Want to drive your business to success?
Creating a thriving SEO culture at all workplace levels is your first step to do it.
In this post, you’ll learn 3 ways to create a learning-first SEO culture that helps you collaborate, delegate, and grow. These are tried-and-true strategies we use at our office to improve customer experiences, foster staff talent, and maximize results.
Read on to learn how you can create an SEO culture that thrives and benefits all.
SEO: What It Is and How It Helps
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your web presence to improve the quality and quantity of traffic you get.SEO is an essential part of modern-day marketing. With everyone turning to the Web to discover new businesses and products, being visible online has never been more important.
In practice, a thriving SEO culture looks like:
- • All departments understand the importance of integrating search data into decision-making best practices
- • Internal collaboration happens across the business
- • SEO’s importance is recognized by executives and prioritized within the company’s structure and budget
- • Goals are shared among all departments, and everyone is committed to the growth of the company
3 Tips to Develop Your Business’s SEO Culture
1. Grow In-House Talent by Investing in it
SEO professionals are dynamic individuals with a lot of responsibilities, a wide range of skills, and specialties that range from creative to technological in nature.These rare and unique people are known as the “unicorns” of the industry and are often in short supply.
Be sure not to burn through this talent, lest your business become known as a toxic working environment. This will make it more difficult to recruit the brilliant minds you will need to move your company into the next stages of growth.
Instead, here are some ways you can support these small, tightly-knit teams:
- • Develop HR policy that supports SEO experts, making them feel safe and comfortable during employment within your enterprise
- • Address inclusion and diversity and hold your organization accountable for these metrics
- • Provide opportunity for additional training, mentoring, and career planning
- • Reward open communication and collaborative efforts between departments
2. Always Build Trust
Trust takes a lot of time to accumulate and nearly no time to destroy.Whether you’re attempting to build bonds across different cultures and geographic regions, or you’re building relationships with third-party contractors, the key thing to remember is to get stakeholders involved in the process as early as possible.
To do this, you can:
- • Schedule one on one meetings regularly
- • Give constructive and fair feedback within your teams and across departments
- • Check-in with team members regularly, don’t wait until they come to you with an issue
- • Embrace failure as a natural part of the growth process
- • Model healthy conflict resolution behavior and have no tolerance for bullying
3. Replicate Success
Establishing processes and best practices that streamline employee onboarding, training, and company culture is the best way to make sure everyone is on the same page and that success can be reproduced.Plans to scale up your business will depend on a reliable source of truth for all employees, so creating a center of excellence where all processes and company values are accessible is essential. As your company evolves, so too will this repository.
As you can see, there are many moving pieces that must be taken into account when you decide how to best use SEO to propel your business toward your goals. By following these 3 simple steps, you’ll be on the right path to make the most of it.
Is your organization getting the hang of SEO culture, or will you try these tips to make some improvements? We want to know! Leave us a message about your experiences in the comments below!