The SEO Girl

Heading up a successful SEO team is no easy feat, especially in these times where clients are hesitant to spend money and tend to want to see results overnight. I’ve held a management role at the digital marketing firm I work at for the last few years, and by sticking to our motto of “Change or die”, we’ve weathered the changes in the SEO industry and the economy. We’re always a work in progress, but I’ve learned some fundamental strategies for managing an SEO team over the years.

1. “Change is the only constant” – Heraclitus: All members of your SEO team must embrace this mantra. Sure, the foundations of SEO have stuck around, but this is an industry that is constantly changing. Sticking to the old ways is going to have you losing customers and gaining a bad rep in no time.

2. Skilled Writers: It’s beneficial to have a savvy SEO programmer on your time, but the bulk of your team should be made up of proficient writers. Whether it’s scripting personalized emails to send to potential link partners or writing SEO copy for a client’s site, they need to be able to write cleanly and professionally. Never underestimate the value of a good writer.

3. Divide and Conquer: Each member of your team has their own strengths and weaknesses. Create sub-departments within your team to solely handle account management, SEO copy, social media monitoring, link building, blogging, press releases, etc. You’ll be building up your team’s confidence in their skills by giving them responsibility for their own mini-departments, and they’ll be able to focus on making their realm of SEO that much more successful.

4. Account Meetings – We hold monthly account meetings, where each client’s account team meets for a half hour, evaluates the stats for that month and develops an outline of the next month’s strategy. This ensures the team is in continual communication about how the account is doing, and we have a forum for ideas and innovation in place.

5. Client Check-in’s - You’re not going to be able to please every client, but it’s always best to take the bad with the good and welcome criticism. We check-in with each client mid-way through their contract term and send them a short survey regarding their perception of their SEO campaign’s performance, interaction with the team, and ways we can improve our relationship together. It may bring some issues to light, but knowing what you can do better with greatly strengthen your team.

These are just a few tips – feel free to share more about your experience managing an SEO team, what has worked for managing your team and ideas we can all benefit from!

This is more of a poll than a blog post, but I’d like to see which SEO tools the SEO community is using and why they find them effective. I’m on a quest this week to find a tool that includes the following items, and I’d like to see if I can find a match for my needs:

• Keyword research tools, like the Google Keyword Suggestion tool and SemRush
• Link building management, with the ability to add link building contacts, assign them to projects/categories
• Content management, with a “project” folder for each client so we can store their SEO copy and blog posts in their folder
• Social media tools – Similar to HootSuite.com where we can post to multiple client Twitter accounts by logging in to only one master account, see stats on the amount of clicks links in our posts receive. Ability to post to multiple Facebook Business Pages would also be a plus.
• Google Analytics integration/Automated reporting tools – Would absolutely love if the SEO tool had white-labeled reports that pulled relevant data from the client’s GA account
• Keyword tracking – Although we stay away from measuring SEO success solely by keyword rankings, it would be nice to have a keyword tracking system so we can sync up changes in rankings to traffic patterns.
• Google Alerts data – Ideally, we’d like the system to automatically search for mentions of the client’s brand name/relevant keywords, a la Google Alerts.
• Project management – A “lite” project management system built in, allowing users to create/assign tasks, view tasks assigned to them and the timeframe for the tasks

And of course if this was packaged into a nice little dashboard with a bow on top, that would be even better.

Have you seen specific increases in productivity with the tools you’re seeing? What’s on your SEO tool wishlist? Leave a comment and let me know, any and all info would be very helpful.

- Thanks for helping an SEO girl out!

I had an SEO discussion with a friend this week over a site that featured 4 “nofollow” links, and then listed those same 4 links a bit below them, “followed” this time and with relevant anchor text, instead of simply “Site.com”. My friend, who definitely knows his stuff when it comes to SEO, explained they chose this tactic so the full amount of “link juice” would only flow to the followed set of 4 links, rather than having to be split between the two sets of links. I replied that yes, the theory behind this is valid, but on a site with a grand total of 8 outgoing links, it’s a bit of a mute point, and may actually raise a spider’s suspicion, as the site is basically shouting out that they’re gaming search engines.

His perspective was that of a technical SEO specialist, mine was more of a natural, visitor-centric SEO specialist. His point is 100% correct, but in this instance, there’s no need to “nofollow” those links. If the site had 25 outgoing links and only wanted PageRank to flow through 4 of them, then the other 21 links should certainly be “nofollowed”. But not for a site with a total of 8 links.

This brings up a good point – if an SEO specialist knows the Google Webmaster Guidelines in and out and applies those principles to their client’s sites, does that make them experienced in SEO? Personally, I feel that knowing when to implement those guidelines is what really shows you know SEO. I’m always learning, but I feel it’s best to learn the technical SEO techniques, and then, and only through experience, learn why they’re beneficial to some sites and how to apply them to best benefit that individual site.

My friend has a wealth of SEO knowledge, and I do look to him for technical SEO questions. SEO duals are nothing new between us and keep us both on top of our game. The art of SEO is about gaining experience on knowing when to apply those SEO best practices, not necessarily in memorizing them.

I was talking with a new SEO client yesterday who told me her previous SEO company built her a Facebook Business Page so she get value from the link on Facebook to her site. As you can probably tell, I cringed. Let’s all say it together: links on Facebook do not pass on search engine value to your site (unless they’re coded in Facebook’s markup language, but we’ll talk about that in another post). They carry the “nofollow” tag, making them clickable, but a search engine spider will not pass on value to your site for that link.

That doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t useful for link building. Here’s some ways to capitalize on Facebook as a link building tool, and get people talking about your site!

Links, In Moderation. Imagine taking a leisurely drive and taking what seems to be a nice turn in the road. Suddenly, you’re bombarded with billboard after billboard, all screaming for your attention. Not so fun, right? Same goes for Facebook Business Pages – link to your site where appropriate, such as linking to a fun product every once in awhile, a new blog post, and of course in the “Website” field on the page.

The less obtrusive your page is, the more likely visitors will stay on the page, click through to your site, post on their own Facebook about your site, and grab the attention of their Facebook friends, who just may link to your site on their own blog or website!

People Like Free Stuff. It’s pretty much a rule of thumb that we like free things. Start a contest on your Facebook page where the first 25 or 50 fans receive a coupon code for your online store, with a value large enough to make a potential fan gush “Awesome!” and blog about it, thus resulting in more links to your main site, and of course more Facebook Fans!

I’ll be posting in about a week about Facebook contest ideas, so check back often!

Keep up the posting. I see a lot of really excited site owners posting often on Facebook for the first month or so, and then their interaction fizzles out. Keep up the posting – try to post daily, whether it’s about something interesting from your day or about a cool product on your site every once in awhile. A conversation involves two or more people, so be sure to comment on other people’s posts to spark conversation and get people noticing your page. Don’t be shy!

And When All Else Fails, Beg! Okay, just to be clear, I have confidence your page isn’t “failing” by any means. It never hurts to outright ask for a link. Once you’ve built up at least 25 Facebook Fans, click the “Send Update to Fans” link and ask if they’ll link to you on their site or blog. After all, if they like you, they’ll be helping out their site visitors by providing them with a trusted resource. Include a coupon code in your update. If only 2 out of 50 fans have a site and link to you, your 5 minutes of time still resulted in success.

Think about it this way: What would make you link to a site? Would it be a fun promotion, helpful daily tidbits, or a collection of really unique product images? Think about your audience and what really piques their interest.

I had a discussion with my SEO team today on taking responsibility for our clients’ successes, or sometimes, their unfortunate lack thereof. Let’s be honest, not every client has a stellar SEO experience, just like not every sandwich you nosh on or clothing you try on is going to fit. But I do feel an SEO specialist needs to be accountable for their client’s results after at least 3 months of SEO service. Some may disagree with me and say there’s tons of variables – what if the client has a poor site design, is in an extremely competitive industry, or is uncooperative with the SEO specialist?

Sure, the responsibility also lies with the client. The client needs to incorporate the SEO suggestions and SEO work into their site in a timely fashion. The SEO specialist also needs to  guide the client with site suggestions, branding ideas, and strategies on how to outshine their competition.

You can outline an SEO specialist’s work in the line items of a contract, and after a few months you can say, “Well, I did what I was supposed to. It’s not my fault their SEO didn’t work out.” But in the end, when it comes to whether your SEO business and industry cred lives on, it’s about how much you effort you put into making that individual campaign as successful as possible in the time you have allotted for it. If you can say you gave it your 200%, then I’m convinced you did your job well and showed responsibility for that account, whether the client stays on or leaves. However, if you simply did “what you’re supposed to”, then my friend, it’s time to choose another industry.

I’d like to hear your thoughts – should an SEO strategy be strictly bound to contract line items, or is it necessary to go above and beyond? Is there a middle ground? I may sound like I’m on a lofty soapbox here, but believe me, I’m working on actual client SEO campaigns every day, and I know it’s not an easy question to answer. I sometimes wonder what a 9-5 leave-and-forget-about-work job would be like, but I love this industry and my work way too much. Plus, this SEO Girl loves a challenge