What do you do if your SEO team is struggling to identify target audiences without collaboration?

Unless you want to produce copy cat content you need to speak to your target audience. If you can’t do this directly, you need to speak to sales, customer support etc. If you want to produce thought leadership content you need to speak to the CEO / face of the company. Don’t assume you know the audience or the clientele. Speak to the people who know the audience best. If you want to produce good content that drives organic revenue you have to be able to relate to the state of mind of the customers. Figure out their pain points, dreams and desires. Incorporate that into their copy. That’s how you do really great content led SEO!

Collaboration for SEO means working together and sharing ideas with teams like marketing, sales, and customer support. This teamwork helps you understand what your customers really want and how they behave. By combining knowledge from different areas, you can make better profiles of your customers, known as buyer personas. This makes it easier to figure out who you're trying to reach with your website. In simple terms, when teams share what they know, it helps make your SEO strategies more targeted and successful because you're creating content that fits exactly what your audience is looking for.

If your SEO team struggles to identify target audiences: Encourage teamwork and brainstorming Share insights and perspectives Use data and analytics for guidance Seek input from different team members Consider external feedback or consultation if needed

Collaboration can be difficult when teams don't have trust in each other. It's up to their superiors to ensure that the team environment is healthy and happy. This means not singaling out one Team Member during meetings as the expert or favorite. It means that during team meetings, each SEO member is engaged and engaging. In order to create an enviroment where Collaboration succeeds, you need to foster the team spirit. You can and should collaborate, it is a must. But you must first lay down the foundation that makes that possible and then becomes natural and intuitive.

Start by establishing common goals and KPIs. Use cross-functional meetings to share insights and strategies. Tools like shared calendars and project management software can help streamline communication and track progress efficiently.

Sharing data is important. You should be using a project managment system that runs like a well oiled machine. Each element of your SEO, whether it's backlinking, onsite blogs, onsite pages, local seo, technical SEO should have its rightful place on the platform you choose. Outside of that, your CRM system allows you to track customer data. Then you'll need a great communication tool like Slack as communication can get messy in PM systems outside of daily comment updates. Weekly team meetings to engage each member part of the team is important, you can use the tools you have in place as visuals and start connecting members to each other and fostering and growing a more collaborative stage.

There are a multitude of data tools that I use including the most popular ones like Ahrefs and Semrush---but direct data is the most accurate and timely. That would be your GSC and even GSC isn't filtered a specific locations grid. So, be analytical and use a combination of these data sets to set your strategy up and then stick to it. Use common sense, if you're getting impressions or views but not clicks, you want to update and optimize content but also look at improving user experience and maybe updating your page layouts, etc. Outside of that, if you're using onsite SEO tools, I recommend RankMath.

Be flexible, if you've been using the same strategy for 6 months, don't be afraid to make changes. Change is scary but change is also good and can be rewarding.