Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vital skill for any online business, but it can also be challenging and complex. To achieve the best results, you need a motivated and collaborative team that can work together effectively and creatively. How can you inspire your team to perform better and enjoy their SEO tasks? Here are some tips to help you.
One of the first steps to motivate your team is to define what you want to achieve with your SEO strategy and how you will measure your progress. You should set SMART goals: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, instead of saying "we want to rank higher on Google", you could say "we want to increase our organic traffic by 20% in the next six months". This way, your team will have a clear direction, a sense of purpose, and a way to track their performance.
Your company was founded to solve a problem for customers with a great product. When customers are searching for the products you sell, and the problems you solve, it is imperative that they find you - the market leader. People make decisions by asking for help on search; If you are not there, you are missing out on the most important set of customers in the market - the people who already have the intent to work with you. It does not make sense to spend any other dollars in marketing, if you are not able to capture the intent that is already out there.
When setting SMART goals for search traffic be sure to align them with the business's goals. If the business wants more sales/sign ups, only increasing traffic without considering this will make it difficult to explain the value of the work being done. Making progress in SEO isn't always about task based inputs and outputs but more about solving a problem the business or user is experiencing. When setting goals, consider how you can help achieve business goals and solve a problem. Then work backwards with opportunity creation to determine how that can be done through an SEO strategy.
10 years of SEO experience | Ex-Performics India, Publicis Groupe | Ex-Good Glamm Group
3 basic principles I believe in: 1. Put clear and attainable targets 2. Translate goals from above as transparently as possible on a need basis 3. Give a hint of a direction to guide the team Being honest while putting forth the vision always helps build trust with your team.
Another key factor to motivate your team is to give them regular and constructive feedback on their SEO work. You should praise their achievements, acknowledge their efforts, and celebrate their successes. You should also provide them with suggestions for improvement, areas of focus, and resources for learning. Feedback should be timely, specific, and balanced. For example, instead of saying "good job on the blog post", you could say "I liked how you used keywords and headings to optimize the blog post, but you could improve the meta description and the internal links".
10 years of SEO experience | Ex-Performics India, Publicis Groupe | Ex-Good Glamm Group
Very critical to provide feedback, whether positive or negative: 1. Do it transparently 2. Always share individual and team wins publicly. Helps motivate the achievers and inspire the under achievers 3. Share negative constructive criticism privately to avoid demotivating team members. However, share learnings from these mistakes/errors with the larger team
SEO is not a solo activity, but a team effort that requires communication, coordination, and cooperation. You should foster a culture of collaboration and creativity in your team, where everyone can share their ideas, opinions, and insights. You should also encourage your team to learn from each other, seek feedback, and support each other. You can use tools like Slack, Trello, or Google Docs to facilitate collaboration and brainstorming. You can also organize regular meetings, workshops, or webinars to discuss SEO topics and best practices.
SEO has not been taught in universities for long and there still is not an SEO degree which means everyone has learned SEO their own way whether that’s via agency, in-house, or self taught so it’s important to recognize each persons own experiences. There is clearly a wrong way to do SEO but the best way is debated. I like to let my teams showcase their own skill sets by walking the team through a project or strategy they led and what the results and outcome was for those projects. This encourages more participation and engagement because you are learning through each other and with each other.
10 years of SEO experience | Ex-Performics India, Publicis Groupe | Ex-Good Glamm Group
Especially for SEO, we cannot work independent of others. Teams from development, content creation, marketing, product development and more need to be worked with hand in hand 1. Always formulate SEO requirements from other teams internally 2. Translate them into easy to understand business requirements 3. Avoid SEO jargon/lingo for more clarity 4. Explain impact of these requirements in business terms 5. Using tools to explain or be creative for certain teams helps them understand requirements far better 6. Lastly but most importantly, specially for extremely big requirements, always helps to conduct a workshop explaining how SEO works and how this particular requirement helps a business in the long run while taking care of best practices
Another way to motivate your team is to offer them flexibility and autonomy in their SEO work. You should trust your team to manage their own time, tasks, and priorities, as long as they meet the deadlines and goals. You should also allow them to experiment with different SEO techniques, tools, and approaches, and to learn from their failures and successes. Flexibility and autonomy can boost your team's morale, productivity, and innovation.
10 years of SEO experience | Ex-Performics India, Publicis Groupe | Ex-Good Glamm Group
Being transparent in explaining requirements to the team also comes with a caveat: 1. Offer complete autonomy in the approach to achieve a goal 2. In most cases, only directional support should be offered to enable a creative thought process 3. Better to step in to create an approach/plan when the team is struggling and coming to you for help This helps keep the team motivated during their wins and learn from their misses. However, the SEO team lead should be brave enough to take a hit when their team's approach does not work as intended to keep their spirits high.
Finally, you can motivate your team by rewarding and incentivizing their SEO achievements. You should recognize and appreciate their contributions, both individually and collectively. You can also offer them tangible or intangible rewards, such as bonuses, gift cards, vouchers, certificates, or badges. You can also gamify your SEO work by creating challenges, competitions, or leaderboards, where your team can earn points, badges, or prizes. Rewards and incentives can increase your team's engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.
10 years of SEO experience | Ex-Performics India, Publicis Groupe | Ex-Good Glamm Group
Incentivising achievements is a great way to keep achievers inspired and retaining them in the organisation while inspiring the under achieving ones 1. Facilitating vertical growth in terms of promotions 2. Enabling more than company average appraisals 3. Gift cards or shopping vouchers over shorter periods to keep morale high through the year 4. Quarterly target driven bonuses. Helps team keep goals in mind while staying motivated to earn more 5. As I mentioned above, consistently caling out achievements publicly I personally feel that sharing of numbers in terms of traffic, ranks, etc amongst teams should be avoided. May lead to an unhealthy competition if the domains are completely different with varying difficulty levels
Promote Ongoing Learning for Your SEO Team One of the most exciting aspects of SEO is its continuous evolution. It’s an industry that always offers opportunities for growth. For instance, Google is currently prioritizing the development of its Search Generative Experience, marking one of the most significant SEO changes in the last decade. With a wealth of online resources available, it’s crucial to encourage your team to stay updated on SEO developments. Here are a few effective methods: - Attend regular conferences and webinars together. - Follow industry-leading blogs. - Read Google’s official documentation. - Join SEO academies like SEMRush and take part in online certification exams.