My first six years in SEO were spent on the same in-house SEO team. During that time, the team evolved and adapted in an endless pursuit of the most efficient way of operating.
We began as a small, junior team working primarily in isolation.
However, by 2020, we had grown to a team of seven people, including senior and specialist roles. We were fully integrated into the digital department through processes and working methods.
From my early days in SEO to my time as a member of the leadership team, I experienced all of the ups and downs and learned a lot about what it takes to prove the value of investing in SEO – and making that investment pay off.
Here are some of the most important things I’ve learned.
1. Nothing Happens Without Buy-In
If you only remember one thing from this article, make it this: It doesn’t matter how good you are or how desperately you need more help.
You will not be able to grow your team or increase your budget unless you have buy-in from the people who can provide you with those things.
You’ll need credibility for this.
This develops over time as a result of good subject knowledge, insights, and judgment, as well as the ability to demonstrate these qualities consistently.
However, there are steps you can take to put yourself in a strong position to accelerate the development of this reputation.
2. Structure Is Your Friend
First and foremost, the structure is required in three key areas:
- Reliable data and a consistent reporting approach.
- A comprehensive, prioritized strategy based on full site audits that outlines what you’ll be working on and, more importantly, what you can’t tackle yet (due to dependencies, budget, or resource).
- A consistent cadence for communicating your progress.
Creating this structure around your SEO program has the added benefit of potentially protecting you from unexpected changes in your organization.
For example, if your department’s leadership changes, with new managers looking to assert their own approach, a solid foundation and a clear plan often indicate that a stronger rationale is required for any upheaval.
It may even provide an opportunity for your team to expand its influence and accelerate its evolution.
Read Business Rules to Follow For Your Success.
3. You’ve Got To ‘Move The Needle’
The following requirement is a track record.
If you’re overburdened and understaffed, this may seem impossible.
Trying to make progress in all areas, spreading yourself too thin, and ultimately failing to make a real impact anywhere will not demonstrate to anyone but yourself that you require more resources.
Instead, inform your managers about the projects you will prioritize and explicitly state which areas you will not be working on due to capacity constraints.
You can then demonstrate the impact you can make with an appropriate workload and allow them to infer the return they could get from investing in the SEO team with a more focused scope.
This step enables more projects to be worked on at the same time.
4. Build A Compelling Business Case
You must also be able to build on this foundation by asking for what you require and convincing others to give it to you.
SEO is, by definition, broad and ever-expanding. It’s difficult to tell whether you’re truly under-resourced or simply overwhelmed by the seemingly endless possibilities and threads to pull at.
You’ll be able to confirm that you truly need more people and make a strong case for expanding your team by estimating the potential return on investment of the projects that additional capacity would unlock.
Of course, ROI, like so many other aspects of SEO, can be complicated and difficult to calculate. Results cannot be guaranteed in the same way that they can for other forms of digital marketing.
Furthermore, many of the initiatives we need to work on aren’t necessarily about incremental growth, but rather about adhering to best practices and protecting long-term performance.
Two main strategies assisted us in putting numbers to the projects we knew were important and demonstrating the need for increased capacity.
Projected ROI should be presented as a range.
What impact could this activity have in the best-case scenario?
What if the outcome is less than expected?
The reality will most likely fall somewhere in the middle, but communicating a range of possible outcomes allows you to be transparent and truthful without overpromising or underselling the potential outcomes.
One approach, for example, would be:
- Define the keywords that your project will affect.
- Project the potential clicks for each term by multiplying the monthly search volume by the estimated click-through rate at various positions (eg. three positions higher; five positions higher).
- To calculate an upper and lower estimate of traffic uplift, subtract any current traffic driven by these terms from the projected totals.
- Apply conversion rates and average spend figures to calculate revenue uplift if desired.
Calculate The Cost Of Doing Nothing Or The Opposite Of ROI
If the goal of a project is to protect SEO performance from future algorithm updates or to stay ahead of competitors, use the same approach outlined above, but this time based on position loss.
The ability to quantify the benefit of increasing your capacity not only helps communicate the value of the work your team does (and could do), but it also helps to build your authority and credibility.
It is also very useful when competing for prioritization with your organization’s development team, for example!
Hire The Right People
So you’ve gotten permission to hire more people. So, what now?
You’ll need to be realistic about the level of experience you can expect from applicants, depending on the salary you can offer.
With this, your business case, and strategy in mind, begin to draft a job description that includes the types of responsibilities that the role will entail.
Consider whether specific SEO experience is truly necessary when hiring for more junior positions.
While it is possible to learn SEO on the job, the qualities that prepare someone to become a great SEO practitioner – curiosity, a love of learning and problem-solving, resilience, and diplomacy – can be much more difficult to teach.
For roles requiring more experience, you should still look for the softer skills mentioned above, but you should also set tasks that require candidates to demonstrate the necessary skills and subject knowledge for the responsibilities they’ll be taking on.
It is critical to ensure that the interviewers are qualified to make that assessment – if necessary, bring in experts from outside your organization.
Trying to judge the extent of a candidate’s expertise when it exceeds that of the interviewers is nearly impossible, and a single bad hire can create extremely sticky situations that are extremely difficult to resolve.
In the words of Dan Patmore, Senior Group SEO Manager at Sainsbury’s Group, “it can be deceptively difficult to find candidates who balance existing experience and knowledge with a receptiveness to further learning and the humility required to truly collaborate.”
“Some SEOs want to be right. I want people who want to learn.”
Above all, keep the importance of internal buy-in in mind when bringing someone new into your team.
Is this someone who can boost your team’s credibility and authority within the organization, instill confidence in your leadership team, and foster cross-functional collaboration?
Or do they pose a threat to your team’s reputation and relationships?
Leading A Growing Team
There are hundreds of books on how to manage a team.
But, in my opinion, the ultimate goal of team development is for it to become more than the sum of its parts.
The way the team members collaborate should elevate everyone above and beyond the skills and abilities that they each bring on their own.
Shared Values
The approach required to accomplish this is consistent with the approach outlined above for hiring: prioritizing values above all else, viewing SEO as an ongoing learning experience, and emphasizing the importance of honesty and collaboration.
To create this environment, prioritize mentorship over micromanagement, focus on developing and guiding your colleagues through their careers, and lead a fulfilled and effective team where individuals feel valued.
This is especially important in SEO teams because many of the characteristics that make someone well-suited to this discipline can also make them resistant to more overbearing leadership.
Lifelong learners prefer to question assumptions and reach their own conclusions, while problem-solvers prefer to improve processes rather than be forced to do things the same way they’ve always done them.
Those who are naturally inquisitive appreciate the freedom to pursue tangents and discover new insights.
If you suppress these instincts in order to gain more control over your team, you will not only make them unhappy, but you will also miss out on their ideas and perspectives (and miss opportunities).
Alignment
So, how do you ensure that everyone is pulling in the same direction?
This, like everything else, boils down to buy-in, but this time you must gain buy-in from the SEO team itself. In practice, this means you should do the following:
- Share your strategy with your team in the same transparent manner that you would with more senior stakeholders.
- Involve team members in the creation of the strategy as they gain experience and bring their own valuable perspectives and areas of expertise.
- Make sure everyone understands where the emphasis is, what the goals are, and why. Agree on outcome and milestone expectations, including deadlines. This structure is critical for staying on track while allowing for creativity.
- Keep a backlog of projects that will be scoped and prioritized later. This enables your team to present new ideas to you and have them heard without jeopardizing current priorities.
Finally, trust is my compass when it comes to building and leading a team. I want to hire people I can trust, and I want to earn their trust as well.
I want to encourage my team to trust one another, and I want everyone to feel trusted.
If you succeed, you will have a team that works collaboratively toward shared goals, challenges themselves to be their best, develops their own strengths and specialties, learns from one another, and generates ideas and innovations that will evolve your SEO program in the future.
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