SEO is not a one-person job. It requires collaboration and teamwork to achieve the best results. But how can you encourage your team to share their SEO ideas and learn from each other? Here are some tips to foster a culture of SEO innovation and creativity in your team.
Before you ask your team to share their SEO ideas, you need to define what you want to achieve and how you will measure success. Do you want to improve your rankings, traffic, conversions, or revenue? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that you will use to track your progress? How often will you review and update your SEO strategy? Communicate your goals and expectations clearly and consistently to your team, and make sure they understand how their SEO ideas will contribute to the overall objectives.
Encouraging your team to share their SEO ideas involves fostering an environment that values collaboration, creativity, and open communication. Create a Safe and Supportive Environment Demonstrate openness to suggestions and ideas yourself. Encourage brainstorming sessions and actively participate in discussions, setting the tone for open communication. Acknowledge and Appreciate Contributions Encourage Diversity of Perspectives Provide Tools for Idea Sharing Set Up Idea Generation Challenges or Contests Offer Continuous Learning Opportunities Support Experimentation and Risk-Taking Act on the shared ideas or suggestions whenever feasible.
Create a culture of idea-sharing with regular brainstorming sessions and anonymous suggestion boxes.Recognize and celebrate even small contributions, like implementing a colleague's idea, fostering a sense of shared success.Encourage cross-team collaboration, allowing marketers, designers, and developers to bounce ideas off each other.Share your own insights openly and be receptive to feedback, showing that everyone's voice matters.Gamify the process with points or small prizes for top ideas, adding an element of friendly competition.
Sharing SEO ideas can be intimidating, especially if your team members have different levels of experience and expertise. To create a safe and supportive environment where they can express their opinions, ask questions, and give feedback without fear, it’s important to establish some ground rules. Respect each other’s views and perspectives, listen actively and attentively, acknowledge and appreciate each other’s contributions, encourage and motivate each other, avoid negative or harsh comments, be open and honest, and seek clarification and understanding. This will ensure that everyone feels comfortable sharing their SEO ideas.
The best (and most fun) way I've found to share SEO ideas is to create a forum (async in Slack and/or in recurring meeting) on a regular basis (I like quarterly) where everyone working on SEO (writers, dedicated SEOs, etc.) is invited to share an SEO activity they did and what the results are. Keep the format simple / loose and let each team member share in the way they prefer (PPT slide, live demo of SEO tool and webpage, or just a simple chat). As an SEO lead or manager: 1. Give kudos for sharing. 2. Capture everything shared into documentation that anyone can reference. Oftentimes, an SEO idea can become a repeatable best practice that everyone on the team can adopt. Work it into your best practices and guidelines as appropriate!
Foster a culture where 'Every Voice Matters'. Introduce regular 'SEO Show and Tell' sessions where team members can showcase their ideas, however big or small. This platform not only promotes sharing but also builds confidence and mutual respect among peers. Remember, the most groundbreaking ideas often stem from the simplest suggestions.
I believe the most effective teams can share ideas in all or any functional areas. But having that said, once clear goals and KPIs are set I enjoy hosting brainstorm sessions. At the end, the team can rank the ideas together.
It starts at the top. Share your ideas, and ask people to share theirs. Engage with your team. Listen, don't just wait to talk. If there is a member of your team that brings negative energy, have a one-on-one with them and address it.
Having access to the proper tools and resources is essential for your team to generate and share their SEO ideas. These include SEO software and tools that can analyze, optimize, and monitor website performance, as well as SEO best practices and guidelines. Additionally, SEO training and education can help improve their skills and knowledge. Finally, SEO brainstorming and collaboration platforms can help organize, document, and communicate their SEO ideas. Examples of these include Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Moz, Ahrefs, Google's Webmaster Guidelines, online courses, workshops, certifications, Trello, Asana, Google Docs, and Slack.
Ignite the spark of innovation with the right tools. Facilitate 'SEO Hackathons' where teams can use these tools to tackle real-world scenarios. This hands-on approach not only deepens their understanding of the tools but also encourages practical application of their ideas, bridging the gap between theory and practice.
Project Management: Trello or Asana Communication and Collaboration: Slack or Microsoft Teams Knowledge Sharing: Confluence or Notion SEO Analytics: Google Analytics or Moz Content Creation: Grammarly or Canva Learning and Development: LinkedIn Learning or HubSpot Academy Design Collaboration: Figma or Adobe Creative Cloud Time Management: RescueTime or Focus@Will Feedback and Survey Tools: SurveyMonkey or Slido Well-being and Mental Health: Headspace or Talkspace Remote Collaboration: Zoom or Miro File Sharing and Storage: Google Drive or Dropbox
To encourage your team to share their SEO ideas, you should allocate time and budget for experiments and tests. Define the scope, hypothesis, and methodology of each experiment and test. Collect and analyze the data and results. Share and discuss the findings and learnings. Implement and scale the SEO ideas that work well, while discarding or modifying the ones that don't. Experimentation and testing can help your team learn from their successes and failures, discover new opportunities and insights, and refine and improve their SEO ideas.
Transform your team into SEO scientists. Initiate a 'Test Lab' program, where every experiment, no matter the outcome, is a step towards learning. Encourage your team to document their hypotheses, methods, and learnings in a shared knowledge base. This not only fosters a culture of curiosity but also builds a valuable repository of collective wisdom.
This is the true way to encourage your team to share SEO ideas. Working the SEO industry for a while many can fall into the trap of just optimizing titles and metas all day. But as SEO and Search engines continue to evolve, the way we optimize for them should as well. It is important to encourage your team to think outside your current workbook and to seek fresh ideas where others are seeing success, this can be as simple as bringing in a strategy that a specific industry has not explored. Or even discovering new keywords that have lower search volume but have the potential to expand as interest grows. There are so many ways to grow organic search traffic in unconventional ways!
To motivate your team to keep sharing their SEO ideas and improve their performance and satisfaction, you need to recognize and reward them. You can do this in several ways, such as praising and appreciating their efforts, highlighting their successes, providing feedback and suggestions for improvement, offering incentives and bonuses, or giving them opportunities for growth and development. Recognition and reward can help to motivate your team to reach your SEO goals.
Recognize and Reward Contributions: Publicly acknowledge good ideas: When someone's suggestion leads to positive results, celebrate their contribution and give them credit in front of the team. This reinforces the value of sharing ideas. Offer tangible rewards: Consider implementing incentive programs where team members receive rewards or recognition for consistently contributing valuable ideas. Empower action on good ideas: Don't let good ideas gather dust. Give team members ownership of their ideas and provide them with the resources and support they need to implement them.
Celebrate the spirit of innovation. Create an 'SEO Star of the Month' award, recognizing not just success but also the effort and creativity behind each idea. This public acknowledgment serves as a powerful motivator, inspiring the team to continue pushing boundaries and contributing innovative ideas.
Ask how their journey started. Ask them to share their first success story. Ask them to share their favorite success story. What strategies did they come up with? Can that be applied to new or existing campaigns for additional wins? Encourage your team to share with confidence. When you see wins, ask them to share their case study, and if they're not comfortable, then give recognition. These simple techniques will open many doors for rewards and more motivated juices for your team.
Asking for ideas is great, being open minded is great, intentionally listening to their ideas is great. But, until you build a system that expects, rewards and reinforces suggestions and ideas, your team's contributions will not be consistent. And even worse yet, won't be consistently implemented or heard. Have a road map as a shared document and task them to drop 3-5 ideas for the next quarter. Do it again the following. Now it's a standard :)