How To Prepare Your Business For SEO

Many businesses know that they need SEO and other online marketing strategies to grow their revenue and profits, however, what they don’t know is that it takes a lot of work on their part to prepare their business to engage in such strategies. I cannot tell you how many potential clients I speak with who are completely oblivious to what SEO is, what is involved in the process, and what it takes to have a successful campaign. I’m not going to lie, this post is probably going to turn a lot of people off and will probably result in us losing some business to one of our competitors who doesn’t care about putting together and executing a successful campaign on their behalf, however, I hope this is an eye opener for many businesses and helps them to stack the odds in their favor of having a successful SEO campaign, regardless of if they plan to engage with us, another agency, or working with an in-house team. So let’s talk about what you have to do to prepare your business for SEO.

Accept Your Agency As A True Extension of Your Marketing Department

One of the most difficult things that an SEO will encounter is a client unwilling to accept them and their team as part of their marketing department. If you want to be successful at SEO, you need to integrate SEO into everything that you do within your company.

Work Towards Real Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

As I’ve said in other blog posts, one of the most frustrating things for an SEO is when a client is determining the success of their campaign based off of horrible KPIs like number of links built per month, or even the number of keywords found in position number one in Google. Just yesterday I spoke with a Fortune 500 client who was attempting to cancel his services because his team did not build enough links each month. It didn’t matter to him that we grew his monthly revenue each month since engaging and were probably thirty days away from really blowing up his ROI.

Full Analytics Access

Upon engaging in SEO, you need to be ready to grant full analytics access to your team. This will allow them to set a baseline, set up filters and goals, and help them work toward the real KPIs that drive the campaign. Not granting full access will be detrimental to the success of your campaign.

Revenue & Profit Data

Just how you need to grant full access to your analytics, it’s also best if you share your revenue and profit data with your team as well. This too will help them work towards driving value for your business instead of just working toward rankings and increasing traffic.

Prioritize Your I.T. Resources

Prioritizing your internal I.T. resources is crucial to the success of your campaign. I’ve worked with some very large companies who have I.T. calendars booked up until 2015. That means if you need a URL rewrite, you will have to wait for three more years. Insane, right? To increase the odds of a successful campaign, make sure to put top priority on all changes your SEO team asks of you.

Use Internal Resources To Help With Content Creation

The last thing you need to do to prepare your business for SEO is to be willing to provide internal resources to help with content creation. This can include, landing page content, product descriptions, and most important, blog posts. SEO isn’t a “pass the baton” strategy in which you will take no part in leading a helping hand, but it is a team effort. Producing and publishing optimized content that targets your buyer personas is a huge part of a campaign and your team needs your help. So what do you think? Am I missing any key elements? If so, please feel free to share in the comments section below.]]>