The Executive SEO Playbook

How to Integrate SEO Company-Wide for Increased Profitability

Jessica Bowman

• Publisher: SEOinhouse.com
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781949639919
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Your SEO team has stellar skills, motivation, and the discipline needed to get it right. SEO revenues are growing, but you feel it could be better...and you're right, "it" can be a lot better.

Doing "it" right is simple in theory, but few companies have been able to do "it." The secret to "it" is to get SEO done right the first time, by the right people, at the right time.

Easier said than done? Well, yes and no. It is nearly impossible to achieve that goal without an effective methodology. This book will show you exactly what that effective methodology looks like, step by step.

The Executive SEO Playbook was written for executives, but the methodology will inform everyone company-wide. Managers will discover how to get their teams to act on the 20% of SEO that makes 80% of the impact for their role. The SEO team will stop chasing projects and start doing advanced, proactive--and effective--SEO.

A truly effective SEO strategy isn't executed by the SEO team, it's executed via company-wide integration. Embrace the future of enterprise-level SEO and enjoy the rewards.

Chapter 1

Before We Begin

It is likely you already know that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is absolutely vital to the success and even the survival of any company of any size. Your company probably has a person or team of people whose primary focus is SEO. Maybe you’re one of those SEO people. If so, don’t worry—this book isn’t a rehash of what you already know. This book is going to help you be more effective at implementing your SEO tactics and strategies. And for many of you reading this book, what you will learn will help you grab the millions in SEO revenue currently left on the table due to problems created by SEO operations.

This is not an SEO how-to book. The assumption of this book is that you already know at least some basics of SEO. It’s crucial to have a basic understanding of SEO practices for this book to serve its purpose, so if you’re a beginner, please check out an SEO how-to book and then come back (see Appendix A for recommended SEO resources). We plan to hit the ground running.

Who should read this book? Anyone who is tasked with doing anything that impacts a large company’s web presence should read various portions of this book. It is written in a way that will give you “light bulb” moments and help you understand the many facets of the complex discipline of SEO. It will also help you understand how you influence multiple “pillars” of SEO every single day, even when making seemingly unrelated decisions.

This book is an essential read for executives who are responsible for web presence, and for members of SEO teams. It will get you thinking differently about how you need to manage SEO at your company.

This book will best serve companies with large development groups and many different roles that influence all online activities (on and off the website). It is specifically for enterprise-level organizations with extensive web presence and proportionately large web development and marketing staff. Your organization probably has roles with these titles—each of which needs to be involved in SEO:

•Team Leads

•Product Managers

•Project Managers

•Merchandisers

•Business Analysts

•User Experience Designers

•Developers

•QA Testers

•Social Media Marketers

•Public Relations Specialists

If you equip these roles with the information in this book and the right skills, tools, and metrics, you will have dozens to hundreds of people pursuing SEO every day. That is the dangling carrot to pursue in enterprise SEO, and it will exponentially grow SEO revenue.

Is this book only relevant to large corporations? Not at all. Everything addressed in this book applies to companies of all sizes. Even the agencies you engage to build your websites can benefit from its solutions.

However, the aim of this book is to implement an SEO strategy in a large enterprise-level organization. Keep in mind that many of the specific recommendations and the SEO Gold Mine (discussed in Chapter 2) are based on the challenges and opportunities unique to large corporations; small and mid-sized companies face different challenges and opportunities.

Let me tell you a little about my experience. Enterprise-level SEO has been putting bread on my table since 2002. My career has included stints as an in-house SEO manager at Yahoo! Inc., Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and Business.com.

In 2008, I launched my own SEO consulting firm, SEOinhouse. com, which was uniquely designed to help companies do better SEO in-house. Today our selective roster of clients includes the biggest brands online. Between my in-house SEO experience, clients, and network of in-house SEOs, there is little I haven’t seen.

I learned how to do “it” trial-by-fire—and developed a well-honed system. Back in 2002, when I started working in SEO, there were few people who knew how to do “it,” the je ne sais quoi of SEO—how to execute on SEO in a large corporation. The big “it” of enterprise SEO, I’ve discovered, isn’t about what you need to do, but how you get those things done. For over a decade I’ve been tweaking a methodology for doing “it.” This book is my revelation—how to do “it”—and it presents a well-honed system broken down into understandable chunks.

“It” is the invisible fence that’s holding you back in ways you are and are not aware of. “It” is what drives you bonkers, causes SEO to get missed, and frustrates everyone from developers to QA testers to executives. “It” is SEO Operations.

Many of the solutions for doing “it” well are a bit of a “no-duh.” It’s funny; people know a lot of what needs to be done, but knowing what to do and effectively implementing a course-correcting plan of action to fix problems are very different things. This book gives you a framework for how to fix and most effectively do “it” in your large, politically charged, and siloed organization. Doing “it” right will make your SEO run like a well-oiled machine.

Why does everyone struggle with doing “it”? In a large organization, SEO is a collaborative effort. The SEO team can’t actually do everything that needs to be done for SEO themselves; there are many tasks necessary for SEO that are controlled by other departments. Often, people working in other departments don’t have a vested interest in doing SEO tasks because SEO is not part of their own team’s performance metrics, and they haven’t been shown (or they do not yet appreciate) the value of adding SEO into their processes. This makes SEO tasks, for them, more of a favor or best practice, not a must-do activity.

THIS IS IMPORTANT: A critical takeaway for executives is that at far too many companies SEO is not a must-do activity. Instead, it’s perceived as a favor or best practice, the bells-and-whistles that can be descoped with little investigation to the short- and long-term risks (despite what the executives say). Why is this? Read on.

People do the SEO team favors when they can, and when they do, they get a warm, fuzzy feeling from having done something for the greater good. This works well until conflicts arise between the SEO team’s requests and the non-SEO teams’ mandated priorities. When the road forks between helping SEO and meeting the goals management has set for them, SEO gets dropped like a hot potato. The next thing you know, SEO is descoped or avoided altogether because there is little reason not to (the decisions makers are not held accountable for any form of SEO results).

When SEO priorities are descoped, the SEO team is forced to chase the project decision makers to try to get SEO priorities back into projects. This keeps them from doing revenue-generating activities. There is a better way.

How do you do “it” better? Simply integrate SEO tasks combined with metrics-driven accountabilities throughout your company’s everyday business operations to the point that SEO is systematized and it happens at the right time, almost every time.

THIS IS IMPORTANT: Metrics-driven SEO accountabilities across the organization are what will make SEO just happen, the way it ought to happen, in your organization.

That’s right, the COO, CMO, and CIO need to have SEO in their purview. You will be able to do “it” better than your competition once everyone influencing your online presence:

•Knows how to act on SEO.

•Is given toolkits to do SEO on the fly (and also to know when to pull in the SEO team for help).

•Is held accountable for getting SEO done correctly for the current SEO Strategies.

Metrics-driven accountabilities are the foundation for great enterprise SEO Operations.

SEO Operations are measurable? This book will offer SEO checks and balances to ensure that your SEO strategy is on the right track and make corrections to smooth out the ride. You need this because being ineffective at SEO Operations can hurt you—even if your SEO revenue is growing despite the operational glitches.

Executives, SEO teams, and non-SEO teams need measurable accountabilities. In Chapter 8 you will be introduced to a new type of metric that will radically change how SEO is managed organization-wide. Chapter 8 has some very critical takeaways for you, so don’t stop reading before you check it out.

Managing SEO operations metrics is the only way to get things done in enterprise-level companies with SEO challenges due to multiple business lines, complicated websites, legacy systems, and more website cooks in the kitchen than you’ll find on the Iron Chef season opener. And of course, half of them are creating more fires than finished dinners.

Fires? Did someone mention fires? SEO managers, like most managers, hate fires—an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Before We Begin
• Chapter 2: Are You an SEO Avoider or SEO Pacesetter? Your operations determine which you are.
• Chapter 3: Are You Setting the Pace or Avoiding the Race?
• Chapter 4: The Four Seasons of SEO: Get Out of Reality Fast
• Chapter 5: Meet Your In-House SEO GPS: The F2R Framework and Methodology
• Chapter 6: SEO Pillars 1 Through 6: SEO Strategies
• Chapter 7: SEO Pillars 7 Through 10: SEO Operations
• Chapter 8: Meet Your New SEO Checks and Balances
• Chapter 9: Assemble Your SEO Army
• Chapter 10: Effective SEO Training Is the Difference That Makes the Difference
• Chapter 11: Laying a Strong Foundation: Optimizing the Operations of Your SEO Team
• Chapter 12: The Roadmap to Becoming an SEO Pacesetter: Your SEO Integration Plan
• Appendix A: SEO How-To Resources
• Appendix B: Links and Resources for Doing Enterprise SEO In-House, Better