SEO project management is a strategic framework for promoting your website’s visibility, increasing brand exposure and obtaining credible leads through search engines.
It relies on comprehensive integration of SEO into a range of business workflows, ensuring search engine optimization best practices are reflected in every step of digital content creation and other processes relevant to managing your digital presence.
Why SEO Project Management Matters
Effectively integrating SEO into marketing, website and development or an agency team can be very challenging.
Even in this day and age, many employees have not had the experience of working with SEO professionals.
They may not understand the value SEO can bring to their existing workflows, or believe that those workflows work well enough without it.
So it’s important to explain the key benefits of SEO in ways that show how they can be applied to different team needs across different departments and actively improve each one.
What Should Be Included In SEO Project Management
The following initiatives are just a few of many that SEO professionals can use to advocate for process integration as part of your SEO project management efforts.
Topic Ideation
Use keyword research to uncover content topics and themes that allow you to rank for keywords and terms important to your business.
This research can uncover white spaces for new content or opportunities to update existing content.
Content Calendar/Seasonality Recommendations
Analyze keyword popularity and seasonal usage to decide when to publish or update content.
Brief Support
Make recommendations for keywords that should be used throughout the piece, including the title tag, page title, meta description, headings, body content, social copy, and alt text.
Traffic Projections
If keyword research and recommendations included in content are based on monthly search volume (MSV) and estimated eventual ranking, then estimated organic traffic/users can be calculated.
While these estimates cannot be directly applied to other channels, keywords are still an indicator of intent.
So by including keywords with decent MSV you know there is interest in the topic.
And by writing content that you know your audience is looking for, you might also encourage additional traffic from content shares and clicks from email links.
Copy Review
Reviewing copy in conjunction with keyword research supports existing SEO efforts to ensure the correct keywords are included.
In this way, they are used to match the audience’s search intent, where the right selection and volume of topics adequately support the topic.
So there is not too much business jargon or too many company-centric terms that the audience may not be familiar with.
Excessively niche or branded language probably won’t mean much to most searchers when they see it on the search engine results page (SERP).
Content Publication
Make sure to be easy to find through the correct setup of the new website URL.
Without proper SEO implementation, you risk Google (and other search engines) potentially not being able to find your content, rank it well, or absorb all the content you’ve written.
If you want your content to be available in search engines:
This should help the content reach its full potential to generate organic traffic and avoid errors that reduce findability.
Reporting
Proof of the value of SEO, or any effort, comes down to the numbers.
You need to demonstrate how the keywords you actively go after are raising your ranking and how the prominence of your content is growing on page 1 of SERPs.
To achieve this—and to report on how your optimizations and the new content you create—increase each of the following:
Together, these can help prove the importance of SEO work and the value of incorporating it into project management plans.
Content Optimization
Ongoing SEO reporting should not only focus on the impact of new content, but also the role of existing content.
Instead of wasting time, effort, and money creating new net content, SEO can provide insight into opportunities to help existing content reach its full potential.
It can offer guidance on the most up-to-date language, topics and themes to incorporate that reflect what is most relevant to the audience.
Updated and more accurate content will help improve the site’s subject matter jurisdiction and support any existing SEO authority.
And when Google crawls a newly updated site, it gives the content a new lease of life and can make it more likely to appear higher in SERPs.
Why Get Buy-In First Before Implementing SEO PM Processes
Before setting up new processes or starting to make structural changes, it is important to get buy-in from all the associated team members and management.
Arrange meetings with stakeholders including creative, product, demand gen, PR, events, marketing managers and business leaders to understand the benefits of implementation.
Reframe each conversation based on the goals, key performance indicators (KPIs) and expected results.
But consistently share the main point: SEO should never be an afterthought.
SEO starts in the short creation and research phase.
It should be prioritized throughout, act as quality control before and after publication, and be reported to prove results.
Demonstrate the value of the SEO workflows and goals mentioned above to highlight why incorporating SEO should not be considered optional, but a necessary part of content and website creation.
Dedicating time to connect with team members will help prevent pushback—or at least reduce negative feedback—because they’ll understand the benefits.
How To Create Effective Cross-Team SEO Project Management Processes
When it’s time to start integrating your SEO efforts into larger team processes, follow this holistic set of actions:
Establish The Role Of SEO In Your Company And/Or Department
Establishing the overall role of SEO will be most helpful in deciding where to start your efforts.
It will also help inform which of the above SEO project management integrations are most valuable to your current team, organization and needs.
Begin by establishing a thorough understanding of these two sets of processes:
Establish the actors involved across content creation for existing content processes, including copy, design, strategy, planning, social, etc.
You should also consider communication platforms, sequence of operations, timelines and deadlines, primary KPIs, any existing SEO efforts and everything else included between the initial phase of a piece of content’s inception to its final publication and tracking.
For existing web/development processes, understand the technical steps required for a piece of content to go live.
Who is responsible for creating a new page?
Is the content management system (CMS) self-service and user-friendly for someone outside the development team, or is more extensive programming knowledge required?
Who, if anyone, is responsible for ensuring SEO best practices are followed? Is there anything built into the CMS that makes it easier to incorporate SEO components?
Are there any structural implications for the site when new content is created? Are there other technical SEO considerations?
It may take a while to answer all these questions and find out what else you need to know. But these are good starting points for understanding where SEO should be integrated.
Determine A New Set Of Collaborative Processes For Content Creation And Optimization
Once you’ve gained a fairly comprehensive understanding of your team’s processes, it’s time to inject SEO into the spaces where it needs to live—or decide how to change SEO’s current role to provide the greatest benefit.
Here’s an example of an SEO-driven content creation process:
While multiple processes could be created to account for different content owners and creators, this example shows one of the more comprehensive ways SEO can be involved in content.
Finalize New Processes By Getting Leadership Approval
While you’ve hopefully already received buy-in from managers and other team members and departments, request additional approval once your proposal is complete.
Sharing the start-to-finish process of SEO and content integration will show how many ways SEO can contribute to the content process, all of which should help increase findability and traffic.
Understanding the full picture should help increase appreciation of SEO efforts to optimize the entire workflow, thus further advocating for SEO and building on your buy-in.
Share The New Processes With Team Members
Open communication is critical whenever processes change.
Make sure no one feels blindsided or disconnected from the effort they are involved in.
Additionally, it can help improve awareness, adoption and accountability by ensuring your entire team has visibility into your plans.
Communicate plans by leveraging the right technology
One of the most successful ways to do this is by leveraging the right technology to communicate and track updates.
And the best way to publicize these processes is to include them in a project management or project tracking software system.
Whether or not you currently use team and project management software, take the time to identify the best PM technology for your team’s needs.
The optimal software should include at least these five features:
Implementing the right project management software
Programs like Asana allow you to build project templates that include each task and associated subtasks in your plans with project descriptions, expectations, and links to relevant documents.
Each can be assigned to a person with due dates or a range of start and end dates.
These platforms can send emails, Slack updates, and other notifications about you and your team members’ tasks to help keep you all informed about your assigned workloads.
As long as the tasks are set up properly, you can be sure that each team member clearly understands the new expectations, timing and dependencies between SEO and other departments.
And everyone wants a clear overview of deadlines, so you don’t have to remind them.
Setting up and sharing the new processes in the PM software before launch
Be very clear and direct when it comes to implementing new project workflows before you start them.
Communicate with the content team and relevant product team members on:
Receive any feedback and update the process as needed.
Implement New Project Workflows
Follow the flow you’ve created to build content from scratch or update it.
Test
With all your extensive planning (and a little luck), your new SEO integration effort will go off without a hitch.
But just to be safe, test carefully and track the progress and completion of the first few iterations.
Confirm if everything is going according to plan, if there are errors or omissions, if the assigned SEO has the resources they need, and if there is any team feedback.
Be aware of expected deadlines, if more lead time is needed, and if everything else you and your team members are expected to achieve, your entire team can deliver the best SEO-driven output through each phase of the process.
If not, don’t hesitate to make changes to your plans.
It is better to delay full implementation than to proceed in a way that does not allow you to substantiate the full impact of your efforts.
Track Performance Of Content That’s Been Created With Your New Processes
Finally, tracking your efforts is critical to maintaining buy-in to any SEO project management strategy or process.
Measure your performance against historical benchmarks for similar content – focusing primarily on organic traffic and activity from organic search.
Decide which organic KPIs are more important to you; for example traffic to your blog, form conversions, time on page or newsletter subscriptions.
Then identify and establish projections for each.
Your projections should be based on things like historical performance, ranking expectations, MSV for targeted queries for new content, and promotional plans that drive traffic.
Increased traffic across non-organic channels can be an additional way to measure the success of SEO efforts, as keywords represent search intent, so you know your audience is looking for the content you’re creating.
If they see it in email, social media, or ads and click at a higher rate, you can infer that search intent applies to other channels.
Start your reporting by first identifying your data sources.
For website analytics and website traffic, you may use Google Analytics or Adobe.
For form conversions or newsletter subscriptions, you use a MAP.
Connect with the owners of these tools, as an expert on your marketing automation team, to determine what can be automated and how you can start building reports to track KPIs.
Even without automated resources, there are plenty of free tools and APIs to help.
For those with more resources, this is where investing in an SEO platform can really help bring all your data together in one place to analyze and extract key insights.
Uncover Insights
Once you have your reporting in place, regularly review the performance of your content.
Start with more frequent and detailed readings to familiarize yourself with the nuances of the data so you can begin to identify small trends.
Before presenting to management, step back and show a holistic view of the impact of your efforts.
Be sure to consider how long it has taken Google to start ranking a new piece of content and when it starts generating organic traffic.
Report if the content created through your new SEO project management system is speeding it up.
The same goes for the time it takes for conversions to start – and hopefully increase – after some effort.
Then analyze the types of content and topics that work best.
Feed Learning Back Into Content Optimizations
Use all this reporting to your advantage and translate your results into optimizations for your process and your pages.
Conclusion
While most content roles and skills have found ways to integrate themselves into the content research, creation and optimization processes, SEO often struggles to emerge as a consistent, let alone necessary, part of team project management.
But by approaching SEO project management with specific tasks in mind and a process that incorporates them, you have the best chance for success—especially when the process can be carefully woven into your team’s existing efforts.
It may take time, but it will ultimately show strategic proactive thinking that demonstrates holistic knowledge of an effectively optimized process, resulting in measurable performance improvement towards achieving your goals.
Featured Image: Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock
SEO keywords (also known as “keywords” or “search phrases”) are terms added to online content to improve search engine rankings for those terms. Most keywords are discovered during the keyword research process and are chosen based on a combination of search volume, competition and commercial intent.
Why is SEO important?
Simply put, SEO is essential because it makes your website more visible, which means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers. Check out the SEO tools you can use for optimal placement.
Why SEO is important in simple words? Importance of SEO SEO is important because it helps people find information and discover pages on the world wide web. SEO is especially important for businesses as it ensures that they answer their audience’s biggest search engine questions while driving traffic to their products and services.
What is SEO and why it is important?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. In the simplest terms, good SEO optimizes your visibility online. This means that the more people see your website, the more your online traffic increases and the better your chances of delivering your product or service to a larger number of people.
Why is SEO search important?
SEO is important because: SEO is not only about search engines, but good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a website. Users trust search engines and having a presence in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching for increases the trust of the website.
Why SEO is important for business?
A strong SEO strategy will allow brands to place their website and their content high on the SERPs for relevant keywords, attracting the attention of potential customers and bringing them into their sales funnel. Start strategizing for important keywords using Data Cube.
What is SEO and why is SEO important for every business?
SEO consists of several strategies, actions, and best practices, all of which have the ultimate goal of improving your site’s position in search engines, which is why it’s called “search engine optimization.” There are two types of SEO. : on-page and off-page.
Why is SEO still important?
Good SEO leads to a better user experience Good content, a better understanding of your user and a positive effect on brand awareness are some of the most attractive benefits of adopting an SEO strategy.
Why is SEO important for small businesses?
SEO is important because it helps you establish yourself as an expert in your field and drives traffic to your website, while helping you organically promote your business for free. If you are unsure about the importance of SEO, you are not alone. Only 36% of small businesses actually have an SEO strategy.
How do I start an SEO project?
How to start an SEO campaign
- Step 1: Set KPIs and Goals. …
- Step 2: Analyze your current website setup. …
- Step 3: Topic creation and keyword research. …
- Step 4: Establish a pillar content strategy. …
- Step 5: Perform an SEO audit. …
- Step 6: Work with audit findings. …
- Step 7: Work on local SEO. …
- Step 8: Work with backlinks.
What is the first step to start SEO? Defining the relevant keywords is the first step in creating search engine optimized website content. By using the keywords and building your themes around them, you will create content that provides answers to Google searches.
What is on page SEO?
On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) refers to the practice of optimizing web pages to improve a website’s search engine rankings and earn organic traffic. In addition to publishing relevant, high-quality content, on-page SEO includes optimizing your headlines, HTML tags (title, meta and header) and images.
What is on-page SEO and off-page SEO? On-page SEO refers to SEO factors and techniques focused on optimizing aspects of your website that you have control over. Off-page SEO refers to SEO factors and strategies that focus on promoting your website or brand around the web.
Why is on-page SEO important?
On-page SEO helps search engines analyze your website and the content associated with it to identify whether a searcher’s query is relevant to your website. Google is constantly updating their algorithm so that it can better understand a searcher’s intent and deliver search results that meet that user’s needs.
Why are on page and off page SEO important?
On-page SEO focuses on optimizing parts of your website that are within your control, while off-page SEO focuses on increasing the authority of your domain through content creation and earning backlinks from other websites.
What is on page SEO and why does it matter?
On-page SEO (or on-site SEO) is the process of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines for specific keywords to increase organic traffic. It involves aligning page-level elements like title tags, headings and content as well as search intent with a specific set of keywords.
Why is on page content important?
Probably the most important reason to have engaging content on a website is to educate and inform website visitors. Without content, no one will know what your business is about, what you stand for, and how they can benefit from what you have to offer.
What is on-page SEO and its types?
| Type | Short description |
|---|---|
| On-Page SEO | All the measures you take to get your web page to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) fall under On-Page SEO. |
| Off-Page SEO | This refers to anything you do outside of your website to perform better and rank higher in Google’s SERPs. |
What is an on-page SEO?
On-site SEO (also known as on-page SEO) is the practice of optimizing elements of a website (as opposed to links elsewhere on the Internet and other external signals, collectively known as “off-site SEO”) in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic from search engines.
What is SEO and its types?
The term SEO, Search Engine Optimization, refers to improving your website’s visibility in Google search results for relevant keywords or search phrases. SEO helps generate website traffic naturally.
Which is example of on-page SEO?
Examples of some on-page SEO action items include: Optimizing your title tags and meta descriptions. Writing in-depth quality content. Cleans up your site’s code.
Which of these is a part of onsite SEO?
This SEO practice requires adjusting elements on your website so that search engines can easily crawl your website and index your content. When you use onsite SEO, you optimize both the content and the HTML source code of a page. One of the most critical factors in onsite SEO is relevance.
What is SEO in simple words?
SEO stands for search engine optimization – so much has remained the same. It refers to techniques that help your website rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
What is an example of SEO? How they determine the “best” result is based on an algorithm that takes into account authority, relevance to that query, load speed and more. (For example, Google has over 200 ranking factors in their algorithm.) In most cases, when people think “search engine optimization,” they think “Google SEO.”
What is SEO and how it works?
Well, SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’ which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial or natural search engine results. It aims to improve your site’s ranking on search results pages. Remember, the higher the website is listed, the more people will see it.
How does SEO work in simple words?
How does SEO work? SEO works by making certain changes to your site’s design and content that make your site more attractive to a search engine. You do this in the hope that the search engine will show your website as a top result on the search engine’s results page.
What is SEO in easy language?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. Simply put, it means the process of improving your website to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing and other search engines.
What is SEO in plain English?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting targeted traffic to a website from a search engine’s organic rankings.
What is SEO and examples?
Off-page SEO refers to actions that you can take outside of your own website to increase its ranking, such as link building or guest blogging. There are also two styles of SEO: White Hat and Black Hat SEO. White hat SEO is based on using ethical, transparent techniques to build your pages’ rankings.
What is SEO Answer?
What is SEO? The practice of optimizing a website’s architectural layout is known as SEO. It helps with content relevance and link attractiveness so that its pages are easier to find, more relevant, more prominent in response to using web searches and thus rank higher in search engines.