Why Everyone In Your Business Wins With SEO via @sejournal, @HelenPollitt1

We know that there are many reasons to focus on SEO from a commercial standpoint.

Working on your company’s SEO can help raise the quality of your website, your brand reputation, and your conversions.

But what about the impact on your team?

Having a good SEO strategy in place can actually benefit your company in other ways.

Colleagues’ jobs can be made easier.

They may be equipped with new skills.

It may even help prove the worth of their work.

How SEO Can Positively Impact Other Marketing Channels

There are many important ways in which SEO can impact other marketing channels.

But let’s take a look at how it can help those teams meet their personal and team goals.

Collaboration

A good SEO strategy will never be in isolation from other marketing channels.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, for instance, goes hand-in-hand with SEO. Both channels’ leads need to talk to each other, or there’s going to be a financial impact.

The benefits go beyond money saving, though. SEO is a far-reaching specialism.

We need input on many other teams’ work: brand marketing, CRM, and paid media, to name a few. Through this, SEO can help to unify projects.

SEO professionals tend to need to be involved in anything that could affect the performance of the website – from brand positioning to content creation.

As such, SEO pros can be key stakeholders in marketing campaigns.

We help to ensure consistency in messaging and audience, both on-site and off.

Traffic And Visibility

SEO can assist with bringing a lot more users to your company’s digital assets, which, in turn, allows channels such as email marketing to promote sign-ups, or ecommerce managers to alert customers to offers.

Without the steady traffic of organic search, it can be hard for other marketing channels to gain enough of an initial audience for their campaigns to flourish.

Organic traffic is often one of the largest generators of traffic to a website.

When colleagues are looking to carry out user experience (UX) or conversion rate optimization (CRO) experiments, they will need a significant enough flow of traffic to be able to declare their experiment concluded.

SEO can be one of the ways qualified traffic is sent to those experiments without the additional cost of PPC or social media campaigns.

Ideation

The data gathered through SEO can also be very helpful in giving other marketing channels a place to start with their own campaign ideation.

Through the Google Trends data into trending topics, your editorial team can understand what subjects to cover that will be of interest to your target audience.

The seasonality of your industry shown through the peaks and troughs of search term usage can indicate to your wider marketing team the impact their campaigns may have at different times of the year.

A quick search engine results pages (SERP) analysis can yield lots of information about what social posts or videos competitors are producing.

The reserved spaces in the search results for videos, images, news, and social media can be a goldmine of ideas for other marketing teams that they may not think to check.

Brand Reputation Management

SEO pros can help improve and maintain brand reputation.

Often, when a search is carried out for a company name, the first page of the search results is a mix of brand-owned and third-party websites. Because of this, SEO professionals have a huge impact on what visitors see when they are searching for a brand.

Negative Google Business Profile (GBP) reviews or a poor Tripadvisor score may be visible on the front page of the SERPs if a brand is having trouble with its online reputation.

SEO pros can work to bring owned properties up the search results for branded search terms, as well as work with customer success teams to respond to negative reviews.

This can help to make the branded search results more neutral (or even positive) for the brand.

How SEO Research Can Help Beyond Driving Traffic

SEO experts have to cover a lot of bases with their work.

They need to understand how the technology of the website they are working on impacts its performance. There is a requirement to understand how user behavior changes over time. They have to be ready to capitalize on trends.

As a result, SEO pros are in a great position to be able to share their knowledge with other teams outside of the marketing department.

Ideas For New Products

Research into search terms potential visitors are using can sometimes reveal new revenue streams or product ideas.

When conducting keyword research for your industry, you may well discover that there is a lot of interest in an idea or topic that is very related to your current product offering.

This insight can be shared with product teams to help them explore interest in new products.

This research can also be used to test the interest in a product in new markets.

For example, if your or a client’s business is considering expanding internationally, then research carried out by SEO pros can indicate receptiveness to a product in the new country.

Competitor analysis carried out by SEO professionals will often look at where there are gaps in the search market that competitors are filling.

This data can give product teams insight into how other relevant companies are better meeting the needs of your shared audience.

It can also show where there is little or no significant competition for a new product or service.

Help Reduce Workload Of Customer Support

Speaking to the customer service team is often touted as a great source of topic ideas for SEO pros. However, finding out what questions and concerns the customer service team is working with daily can go beyond an article for the company blog.

Find out common customer issues now and provide resources online to alleviate those concerns.

This is especially beneficial to customer service teams that field many calls every day, and have long hold times.

It isn’t just for the benefit of getting more organic traffic to the website. It could be the difference between a happy or unhappy customer.

SEO professionals can optimize this content so it directly meets the needs of searchers looking for those answers. This makes the answer easier to find and stops them from having to call a customer service line.

It can also give SEO pros an understanding of what might appear as a “People Also Asked” question in relation to your brand if it is asked a lot, and therefore probably searched a lot.

Creating content that answers those frequently asked questions can help your customer success team’s workload, and also enable your site to be a possible contender for the People Also Asked result if one is provided.

SEO Skills Can Help Other Teams

It can be fairly obvious to see how SEO will impact other marketing channels and vice versa. However, have you stopped to consider quite how broad the impact of SEO is?

The skills involved in good SEO can have a much wider effect.

Sales

SEO is all about understanding our audience’s needs and how they go about solving their problems.

Through keyword research, we have a clear view of what our target market is looking for in relation to our products or services.

This information is incredibly valuable to sales teams.

It is a level of data they may not be able to access themselves, yet it provides great insight into the problems and concerns their customers are looking to solve.

Consider creating regular reports to your, or your client’s, sales teams that detail trending topics and frequently asked questions.

This data could help them to identify new hooks or solutions that will be directly relevant to your market.

Content Creation

This one might seem obvious.

We know SEO relies heavily on quality content creation – the data we can pull for keywords alone helps to ensure copy that’s more relevant to searchers.

But how can SEO help copywriters?

With the myriad of tools at our disposal, SEO experts can gain insights into trending topics, predict seasonal interests, and understand how to make copy resonate with readers.

All of this is very valuable to content creators.

Editorial Teams

Consider your editorial teams – they want to be creating content for your blog or video channel that will be found by new audiences.

SEO pros can help with that greatly, from recommending important search phrases to use, to video optimization to help them be more visible on Google Search and YouTube.

Product Copy

Beyond editorial, SEO can assist with ensuring product copy and service details are targeted to the language readers are wanting to see.

Keyword search data and competitive analysis can give insight into what features and information readers are interested in and therefore need to be highlighted.

SEO experts can also help copywriters to understand how search engines perceive the relevancy of their copy to their target audience’s needs.

After all, the likes of Google have spent considerable time and money ensuring the pages they rank will meet the needs of searchers. There is a lot of insight SEO pros can provide on what relevancy looks like.

Using SEO To Reinforce The Value Of Other Teams’ Work

One big way SEO can positively impact the work of other departments is by showing the value their work brings to SEO.

They will have their own metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) they use to demonstrate the effectiveness of what they do.

SEO, however, is another channel they may be affecting – and proving the benefit of their work to the success of SEO is a great way of encouraging closer collaboration.

There will be several ways in which you can quickly identify the impact of other teams’ work on SEO.

Traffic

Sometimes changes are made to websites, and the teams involved don’t know how to measure their success.

Increases in search visibility or organic traffic to those pages can be a good indicator that the change was a successful one.

Conversion Rate

SEO isn’t just about driving traffic to a website; that traffic needs to be converting.

Demonstrate to the teams involved that changes to the website have yielded a much higher conversion rate for organic traffic.

This can help to solidify the value of the work they have carried out.

Crawling And Indexation

Changes the engineering team has made to the website can drastically hinder or improve its ability to be crawled.

Crawl stats can detail the improvement in volume or type of pages being crawled. They can also show the reduction in cruft pages being crawled.

It can be a good analysis to demonstrate the success of recent development changes. Similarly, look at how pages are being indexed over time.

Seeing that the right ones are indexed (and the wrong ones aren’t) can be a success indicator for recent development changes.

Page Speed

This is a metric that most developers are probably keeping an eye on themselves.

However, it can be a good one to share with those that aren’t.

Improving page speed can be a positive change for SEO purposes and user experience.

Conclusion

SEO has a very obvious benefit to companies. More traffic, more leads or sales, and more revenue.

Beyond this, SEO can help other departments of a business be more efficient.

As SEO pros, we shouldn’t be afraid to provide insight to other teams.

It might be valuable to them and can help them to demonstrate their own successes to the broader organization.

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