEO strategy so a strategic thinking will be an add on.
Data analyst: The job of a data analyst is to conduct research on keywords, studying the webpage traffic and giving meaningful insights after number crunching.
Web development: This is an important role in an SEO team as web developers have to take care of page loading time, internal navigation, and indexing. Their job can also require them to design the pages. Sometimes web developers are shared with other teams.
Content writer: To appear on search engines a blog/web page requires lots of content, it requires good content. Without good, creative and innovative content the web page will not show up in the top links of search engine.
Link building: SEO takes into consideration the quality of links pointing to your content to validate the authenticity of your content. Hence it is advised to designate this work to an expert who understands when and where the internal or external links should be provided. Sometimes this role is merged with a content writer’s role.
2. Keep them updated
Search engines keep on updating their crawling algorithms from time to time. Google is a search engine which keeps SEO experts on their toes. Some of their major updates include Google Panda, Google Penguin, Google Hummingbird. These updates mainly depend on the development of Machine Learning. (ML).
To understand how to get more views on a page, SEO teams must be up-to-date with the ever changing algorithms. To ensure that your employees are on the same page as the latest SEO trends, your team must be continuously learning. In fact, research should be a part of their daily activity.
Good research brings good results. Information related to latest ML developments can be found on many websites and online journals as well. Some examples are: Moz, Search Engine Journal, and Google SEO Guidelines. Subscribing to journals and blogs can help the team in predicting the upcoming SEO trends.
3. Train employees
You may not be able to hire the best SEO specialist in the world. But nothing stops you from training them to achieve world class success in SEO. A good SEO team should comprise of employees who are ready to learn new things. SEO is all about understanding content and what the audience likes to read/watch.
Get them to read all about SEO and conduct SEO related workshops. You could even create courses to train the employees. Make sure your SEO team is working closely with market research to understand their target audience and what they want.
4. Encourage with Awards
Acknowledging the efforts of employees motivates them to work harder. It makes them believe that their efforts have a positive effect on the business and hence it boosts the self esteem of the employees.
Incentives can be provided on a quarterly basis in the form of bonus or it can be given yearly in the form of promotion or raise. Regular recognition of their quality work in the form of awards and titles also works to motivate your team.
5. Create a healthy environment
There is no doubt that a healthy workplace should be provided to employees of every department but the work of SEO operations requires focused attention and sometimes working for long hours. Data crunching, meeting content calendar deadlines and continuous learning can be stressful too.
Breaks for other activities such as games, debates, discussions, art, etc reduce stress as well as build stronger relations. The employees should have good relationship with one another as well. This way they can work as a team together. This would also make them open towards receiving others suggestions as well as giving them.
6. Interact with other SEO experts
Certain exclusive knowledge can be only learnt with experience. Not everything is found online. Make sure your team learns from those who have spent years in the industry. Encourage them to attend conferences, discussions and workshops about SEO operation.
In all these events employees will get tips from the experts, they will witness ideas in the process of being made and most of all these events will inspire them. Seminars are a great way of meeting other SEO teams in your industry and other big influential companies. You team will also pick up new strategies that help them to think out of their daily work.
Final Thoughts
For years businesses have focused on advertisement to attract more customers and in today’s internet age, appearing on the first page of search engines is the perfect advertisement. Try out these tips and prepare yourself to see your business grow.