The Art of SEO

Identifying the Site Development Process and Players

Before you start working on any SEO project, you need to know three things: who your target audience is, what your message is, and how your message is relevant. There are no web design tools or programming languages that tell you these things. Marketing, advertising, and PR have to set the objectives before you can implement them—successful SEO requires a team effort.

Your SEO team should be cross-functional and multidisciplinary, consisting of the team manager, the technical team, the creative team, and the major stakeholders from marketing, advertising, and PR. In a smaller organization, you may have to wear all of those hats yourself.

The team leader wants to know who the target audience is. What does marketing know about them? How did we find them? What metrics will we use to track them? All of this is key information that should have an impact on the project’s technical implementation.

Advertising needs to have its messages well thought out and prepared. You do not want your team bickering over whether to optimize for “hardcore widget analysis” or “take your widgets to the next level.” Advertising serves multiple purposes, but its most fundamental purpose is to compel people to take a specific action: what action are you compelling people to take?

PR has to take your story to the media and entice them into writing and talking about it. What message do they want to deliver? You have to mirror that message in your content. If they say you’re relevant to white bears but your project plan says you’re relevant to African bees, the whole project is in trouble. When you’re creating visibility, the people who build up your brand have to see a clear, concise focus in what you do. If you provide them less than that, they’ll find someone else to talk about.

The technical and creative team is responsible for delivering the project. They take direction from marketing, advertising, and PR on what needs to be accomplished, but from there on out they have to put the pieces into place. As the project unfolds, marketing has to come back and say whether the target audience is being reached. Advertising has to come back and say the message is clear. PR has to come back and say the media likes what they see.

Ongoing feedback is essential because the success of your project is determined solely by whether you’re meeting your goals. A successful SEO team understands all of these interactions and is comfortable relying on each team member to do his part. Establishing good communications among team members is essential.

And even if you are a team of one, you need to understand all of these steps. Getting all aspects of the marketing problem addressed (as relates to SEO) is a requirement for success.