You're aiming to boost SEO outcomes. How can you align stakeholder goals on different search engines?

Before implementing SEO strategies, it's crucial to understand the unique goals of your stakeholders. Whether it's increased traffic, higher conversion rates, or enhanced brand visibility, each stakeholder defines success differently. By clearly identifying these objectives, you can craft an SEO plan that aligns with the needs of content teams focused on engagement, sales departments aiming for conversions, and executives seeking growth. Balancing these diverse goals requires a nuanced approach to SEO, one that addresses search engine algorithms while meeting stakeholder expectations.

Understanding the business objective is crucial to define the correct SEO project. Some goals might be: - driving more traffic to money pages - brand building (e.g. sustainability topics that the company wants to address) - reducing customer care requests This is important to know in order to do the correct activities and to align stakeholders on the correct KPIs

To align stakeholder goals across different search engines and boost SEO outcomes, focus on creating a unified strategy that addresses varied algorithmic preferences. For Google, prioritize high-quality content adhering to E-E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). For Bing, leverage multimedia content, as it ranks videos and images higher. Use consistent keyword targeting, backed by thorough competitor analysis, to ensure alignment. According to Backlinko, pages ranking #1 on Google also rank in the top 5 on Bing 75% of the time. Regularly update stakeholders with data-driven insights and adjust strategies based on search engine performance metrics to maintain goal alignment.

To align stakeholder goals across different search engines, begin by understanding what each stakeholder wants to achieve and who their target audience is. Then, do keyword research specific to each search engine, as they may rank things differently. Make sure your on-page SEO is solid, with relevant and engaging content, and pay attention to technical aspects like site speed and mobile optimization. Create a content strategy that works well across all platforms, and regularly track your performance to make improvements. By doing this, you’ll ensure that everyone’s goals are met with a unified SEO strategy.

Keyword research is the cornerstone of any successful SEO strategy. To align stakeholder goals across different search engines, it’s essential to identify keywords that are relevant to your content and have a strong potential for ranking. This involves analyzing search volume, competition, and relevance to your target audience. By selecting a balanced mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords, you can create content that resonates with users across various search platforms, ensuring that stakeholder goals for visibility and engagement are met.

On-page SEO is critical for optimizing individual web pages to achieve higher search engine rankings. This process includes refining title tags, meta descriptions, and content to incorporate targeted keywords without keyword stuffing. Crafting descriptive and user-friendly URLs can also boost click-through rates from the SERPs. Additionally, optimizing images with alt text and implementing structured data markup can improve visibility in image searches and rich snippets. By fine-tuning these on-page elements, you establish a solid foundation that aligns with stakeholders' goals across various search engines.

SEO is no more only about "individual pages", you also have to work thinking about topic clusters. All the usual on-page SEO activities are still valid to date, but how pages are interlinked is becoming increasingly important to create strong presence in SERP.

Technical SEO is the foundation of a well optimized site. I personally like to have a clean and sound website from a technical standpoint, because I find that search engines in some way reward websites that are well maintained. So I always check at least that: - robots.txt is correct and doesn't block CSS / JS / images needed to render the page - sitemap.xml has only the canonical pages. Suggestion for WordPress / WooCommerce website: clean up your sitemap, you might probably have taxonomies and custom post that are not real pages and should never be crawled and indexed. This is especially true when using a commercial theme or a portfolio plugin. - canonical and hreflang tags are correct - noindex is not present unless necessary

One activity that every SEO specialist should do is check the SERP for that specific search and search intent in order to understand what Google has decided to rank. For example, Google might have already decided that a specific search is a commercial one, so an informative content won't rank even if it's a great content.

Performance tracking is not only about rankings, but it should always be about traffic and conversions as well, depending on the business objective. It useless to rank #1 for keywords that no one cares about, so always report also on clicks and organic traffic changes. GSC and GA are the first tools to use for this.