Content team inspiration for SEO
When companies start SEO, they often hire a dedicated SEO specialist. This person’s area of responsibility is usually broad and includes a variety of tasks. They often work with content teams that have commercial priorities that drive the content and work separately from SEO teams. So the biggest challenge is getting a content team to take care of SEO. Just as your development team needs to understand SEO priorities, it’s important to inspire your content experts to support your SEO goals.
Why content teams should care about SEO
Some of the duties of the new SEO specialist may be:
Measure and understand SEO successes and report on performance.
Evaluate the technical SEO of the websites they are working on and work with the development team to address challenges.
Create a structured search engine optimization strategy.
And identifying risks and opportunities to optimize and create new high-priority content.
With teams outside of the SEO team responsible for creating and optimizing all other content, there is a risk of missing opportunities for new content, a shallow understanding of user needs, and less search engine optimized content.
Therefore, SEO specialists and content teams should work closely together. But how is this possible?
Find common interests
To understand how SEO and content teams can work more closely together, you first need to understand where their interests align.
Content teams‘ KPIs often focus on engagement metrics:
How many users came to the site from their pages?
How long have they been on the site?
What impact has the site’s content had on your further activities?
Content creators must understand the needs of the people they write for in order to optimize all of these metrics.
Search engine query data helps determine exactly what people are searching for, how they’re searching for it, and how many people are searching for it, and SEO teams hold the key to all of this information.
By giving content teams access to user search data, both teams can drive traffic and, more importantly, deliver more value to their customers.
It often starts with searching for search terms directly, but to prevent your team from becoming a bottleneck in the process, you need to give them the tools to do their own research.
Teach them how to optimize their content
Once they know what their users are looking for and how, your content team needs to know how to put their work where it will be found: on the first page of search results.
We know that every area of search engine optimization is full of nuances and that the answer to every question starts with „it depends.“ However, your goal is to make content creators feel confident to start optimizing their work, so stick to some easy-to-follow guidelines.
They need to understand best practices for optimizing metadata, structuring content, and how to analyze the top ranking results for a term to determine the ideal length and format of top-ranking content.
Tools like browser extensions can make this easier by providing information about header tags and word counts.
Experience the value of SEO
If you’ve done your job well, one or two members of the content team have probably already developed a special interest in SEO. They are the ones who ask the right questions and come back to you to confirm their research and plans. Keep these people on your side!
Now that the team has mastered the basics of content optimization for search engines, you should encourage them to go ahead and continue building their skills.
This works best when you can show results. As mentioned before, content teams‘ KPIs usually include the number of visitors coming to their website from their pages. If they can demonstrate that their efforts increase these numbers by stimulating research interest, this will renew and strengthen their enthusiasm. Also, this is an excellent case study to encourage others to follow.
By tracking keywords and seeing changes in rankings, they can see tangible improvements in their work as well as tracking and reporting.
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