Enterprise SEO is such a vast subject that a person working for a few years also seems a novice to the industry. Especially if the firm is dealing with intricacies like local SEO or enterprise SEO, one needs to work with more finesse.
Just like any other marketing channel, SEO helps companies with discoverability and brand awareness. Businesses get more traffic, engagement, and conversion with credibility. However, it is an ever-evolving and cost-effective channel to reach the audience. It gives long-term results and boosts brand recognition.
So, companies can only give over SEO management to some people. They must have experience and skills to transcend others to capture maximum real estate on SERPs. Today's blog will cover the 13 core enterprise seo skills an SEO team needs to attain marketing success.
13 Core Enterprise SEO Skills For Marketing Success
SEO is not a marketing quick fix, which will help with discovery and brand recognition. It is a slow and complex channel that demands constant learning and strategic planning to achieve results.
Especially if you are an enterprise working across the globe, it becomes even more of a hassle to manage millions of pages and satisfy multiple stakeholders. You need a dedicated team of specialists who can scale and automate to handle your SEO efforts. Additionally, SEO is a multi-disciplinary channel with various interdependencies across different teams. So, a team must focus on particular core skills to ace their enterprise SEO efforts.
Here are 13 enterprise SEO skills you should instill and train your teams to run a successful enterprise SEO campaign.
1. Understanding The Business
Does your SEO team understand your business?
SEO focuses on brand awareness and discoverability. The team needs to understand basic business operations, workflows, and dependencies to be able to do much with SEO efforts. Big enterprises especially have complex interdependencies and organizational structure. Hence, understanding these nuances is critical to curate strategies that cater to specific business needs.
The SEO strategy should not be restricted to proven SEO tactics but rather align with business goals, performance, growth, and productivity. For instance, a business firm will focus more on content at an early stage but will target a specific audience keeping in mind its sales funnel. Each business has unique requirements which the SEO team must assess and address in their planning.
The SEO team must spend hours on analysis and understanding before devising a strategy. They should actively scrutinize each content piece, product offering, search result, and analytics to provide tailored solutions for marketing success.
Further, each SEO effort must translate into a visible metric. The team must choose specific metrics and KPIs to track the effectiveness of SEO efforts. These KPIs must align with the business's primary goal.
For example, if the business aims to increase sales by 7% per quarter, relevant metrics will be organic traffic conversions, traffic cost, and brand vs. non-brand visibility. Contrarily, some insignificant metrics will be backlinks or bounce rates.
Ps:- The team will also cover these metrics but will focus on more relevant ones!
2. Distribute SEO Ownership
Can your team collaborate with other teams to distribute SEO efforts?
SEO is a multi-disciplinary practice where various teams come together to implement a successful marketing campaign. With enterprise SEO, there are more buy-ins and greater level collaboration, where each department has something to offer for website content. Hence, the team must be efficient in cross-functional collaboration. This involves active communication and work distribution among the different teams.
The SEO team must communicate the importance of SEO to each department and align their efforts for effective execution. This will require an analysis of each department’s role and strategically creating a multi-channel marketing strategy. Combined support and insights from numerous teams, such as paid search, social media, community building, etc., will drive marketing success faster and more effectively. Teams will collaborate to curate cost-effective strategies and prioritize business goals.
Multimedia skills play an important role in bringing SEO together with other disciplines. The team must have a basic understanding of how great content comes together and exact workflows. This will enable them to distribute the resources and responsibilities while enhancing engagement and conversions skillfully.
3. Reporting and Data Management
Can your team analyze and share the results of their SEO efforts?
SEO is interrelated with many other disciplines, which makes it harder to track effectiveness. Moreover, many factors, such as indexing time and Google updates, aren’t in our control. Hence, the team should be able to align each SEO effort to business goals and respective metrics.
Further, all the data collected needs to be analyzed to create dedicated reports which are insightful and easy to interpret. Moreover, the team must be able to look into the technical SEO to extract valuable information for identifying loopholes and improving SEO strategies. The data collected and the reports generated should aid in data-driven decisions.
Another aspect to remember is that SEO reports are for more than just SEO professionals. Instead, stakeholders across the firm use it for data-driven decision-making. Hence, the team must remove all the technical jargon and elaborate impact of each metric. Each technical idea must be distilled into an easy-to-understand insight for the executives.
For instance, a 5% decrease in bounce rate means reaching the relevant target audience.
Clear insights help set expectations from the SEO team and effectively distribute the work credit. This will ensure the appreciation and acknowledgment of each department.
4. Documentation
Does your team spend time documenting SEO efforts and tracking progress over time?
Documentation is about recording the current effort to identify the scope of improvement over time. It includes all the strategies elaborated in-depth. Documenting each step helps the team actively align each SEO effort with visible metrics. Teams can easily compare the before and after to track real marketing success.
Teams must set SMART goals while documenting and curating strategies. This implies the goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. This ensures reaping the true benefits of documentation due to clarity in the end goal and working towards a common objective.
But how will it help the team to improve their efforts?
By actively looking at the before and after scenarios, teams can understand the loopholes and opportunities. Moreover, it becomes easier for third-party experts to give their input without spending time on auditing. Also, since there are so many stakeholders involved, it makes it easier for different departments to understand their role and analyze impact.
Also, it eases cross-functional collaboration as each person’s role is clearly stated, making it easier to onboard people on projects. Overall, it helps prioritize multiple stakeholders' needs, facilitating teams to get feedback effortlessly.
5. Authoritative
Does the team leader/ manager have authority over the team?
Teams must trust their leader and belief in his/her words. They must prioritize tasks as per their willingness and not question their ability. For instance, in case of any complexities, instead of relying on traditional tactics, they must abide by the leader's solution and advice.
The team let themselves regularly update Google updates and aim to build credibility amongst the team members. They should focus on documenting and sharing the credit with worthy team members. They must facilitate all the strategies and new campaigns by actively communicating with stakeholders and getting their buy-ins. Spending time and effort on getting input at each planning stage will help the team to implement each strategy rapidly.
The team leader spends time documenting and communicating for smooth functioning. It helps to clarify roles and responsibilities, assign decision powers, and execute each campaign without roadblocks. They become thought leaders and aim to enlighten their colleagues. This can take place in the form of conversations, weekly meetings/ workshops, training, or simple email updates.
6. Multi Tasking
Can your SEO team prioritize multiple tasks at the same time?
The SEO team has various roles and responsibilities, which they must balance and prioritize based on requirements, importance, and deadlines. For instance, if the current business goal is to enhance brand awareness, the team must focus on publishing top-of-the-funnel content and fixing any indexing issues.
But it is not just about prioritization!
The team needs to perform various tasks to satisfy multiple stakeholders simultaneously. They must start by understanding the customer journey and distributing the workload within the team to execute strategies effortlessly. Since various departments collaborate to support discoverability, engagement, and conversion, teams must strategically allocate ownership.
To provide a seamless customer experience, the team must work around various priority areas and bring them together for effective implementation.
7. Technical Soundness
Is your SEO team technically proficient?
SEO has a lot of technical aspects that need to be addressed for effective strategy implementation. The team must be able to understand the technical nuances and use technology to improve the campaign and user experience. Moreover, Enterprise SEO has a unique set of technical complexities, which needs to be addressed.
The SEO team must understand all the challenges and track down the core issue to ensure technical health of the website. Moreover, they must equip themselves with concepts like machine learning and natural language processing since search engines are actively using them. Additionally, they can save resources and leverage technology for mundane, repetitive tasks by identifying automation opportunities.
The SEO team must have a strong grasp of SEO tools to extract maximum benefits from them. If the team is adept with the basic SEO tools, they can take advantage of opportunities. Hence, knowledge of analytical tools gives an edge to SEO teams in performing research, monitoring, and optimizing efficiency. Moreover, the teams must spend time having clarity over basic programming concepts since it can help to improve the technical aspects and user experience.
8. Management Skills
Can your team manage multiple stakeholders, collaborations, and projects simultaneously?
Management skills are critical for the enterprise SEO team since they actively collaborate and deal with multiple stakeholders. They get buy-in from numerous executives and curate cross-departmental strategies. Hence, teams must spend time understanding hierarchy and workflow dependencies while advocating for SEO to secure budgets and seamless collaboration.
The team leader must be inspiring, motivating, and a good communicator. They should understand the audience and be proficient in sharing the data and insights with the stakeholders. They collaborate with creative teams and third-party content creators, increasing the need for effective communication and managing relationships.
The final question becomes: is your team able to handle multiple projects? SEO requires a team to plan, execute, and implement projects with numerous priority tasks. Hence, the team has to juggle multiple projects and reflect on their project management skills.
9. Problem-Solving
Can your team fix SEO problems actively? Or does your team blame it all on Google updates and algorithms?
An effective SEO team must have specific industry knowledge and problem-solving skills. They must align all their efforts with relevant metrics and execute all campaigns strategically. With proper documentation, problem identification becomes easier. Enterprise SEO especially comes with unique problems as companies have to manage millions of pages and have a lot at stake.
Further, the team leader's authoritativeness decides how well the team can solve the problems. Do they rely on tactics available on Google or explore resources to find creative solutions?
The team should be able to see the big picture and adapt to solve all the problems with technology and innovation. They should be able to prioritize and know which areas matter and which don't. The main focus should be to identify the core issue and resolve it with strategic solutions instead of trying to fix it with some tweaks.
10. Experimenting
Does your team experiment with the strategies?
SEO is a vast subject with a lot of scope for experimentation and playing around the old tactics. To experiment with measured risk, the team must have a basic understanding of business operations, goals, and interdependencies. Each strategy must be documented and have specific metrics aligned to measure results. Since SEO has a direct impact on revenue for big enterprises, the SEO team might need to be careful with experimentation, but they need not shy away!
A business has various goals and priorities at the same time. This demands the team to implement various projects targeting different audiences. Hence, the team must spend time understanding the audience, buying behaviors, search intent, etc., to provide exceptional UX with creative strategies. Moreover, the team has to work around various technological aspects to keep experimenting.
What's crucial is to measure the result! The team must keep a close eye on what's working and critically assess each step of the campaign.
11. Adaptability and Persistence
Is your SEO team adaptable to changes and the dynamic SEO industry?
The SEO industry is dynamic and constantly evolving with new updates. It is practically impossible to dominate all SEO skills. Moreover, enterprise SEO is filled with eccentric complexities, which are unpredictable and have a huge impact on business revenue.
Is your team able to adapt to the changes and deliver results?
SEO implies uncertainty regarding the client's needs, budgets, and technical aspects. The team must accommodate these changes. No failure should be taken personally! They must identify the core issues to improve and implement campaigns for greater success.
Moreover, they should keep experimenting and allow inputs from various disciplines to achieve marketing success. However, work credit and ownership must be diligently acknowledged to motivate teams and promote active collaboration.
12. Research
Can your team perform solid research?
SEO involves a lot of research work. The team has to recognize the user intent, do an internal audit, and spend hours on research to devise strategic campaigns. These researches range from:
- Keyword Research involves understanding the search intent and combining that with search result searches. Based upon this understanding, the team creates a list of keywords that drive results and are relevant to their audience.
- Audience Research: The SEO team works on multiple projects and simultaneously targets various audiences. This requires them to work on numerous personas and understand the customer journey to the root level. They should research their demographics and psychographics to curate relevant strategies and offer an exceptional user experience.
- Competitor Research: An SEO team needs to analyze the competitor landscape to leverage their weaknesses and prepare against their strengths. This involves ranking high-profile websites in the niche and performing external audits to identify ranking factors.
13. Local and International SEO
Can your team take over local and international SEO?
Local and international SEO is an extension of traditional SEO, which aims to provide better visibility according to business goals. For instance, if the business wishes to enhance its visibility in a particular state or local area, it will put effort into local SEO. However, they must opt for international SEO if they target a global audience.
Each type has its complexities. What's worth noting is that SEO teams that can cover both reflect adaptability to different organizational structures. Each SEO variant has diverse ranking factors and corresponding business goals. Moreover, since enterprises have a global footprint, the SEO team has to focus and excel at both local and international SEO for reaching the target audience.
The team must work for years and gain experience to offer the results. For instance, international SEO demands basic knowledge of top-level domains, hosting, language usage & countries differences, hreflang tags, SEO forecasting, website migrations, understanding server management, and more. Traditional or local SEO needs to pay more attention to these aspects.
Companies must invest time and money to create an in-house team of SEO specialists with all these skills. Once they put in that effort to set an SEO team in place, they will have industry experts in hand and will be able to achieve enhanced ROI with optimum resource utilization.
Need Help To Run SEO Campaigns?
Planning, executing, and managing SEO campaigns can be a hassle, especially for big enterprises. Additionally, constant Google algorithm updates and slow progress can make it difficult to drive visible results consistently. Moreover, companies have to face budgeting issues while managing technical aspects and a team of marketing professionals.
Big firms face a different set of SEO challenges and the burden of millions of SEO pages. They must prioritize buy-in from multiple stakeholders while effectively managing cross-team collaborations. It becomes challenging to track effectiveness and manage brand reputation with so much content and web pages in hand. The job of brand building isn't restricted to the PR team but requires a collective effort from different departments across the firm. Teams spend time tracking effectiveness (with regular audits) and handling duplicate/ thin content, product pages, bulk UGC, and much more.
Want a dedicated team of experts to extend your digital marketing team?
We at TripleDart help companies with dedicated teams and strategic execution to achieve marketing success. With a proper business audit, we offer customized solutions to handle end-to-end SEO. For large enterprises, we leverage automation and help in scaling content with regular audits to keep tracking results simultaneously.
Book a call to get hands-on with an SEO specialist team that elevates your growth with engineered solutions!
