For companies that rely on the cultivation of their digital brand, a strong SEO strategy is essential. But while high-level SEO planning is crafted by SEO management, the technical implementation of concrete enterprise SEO measures are often the responsibility of programmers or developers. For this reason, the interface between SEO managers and technical teams is critical.
In our recent SEO Summit, Jordan Koene, Advisor to Searchmetrics and a technology leader in the industry, offered six tips that can help streamline SEO implementation across the entire organizational structure.
1. Make data usable
“Whether you’re working with small or large teams, it is absolutely critical to be able to understand how to create integrations in order for you to scale.”
Jordan Koene, Advisor to Searchmetrics
Jordan acknowledges that data can be complex, but being able to collect, analyze, and put data to use is a crucial part of identifying and solving problems before they have a negative impact.
Data quality is a prerequisite
“Understanding core technologies and limitations is the first step to successful data collection and usage. The second step to the process of ensuring that you’re recording reliable data points that you can align across the organization.”
Jordan Koene, Advisor to Searchmetrics
According to Jordan, there are two core requirements for high quality data: Consistency and completeness. This means that data collected over time should come from the same source to avoid discrepancies and inaccuracies. Data sets should pursue an identical insight goal over a longer period – only then are they consistent.
Jordan also reminds SEOs to consider competitor data, which often gets pushed into the background. Competitor comparisons provide a clear picture of where a company’s website performance truly stands. With the right tools, SEOs can easily record both their own data and that of their competitors.
Software provides a critical source of data
“The reality is that crawl data is very complex. What we often do as SEOs is we download the list and send it over to somebody, but this doesn’t actually create any inspiration for someone to work on it, because it doesn’t tell anyone anything meaningful. It just says I have a whole bunch of errors.”
Jordan Koene, Advisor to Searchmetrics
In order to identify problems at an early stage, data must be collected, stored, tracked, and understood by all internal stakeholders in order to draw concrete conclusions or formulate specific instructions on how these problems can actually be solved.
For example, SEOs cannot achieve their goals by simply sending reports to web programmers. Instead, the informative value in reports should be extracted and shared using tools and solutions that aid in the understanding of the data and paint a clear picture of how a website is developing.
Defined thresholds can help SEOs stay on top of issues. If a certain value is reached, it can automatically signal to SEOs that they need to act. For instance, if the number of 404 pages increases by ten percent, this could trigger an alarm that prompts SEOs to take appropriate countermeasures.
Leverage dashboards for health status updates and monitoring
Operationally, Jordan recommends that SEOs use dashboards to keep an overview of multiple website performance categories at once. Dashboards provide SEOs with centralized information about the health of their websites. They display complex data sets in a digestible way that accurately show how different components contribute to the broader health of a site.
Jordan gives Google Search Console as an example of how to organize and enrich data. GSC presents information in a comprehensible way so it can be effectively used to influence strategic direction, initiative priorities, and KPIs.
Trending software, dashboards, and other tools that generate meaningful information from data help SEO managers visualize and interpret that data to increase website traffic, visibility, and reach.
2. Generate tickets correctly and efficiently through problem-oriented communication
“In order for us to become more effective, we need to be able to focus on the problem and the opportunity more than the actual task at hand.”
Jordan Koene, Advisor to Searchmetrics
Companies usually use a ticket platform as a place where individual tickets that address specific problems can be created and assigned to a particular group of people or a certain individual for resolution. In SEO, tickets represent a central communication tool for project management that can be accessed by all the people in the company that are involved in website maintenance.
It is important that tickets do not focus too narrowly on a particular task or tactic. Instead, they should focus on the root of the problem that needs fixing and the potential paths to a solution. This will provide context for the website developers, programmers, and other technical staff who will ultimately be responsible for implementing the fixes.
Jordan gives a real ticket example of Search Title Experimentation. Optimizing the