Good morning search marketers, getting support for SEO initiatives takes leadership.
Raise your hand if you've seen this happen first-hand: The executive team shows a burst of enthusiasm for SEO, plans are made, budgets are approved, SEOs feel empowered. And then it all just … fizzles out.
"When SEO begins, management will give the great rah-rah speech and then they walk away and pass it off to the SEO team — and the SEO team gets started, but then they get pushback," says Jessica Bowman, owner enterprise training consultancy of SEO In-house, and an editor at large here at Search Engine Land.
Jessica says SEO must be framed as a company-wide mandate to get more teams — dev, content, UX — involved in improving search performance and preventing mishaps that can lead to lost organic traffic and revenue. (Like the time, Jessica shared, a dev team in an overseas region moved CSS files to a different directory without thinking about SEO implications. Turns out that directory was excluded via robots.txt and search engines could no longer access the files.)
SEOs can help themselves by establishing relationships with key stakeholders such as project managers and be pre-emptive about communicating strategy and showing the numbers, but Jessica says, executives must take a lead and ensure staff is trained on SEO and that every project has SEO accounted for.
Jessica will be diving deep into this topic in a workshop on optimizing SEO operations for marketing leaders in Boston on September 16, ahead of our MarTech conference. Registration is now open.
Read on for a Pro Tip on a script to help you track budget at various levels of your Google Ads account and more.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
