How to kick-start an SEO programme

As more and more companies have tried and experienced success with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing over the last few years, there has been a gradual shift towards greater and more sustainable conversions and return on advertising spend (ROAS) from search engines. Naturally marketers look towards search engine optimisation (SEO) as a solution to increase their footprint and ROAS in search engines.

Introducing a concept like SEO into your organisation can be a real challenge, especially if you have just got everyone familiar with the concept of PPC. SEO requires a different level of coordination, tolerance for risk, and project management.

SEO is often seen as a specialist domain. The reality is that SEO is a much larger undertaking that is more akin to traditional consulting. It requires heavy consulting and education of multiple stakeholders that spans months, if not years. It involves as many soft skills in communication, consensus building, project management and selling projects as it does technical skills.

SEO performance is influenced by numerous everyday activities and you will need to change 100s of ingrained habits.

To get SEO humming you need to enlist designers, programmers, editors, marketer and communications teams so that they are collaborating with you on a logical series of projects that will influence the content, internal links, front end code, backlinks and social ranking factors you need.

While SEO can be highly complex, here are simple things that you can do to ensure that you have the best chance of success.

1. Create early wins to build faith. A new SEO project is often viewed with suspicion so you need to create proof of its efficacy. I once created 300,000 pages of quality content to prove the point that content was critical and I was able to showcase this to the business for years after whenever the value of SEO content was questioned. You can begin with low hanging fruit like having the editorial team write content to showcase your thought leadership. Syndicate this content on social media and track the conversions and interactions you get from the content pages. Quality content, based on what your customers want, is essential to SEO and with “blended search” the more you syndicate content in different formats, the more you appear in search engines.
2. Make sure you hit the ground running and insure against major SEO risks. I have seen category-leading sites lose half their conversions because of an IT decision that was avoidable. You can insure against risk by supplying the IT team with monthly SEO training, cheat sheets, and escalation procedures so they know what technical events (such as site re-launches, site rebrandings, content expiry and page redirects) they need to inform you of.
3. Appoint an in-house cross-departmental person as your SEO person and appoint an experienced SEO agency as your external R&D (Google has hundreds of algorithm changes a year that can impact results so a lot of SEO is about trial and error R&D). Agencies that have worked internationally have more access to cross-industry case studies than you can access in-house and can help you overcome internal barriers to SEO implementation. After a while, once you have a track record, you can bring the SEO function in-house and let go of the agency
4. Get a senior champion to help you embed SEO into the organisation’s practices. I have been in positions where I have reported to the COO and made 10 times more progress than when I reported to a marketing manager, because the COO had more clout with the IT team and could help champion my SEO projects through.
5. Last but not least, tie in your social media efforts with your SEO by ensuring all your content responds to an audience need and is as shareable and buzz-worthy as possible. This is a serious point as search becomes more influenced by social factors. I have been involved in acquisitions of social sites as part of a strategy to help with SEO efforts.

Having previously consulted in SEO across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, I came to Hong Kong to start an SEO team for BlueCurrent and to work with clients in China, Hong Kong and Indonesia. Remarkably. the challenges I see here are very similar to the ones I saw in other countries. There is always an IT team, editors and marketers to be trained. This is one of the reasons I believe that SEO can be a real competitive advantage for companies. It is something that everyone “gets” but which remains a serious challenge for most organisations to execute. The companies who get it right have a real edge in their marketing. Every single category leader that I have analysed has a strong SEO program in place. They are hard at work creating engaging SEO and social content day and night.