A successful SEO strategy requires the engagement and active support of the many stakeholders within a business. Gaining support from stakeholders has communications; educational, working practice and political dimensions which must be incorporated into the overall strategy.
Stakeholders include senior management, business strategists, marketing, web designers, web developers, content providers and others. Each stakeholder has different business priorities and pressures.
This stakeholder engagement often requires communication of information, education on SEO and why it is important. It may also require changes to stakeholders working practices. The stakeholder roles listed below introduce some of the issues that must be considered.
Management – SEO requires significant investment of time and resources which must be justified through the meeting of business goals and delivery of clear business benefits. Management engagement is achieved by:
- Presenting a clearly defined SEO strategy
- Providing supporting facts
- Detailing the research carried out (for example, keyword research and competitive analysis)
- Delivering a clear plan of action with estimates of timescales
- Providing budgetary costs and estimates of ROI
- Monitoring progress and reporting against plan
- Identifying what works and what does not
- Adjusting the strategy accordingly
Management recognise, from previous experience, that any business strategy poorly researched, insufficiently thought through and poorly implemented will be costly to recover.
Marketing - The Marketing team are an important beneficiary of a successful SEO strategy. In many organisations, marketing are responsible for devising, delivering and managing a successful SEO strategy.
However, the desire for an attractive, innovative, cutting edge website design may result in poor SEO ranking performance.
A level of compromise is often required between innovation and optimal SEO. Marketing must work with the stakeholders responsible for the graphical design, coding, building, producing content and the SEO team to ensure that the website is optimised for business.
Graphical designers – Designers are responsible for the design of the website, usability, accessibility and information architecture.
Designers strive to be innovative. However, great innovative design, may not be good for SEO or other important website features.
The SEO team must communicate to designers the requirements of successful SEO and, the negative impacts of certain technologies and techniques.
For example, a website which uses too much Flash or incorporates lots of images will not be optimised for SEO. The search engines spidering a website does not pick up on key words incorporated in Flash or Images.
A level of compromise and balance can be achieved. Design and SEO offers great opportunities for synergy, for example, a crumb trail, a commonly used secondary navigation device, provides a great opportunity for the propagation of keywords.
Website content – Content includes images, video, other media in addition to text. Writing in the world of online requires a different approach to that of writing for print or for other media platforms.
Many professional writers, particularly journalists and copywriters, often write to a tried and trusted formula which may not be appropriate to online and SEO.
Content writers must be encouraged or trained to work and write in a manner that supports SEO, for example, carrying out keyword research; using and placing correctly, appropriate keywords on the page can be important.
The reward for writers is that the use of keywords will not only improve search ranking, but will also result in more people reading the writer's article.
Web development – The Web Development Team are responsible for many of the technical aspects of the websites, for example, coding and browser testing. Page download speed is important as is the overall performance of the website.
The website must also be accessible by Google and the other search engines. Judicious use of technology is important.
Web developers should be encouraged work to coding standards, if not already doing so. This will not only improve SEO, but also many other aspects of the website and greatly reduce website problems.
Part 4 next time. If you would like help or more information about SEO strategy then click on the link to contact us
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