Use Custom SEO Training to Get Your Employees Onboard
Before you start worrying about link earning, content creation or social promotion, your SEO program needs to be accepted from the inside out! Without a strong internal push for strong SEO your program will never be as successful as it good be. You have to invest in SEO training for everyone in your company, and customize those trainings so each department sees how their work fits into the overall picture. The more focused your training is the more likely your coworkers are to adopt best practices.
Here are a few key points you can use in your SEO training for various departments to help get them onboard.
Sales
What do your sales teams really care about? Getting qualified leads and closing deals! So how is SEO going to help them fill their pipeline and bring them one step closer to landing new business? Remind your sales team that customers do most of their research online long before they ever pick up the phone or fill out a lead form. In fact, 60% of consumers start their research without any website/company in mind, but rather with a problem or a need. By the time they actually get in touch with a sales representative they have already done their homework and are probably coming in with more difficult or in-depth questions. In that way, a solid SEO program actually helps pre-qualify sales leads! Only the best leads (those that know they probably want to work with/buy from you) are getting into the pipeline. When it comes time to train your sales team on SEO best practices, keep hammering home that SEO is about getting the RIGHT people to your site, which means they’ll have better leads and more informed prospects to work with. SEO should educate and inform your audience so that they can become better customers.
C-Suite
Like any other marketing program, if you don’t get a solid buy in from the higher-ups chances are your SEO program won’t get very far. But too often the C-suite Google’s a search term they think your company should be ranking well for and if they don’t see your site at the top than clearly your SEO is a failure. When it comes to training the C-suite the key is managing expectations. Keep reiterating how complex the algorithm is and how competitive the market is—everyone is trying to get to #1 and only one website can be there. In reality, moving from the top of page two to the middle of page one is probably a lot easier than moving from middle of page one to the top spot. The best analogy I ever heard is that moving rank is like warp speed (from Star Trek). It’s takes an immense amount of work to hit that next level and the higher you want to go the more work/time/energy it will take.
Customer Service
A good SEO program can actually lead to better customer service! A huge part of SEO is simply about managing your brand online, as well as perfecting the customer experience. Will your SEO be built on making your site appeal to the bots or to actual people? Yes, there are a few things you need to keep in mind from a technical perspective, but at the end of the day SEO is really about making your website something HUMAN searchers will enjoy and find useful (as counter-intuitive as that may seem). SEO should be about educating and helping your customers, building up your company’s expertise and reputation and putting your brand out there for people when they need you. A strong SEO program will actually help you deliver better customer service because it forces you to think like your customers—what information do they need, what problems are they trying to solve, and how do they go about solving them?
Categorized in: SEO
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