How do you manage a team of content writers and SEO experts?

Outline your business objectives, do you want to increase awareness, generate leads, build loyalty etc.? Content strategy needs to align with these goals. Take the time to research your audience, who are they and what are their pain points. What interests them? Create content that resonates with them. Give them a reason to engage with you. Once you have all of this you need to document it. This then provides clarity for your team for the roadmap ahead. Make sure you are constantly presenting and checking in with the team each week on how the roadmap is progressing.

Implement a collaborative content calendar where your team can input ideas, tasks, and deadlines. This ensures everyone is aligned on content priorities, timelines, and responsibilities.

A question I often ask my teams is "What are we about?" cause besides the objectives, audience, key messages and all that, you have to know what makes you unique? Sometimes its hard to level the technical SEO with the storytelling and its something you should focus on, its useless to be have a good SEO strategy for boring content.

Content writers and SEO people can both get sucked into chasing the wrong metrics. There needs to be a documented content strategy in place so everyone knows what the right metrics to chase are.

Offcourse, we work collaboratively. I manage the team by strategy, and planning and task management. We follow RACI framework -- Responsibility, Accountability, Consultation and Consult and Inform. Don't confuse it with RACE -- Reach, Act, Convert and Engage.

Establish content pillars that represent key themes or topics aligned with your brand. These pillars serve as the foundation for content creation and ensure consistency across various channels.

Content should be alive, not in a manual, thats for groundrules but not a way of writing, i recommend having people from Media trained into SEO techniques, they are often creative and well versed in a lot of subjects

Establish a centralized knowledge repository for your content and SEO team, where they can easily access industry insights, best practices, and case studies. This valuable resource not only keeps team members well-informed but also serves as a wellspring of inspiration. It fosters a culture of continuous learning and collaboration, empowering your team to stay updated with the latest trends and find innovative solutions to challenges, ultimately enhancing their performance and the quality of your content marketing efforts.

Or you can just let them do their work, content and make "aseembly lines", its a very different profile the one of a creative guy than the linkbuilding woman, so try also to understand the nature of their jobs and dont force any unnecesary interaction on them

Be gentle here, content creators are not sales persons and you cant only measure them by the number of clicks they have, sometimes they will hit a homerun ot do a hatrick but sometimes they will have 3 strikes and it shouldnt mean they are out, give them time and try to create your own way of rewarding them.

Incorporate qualitative feedback analysis into your measurement strategy. Beyond numbers, delve into customer comments, reviews, and surveys.

Whenever possible, coach your people on tying content marketing and SEO performance to tangible business results. Not only will this help them prove the value of their work and roles, but it teaches them to better judge the cost/benefit of creating new pieces of content or campaigns. Keyword rankings and vanity metrics have their times and places, but if you can coach your team to think about and report on their activities in terms of leads, conversions and revenue, rather than just traffic, the happier (and more secure) they'll be.

Yes, one of website owners' most significant mistakes is allowing their content to turn stale. As a rule of thumb, touch each piece of content on your website at least once every 6 months and build management routines to make you do so. Update used statistics, check for link-building opportunities, align it with content created since, and restructure or rewrite it if it doesn't perform. Compare it with better ranking content of your own site and external sites.

Content people often end up getting managed by digital marketers or ex-journalists acting as the editor-in-chief. Both situations can be problematic. Digital marketers often have too much to do to run content in the way that it needs to be, and they might not know how to give content people the sort of feedback they need. Ex-journos might not have an adequate grasp of marketing or content strategy, which can lead to content that gets read, but doesn't help sales. More companies should focus on having people who understand content strategy and who can also write running content teams.