Getting Organizational Support for SEO and SEM Projects and Campaigns
Posted by Arjun ThomasAnother article that by russ mann that is definitely worth a read.
A while back I provided some advice on pitching for budget and headcount for search marketing projects, and for your own personal raises and promotions!
Even when SEO and SEM managers get the budget and headcount they request, projects don’t always go exactly as planned. Getting great results from SEO, especially at large companies, is not just about understanding the latest nuances of Google’s algorithm, or being an expert linkbaiter or quality score smoother. More often, it’s about managing organizational dynamics, leveraging best practices in project management, and being a great influencer, communicator and leader at all levels of your company. I’ve found that these factors can be the difference between success and failure.
Based on my experience working with more than 75 Fortune 500 / Global 2000 advertisers, here are five key learnings (translated into actionable insights):
- Get executive support for your project
- Use objective measures for comparisons
- Establish concrete milestones throughout the project or campaign
- Make SEO part of the regular workflow, and make it easy
- Have fun with competition
Bonus Actionable Insight #6: Align incentives and compensation for the people most involved
ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #1: Get an official executive sponsor for your project
Just because you got the budget and the headcount doesn’t mean you necessarily have executive support. In traditional project management, the project manager (you!) gets a senior executive to be the “executive sponsor.” This may or may not be your direct boss. The key is getting an executive sponsor who is at a level where he or she can reach across teams and organizations to get things done and to get other folks to cooperate with you. The executive sponsor needs to be enthusiastic about your project and understand its importance to the company — and he or she must be willing to step in if things are going sideways.
ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #2: Use objective measures for progress reports and business unit comparisons
In SEM, objective measurement is fairly easy — total revenue, ROI and other conversions tend to be the key metrics. CTRs, CPCs and bounce rates are additional metrics that paid search managers can use to gauge campaigns across the corporation, even if they have different end objectives (e.g., one group may be focused on ecommerce while another may be focused on lead generation).
In SEO, the metrics around a successful campaign tend to be less readily available — especially as “rank” becomes less useful in the age of personalized and targeted search results pages. Covario clients use Covario Organic Search Insight, the leading SaaS search engine optimization (SEO) software solution, to audit over 56 on-page and off-page elements for SEO health and roll them up into a single, easy to use score at the business unit or program level. We often hear from our clients that the Covario SEO Audit Score™ is a great way to use a consistent and objective measure for comparison across business units, geos, and product lines — and it helps to eliminate the subjective discussions about who is doing better or worse.
ACTIONABLE INSIGHT #3: Establish concrete milestones throughout the program or campaign
We see a lot of SEO projects get kicked off with a “never-ending” mentality. Folks get hired to do SEO, that’s their jobs, and they’re sticking to it. We recommend that even long-term SEO projects and ongoing optimization programs be broken into phases or campaigns. Some examples for specific phases might be:
- Get 1,000 more pages indexed by Google / 60 days
- Secure 25 more quality inbound links / 30 days
- Improve total conversions by 20% / 180 days
- Increase Covario SEO Audit Score™ by 5 points / 90 days
Not only will it give your team and constituents a sense of “pace of play” and objectives met or beaten, it will also provide visible measures of progress and success throughout the life of the program.
Read the entire article.
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