After working in an agency and in-house, I know how difficult it could be to get resources for an SEO strategy. Even though stakeholders tend to understand the importance and the significance of the share of organic traffic, when it comes to action, there are always more urgent things to do. The fact that SEO is a long-term commitment that doesn’t bring shiny results immediately, doesn’t help the situation.
This leads to the SEO tasks to be thrown in the end of enormous product backlogs and wait for months (if not years) to be implemented. Surprisingly, it happens both in the agencies – even though clients pay a lot of money for the consulting- and in-house.
From my experience, in order to achieve a long-term commitment, it’s important to change the way people in the company – from the bottom to top – think and work around their priorities. The main goal is to promote the importance of consistent SEO work.
And SEO managers and specialists are the ones who should lead the change.
What is change management?
According to aql.org:
Change management is defined as the methods and manners in which a company describes and implements change within both its internal and external processes. This includes preparing and supporting employees, establishing the necessary steps for change, and monitoring pre- and post-change activities to ensure successful implementation.
In other words, in order to create an SEO mindset, we have to set up a plan, help our colleagues to adopt the change and make sure they follow the steps.
Let’s use Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model to do that
According to kotterinc.com, over four decades, “Dr. Kotter observed countless leaders and organizations as they were trying to transform or execute their strategies. He identified and extracted the common success factors and documented them as the 8 Steps for Leading Change”. Let’s apply them to SEO.
Step 1: Create Urgency. What will happen if you don’t act now?
One of the biggest problems for SEO professionals is that SEO doesn’t give many shot-term results and, because of that, (almost) never feels urgent.
However, we can all remember cases when the traffic suddenly dropped by 30% after the website migration or an algorithm update hit the keyword rankings. In my experience, that type of events can be terrifying for the stakeholders who are willing to freeze other priorities in order to solve the problem.
So how could we create that sense of urgency when everything is stable and the website is not on the edge of collapsing?
Here are some ideas to use:
- Benchmark: does your website have strong competitors whose rankings keep growing MoM? What did they do in terms of SEO? And, more importantly, which market share will they have in 6 month / a year / 3 years if you don’t start acting?
- Algorithm Update: is your website technically prepared for the next core update? How much traffic could it potentially use in a worst-case scenario?
- Traffic trend: Which is the clicks / impressions / organic trend for your website? If it’s decreasing, how much traffic you’ll get in 1 year / 2 years and 3 years?
- Google Trends: based on the data for the most important keywords, is the market growing or dropping? How will this trend affect your organic traffic if you don’t start acting?
- Missed opportunities: how much organic traffic would you be having now if you started doing SEO 1 year ago?
Although SEO managers don’t like doing forecasts and predictions (let’s be fair, not many of them come true), it’s the easiest way to get the attention of the stakeholders. After all, they speak business language, not “SEO” language.
Step 2: Form a Powerful SEO Coalition
Who are your allies in the company? If you have been hired, there should be people who understand the importance of doing SEO. Start talking to them about the existing problems, the benefits of the organic strategy and what needs to be done.
Try to get people from different teams who could reach stakeholders that you don’t contact directly. This way, more and more people will start being aware of the changes that need to happen.
Try to get:
- People from sales team
- Product managers
- Developers
- Marketing specialists
- Middle and top managers
The last group is the most important one for the change to happen. You need to get middle and top managers onboard as early as possible. Otherwise, you might find yourself in a situation of top-down decisions that undermine your efforts and the resources being redirected towards other projects that seem more urgent to the decision makers.
Step 3: Create an SEO Vision for Change
What do you want to achieve by doing SEO in long-term? Create a short (a couple of paragraph) vision that would inspire stakeholders.
Don’t focus on the keyword positions or other specific metrics. The following vision will probably not inspire many people to act:
Our SEO mission is to get move most important transactional keywords to the first page of Google and outrank competitors.
Try to make your vision more user-centric instead. For example:
Our SEO mission is to help every potential customer discover the website by search and give them opportunity to solve their problem by using our services. In order to do so, we need to improve their search experience that consists of having a fast page speed, creating content that matches their search intents and having the best quality landing pages on the market.
After you create the first draft, show it to your coalition and get feedback. Discuss it with the team and iterate your vision until it’s simple and inspirational.
Make sure that the vision is beneficial for 1) customers, 2) stockholders, 3)employees
After that, you can start working on an SEO strategy that would include all the aspects you want to work on. Make sure that it allows you to fulfill the vision you created. Make sure you cover:
- Technical problems
- Content opportunities
- Creating SEO mindset within the company
- Authority building
- 2-year backlog
- Number of teams and profiles that need to be working on the tasks
- Main KPI forecast with different scenarios: do-nothing / do-something / do-everything
This way you will show a path to achieving the inspirational goal you stated in the vision and help stakeholders understand what resources you need.
Step 4: Communicate the SEO Vision
After you prepared your presentation and iterated it with the coalition, you need to communicate it to the rest of the team.
When it’s ready, try to schedule a meeting with the stakeholders. Make sure you speak in a clear non-technical language and focus on the business side of the presentation: threats, opportunities, necessary resources, timeline and outcomes. Try not to overwhelm them with SEO details and definition of tasks.
After the vision has been approved by the managers, use every possible channel to communicate it to the rest of the company. Put it in the newsletter, mention it in every meeting that deals with SEO, report on a weekly basis what you are doing to get there etc. Ask people from your guiding coalition to do the same.
While communicating the vision, stick to the few inspirational ideas. Don’t try to communicate every excellent task and project you included in your plan. It will take a lot of time and confuse people who don’t understand SEO. Use storytelling, metaphors and examples.
Step 5: Remove Obstacles that undermine SEO actions
What structures and systems don’t let people get there
What are the blockers (people) and how can you convince them not to undermine
Encourage risk taking
People don’t understand SEO
The main obstacles that could undermine the SEO change efforts could be:
- Structures. A lot of times, product teams that implement features on the website, don’t communicate to each other frequently enough. You can find yourself in a situation when several front-ends work on solving Core Web Vitals, while developers from another team launch a cool new feature that makes CLS grow 2 times.
In order to avoid that, try to improve the communication between teams and make sure everyone understands how their actions affect SEO. - Skills. Not many developers have enough knowledge about crawling, indexaing, canonicals, meta-tags etc. That leads to them not understanding the importance of SEO optimization of the new pages.
You can start a series of workshops or launch an SEO course to help them. - Systems. If the company didn’t work SEO before, it’s very possible that the current way of work is not suitable for what you are trying to achieve. Evaluate if the current way of work of product teams has SEO focus.
Make sure you have SEO check-lists in place for the launch of new features. Also, try to implement e2e test and a protocol that everyone will follow in case of an SEO emergency. - Supervisors. Is every PM on board with the actions that you proposed? If not, they might prioritize other tasks and move SEO to the end of their backlog.
Communicate the importance of the actions that you proposed frequently and encourage your teammates every time they finish an SEO task.
Step 6: Create Quick Wins
Are there any quick wins that could give you fast results? Try to find a few actions that are easy to implement and give visible outcomes to encourage the team.
It could be something as easy as titles or schema A/B test.
It’s needed for the team to feel motivated about the job they are doing. SEO is a long-term activity, and it’s easy to get frustrated while working for 3 months on a website section that will not have visibility for another several weeks. Show the team that they CAN make a difference.
After the actions have been launched, communicate the change and prove that the effort has paid off by using clear metrics: clicks / CTR / impressions.
Another objective of the quick wins is putting additional pressure on the teams to finish smaller projects on time.
On the other hand, a lot of times we are forced to do SEO forecasts and create business cases before starting to work on the strategy. It’s important to warn the stakeholders in advance if you think that you won’t get to the numbers you predicted, and explain the reasons.
Step 7: Build on the Change. Don’t let stakeholders think that SEO is “solved”
One of the worst mistakes that can be made is celebrating the victory too soon. If people think that they “solved SEO” it will be difficult to convince them otherwise in the future.
So, acknowledge the effort made by the teams, communicate the results, but don’t celebrate too early. Keep reminding the team that SEO is a long-term commitment and the growth you achieved might easily be lost if you stop optimizing the website.
Try to use the results that you achieve, to create even more change: launch new actions, projects and get more people onboard.
Try to keep the urgency high by showing the competitors’ actions and new Google algorithms.
Step 8: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture
The ultimate goal is to make everyone think about SEO while any change is being made on the website. Here are few things that could help:
- Launch an obligatory SEO course for your colleagues. Make sure that product teams and content teams get relevant information.
- Add SEO as a definition of done for front-end, back-end, and content tasks
- Implement e2e tests
- Implement automatic alerts connected to your SEO tools that would communicate problems immediately
- Make sure everyone understands that SEO in a long-term commitment that needs constant work
Try to show how new behaviors helped to improve organic traffic and avoid being hit by algorithm updates.
What is success?
Richard Gerver in his book “Change” mentions that for him, the success in change management is measured by the legacy you leave behind. For me, success in SEO means that the company keeps doing SEO without a demanding SEO manager who keeps pushing for his strategy and the change will stay in place even if you leave the position.
Daria Miroshnichenko
Note: this article contains only my personal research and opinion:)
Sources and recommended literature:
J.P. Kotter - “Leading Change”
R. Gerver - “Change”
