An SEO strategy flywheel to win leadership buy-in and drive results

In today’s SEO industry, human challenges far exceed technical challenges. Our job as SEOs has evolved dramatically in the last 10 years. To show value a decade ago, SEOs manually audited sites and created a laundry list of SEO whoopee items to fix. Prioritization wasn’t imperative to success considering marketing teams were limited, websites were smaller, and SEO didn’t have an obvious home…should SEO live with development, content, creative, or marketing? As we love to say, “it depends.”

In the decade since we’ve learned that SEO does require meaningful prioritization to get buy-in from all stakeholders. Prioritization is now mandatory for two reasons:

1. Resources are finite—as SKUs and sites grow, the SEO resources usually don’t
2. Tools have replaced the need for transmission audits but cannot replace human expertise in prioritizing versus merchantry needs and objectives

John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, plane says this on Reddit:

As an SEO, a part of your role is to take all of the possible optimizations and icon out which ones are worth spending time on. Any SEO tool will spit out 10s or 100s of “recommendations”, most of those are going to be irrelevant to your site’s visibility in search. Finding the items that make sense to work on takes experience.

However, modern SEO success moreover requires increasingly than just spanking-new prioritization. We’ve well-set on a worldwide weighing that regardless of where SEO sits within an organization, it is marketing! SEO = marketing. And, whether we like it or not, that makes us as SEOs advertisers. SEOs = advertisers.

Unfortunately, I have bad news for you: people despise advertisers, according to Gallup polls.

So this presents obvious challenges for us as we try to win over folks like merchantry executives, developers, content writers, etc., with this inherent bias versus us as advertisers.

Introducing: The SEO strategy flywheel

The SEO strategy flywheel was hard-fought through my personal experience. The weightier part is that this flywheel can be used by in-house SEOs, freelancers, and agencies!

As Myriam Jessier says to SEOs, “Heart surgeons use checklists. You are not whilom them.”

To take this further, we are not whilom process either – and in today’s world, the process must go vastitude traditional SEO expertise. SEOs must use processes to overcome human and technical challenges. Processes can finger mundane, boring, and possibly plane robotic. Far too often have I witnessed SEOs painfully living in unconnectedness with no specified roadmaps, processes, or regular workflow cadence. But the truth is: we are not whilom process and it does not turn us into robots.

Rather, creating process makes us increasingly human. It eliminates the need to focus on “survival” tactics and reserves bandwidth to focus on increasingly impactful strategic initiatives.

Having a team and various stakeholders commit to a process improves efficiency, allows for increasingly collaboration, and ensures we can see our recommendations implemented.

1. Opportunity wringer – Build confident humility into your process

Step one is our opportunity to reassess our strategic vision, layered versus the new competitive landscape from the previous quarter.

Too often, we as SEOs are either too stubborn in our strategic vision or too passive to make recommendations that may be experimental or challenging to get approved. This leads to either armchair-quarterback syndrome where you’re blinded by hubris or imposter syndrome where you’re too meek to make difficult cases compelling. The goldilocks spot is what Adam Grant calls, “Confident Humility” in his typesetting ‘Think Again’.

The opportunity wringer commits all teams to unceasingly review site performance, and unriddle and prepare for any industry/vertical change. In short, the opportunity wringer forces confident humility. And confident humility is how we get better—quarter without quarter.

Most important in the opportunity wringer is to ensure that there is an “outside” perspective from flipside SEO expert to ensure that your findings are sound. At Brainlabs, this includes check-ins and QA with the Group Worth Director and VP of SEO. This outside perspective allows us to help narrow in on the most impactful findings for our recommendations.

Tips

• Doing an audit, you will find someone somewhere withal the line made a mistake (for example, unimplemented content, wrongly implemented schema, and the other). Make sure to rectify this surpassing the Discovery Meeting where you recap findings so you don’t shrivel a underpass with an important stakeholder like a developer.
• Always put the opportunity in merchantry KPIs, not SEO KPIs.

2. Discovery meeting – Get buy-in from stakeholders early

The most collaborative part of the process is my personal favorite and the most influential: the discovery meeting. The discovery meeting is our time to build relationships with all stakeholders—and understand misogynist resources and want for change. Put simply, robots can’t build relationships–that’s still something we have over any SEO auditing technology.

Having meaningful questions to ask stakeholders is part of the reason why the Opportunity Wringer is the first step—you don’t want to go to this meeting empty-handed. The questions I like to ask can be grouped into 4 buckets: Partnership, Business, Industry/SEO, and Resources. While templated questions are a unconfined start, you should unchangingly tweak the questions to be relevant to the brand.

Example questions include:

Partnership:

• What project has been your favorite so far? Should we do increasingly of that?

Business:

• Are there any changes in your industry or merchantry that can/will impact the website or marketing efforts?

SEO:

• Is there anything in the reservoir of projects that you’re excited about? What can we provide to make a specimen for implementation?

Resources:

• With the economic uncertainty, will resources stay the same on your side?

Tips

• This meeting can be folded into a QBR-esque meeting or, if you can swing the time, it can stand vacated on its own, which is my preference.
• Invite stakeholders from multiple teams to get perspective (for example, developers, execs, content, trademark marketing, and other relevant members)
• If time allows, have a mock undeniability to ensure that the questions and presentation are well-crafted and the team is well-appointed delivering them.

3. SEO roadmap megacosm – Put rubber to the road

Most SEOs try to skip directly to this step first. But—be warned from my experience—it is a plush mistake (in both time and political capital). Beginning your SEO project with a roadmap results in a long list of unprioritized recommendations and little implementation, and the end result is a loss of trust and frustration with stakeholders.

The roadmap, when preceded by proper opportunity wringer and an constructive Discovery meeting, will successfully succeed three things:

1. Lay out projects with unbearable detail for early buy-in
2. Identify participants for each worriedness to stave a joint whoopee problem
3. Act as an worriedness log which makes measurement easier

The sheet unelevated is an example of an SEO quarterly roadmap. We pinpoint each project and quantify the impact on the merchantry using relevant SEO KPIs and merchantry terms (outlined in pink).

Next, we include a RACI model (outlined in blue) to pinpoint project participants by who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.

Lastly, once the Roadmap is tried we add the middle Project Status section (outlined in black), and track each worriedness so we can measure pre- and post-implementation success.

Tips

• Exercise ongoing confident humility with the roadmap and know when to pivot a project
• Continuously update the roadmap and use this to guide status calls
• Use the roadmap to pinpoint resource typecasting and project management—that is, new projects to be widow must be washed-up in place of something else

4. Implementation – Get sh*t done

While site implementation may fall to variegated teams, the important part is stuff worldly-wise to assess who needs clearance for which implementations early on. That way, by the time each recommendation is finalized then it can immediately be ready for implementation.

Tips

• Since you have a roadmap with specified timelines, get minutiae tickets submitted early so the implementation team can prepare resources for them in an upcoming sprint
• QA all implementations to ensure that the final result matches your recommendation
• Use a site transpiration tracker tool to see when stuff gets implemented

5. Measurement – Identify winning efforts to scale

Step five is where this framework turns into a flywheel: Measurement. Having an worriedness log in your roadmap allows you to hands identify pre- and post-implementation impacts. Stuff worldly-wise to tie performance when to a specific subset of optimizations allows you to scale those efforts to yield the compounding effects of SEO.

There’s no largest way to win influence over a site’s minutiae team than by pursuit up and sharing the results of their work. Make sure they see the post-implementation report and watch how hands SEO projects get widow to the minutiae roadmap in future sprints!

Tips

• Make sure implementation dates are well-judged (including site adjustments)
• Ensure to worth for seasonality in your analysis
• Track pre and post-measurement from the soonest trickle stage without implementation, rather than implementation itself as it can take upwards of three months for a page to be recrawled
  • You can use the GSC URL API in conjunction with Screaming Frog to streamline this process
• Use an SEO A/B testing tool for testing ranking/traffic impact—like SearchPilot for large sites—and/or a conversion testing tool like Google Optimize to test for engagement/conversion impact
• Set up tracking for SEO KPIs as early as possible to get unbearable pre-implementation data

Process = Success

The SEO strategy flywheel allows you to dedicate your SEO team’s time and resources to SEO rather than reactively resolving prioritization conflicts. Committing to this process builds confident humility into your work, gets stakeholder buy-in early, and hands allows you to scale winning efforts. I encourage you to modify this process to fit in with your existing workflows and share your modifications with others in the comments for inspiration.

Next quarter’s planning is right virtually the corner—go get it!

Travis Tallent is the VP, SEO at Brainlabs overseeing the SEO product to ensure worth teams have the right talent, tools, tech, and process to do their jobs well. Travis spends time enjoying nature, playing saxophone in a local band, and volunteering for LGBTQ organizations. Follow Travis on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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