If you want search success, cross-collaboration across your paid, content, and organic teams is essential. However, this requires a lot of effort – from untangling communications to cross-training and even getting everyone to “buy-in” to the integration – it’s a lot of time and work.
While this is true, there are some tips you can use to successfully integrate your content, paid, and organic search efforts to ensure a smooth and unhindered experience.
Roll Out Changes Individual but Announce Change at Once
It’s often overwhelming to integrate practices and change to old processes. As a result, you want to avoid trying to do everyone at once. This would be like trying to boil the ocean – it’s just too much.
While you want to ensure everyone is on board and aligned with the challenges and benefits they will face during the integration process, it’s essential to make the changes slowly.
Document New Processes and Products
As you begin developing new processes and capabilities, you must continue to document them in a shared, living wiki. This is because the processes will continue to grow and change.
You can use several tools to document your shared workflows, but everyone on the team should have access and trust to refine how they see fit and what is good for the team.
Make Recommendations
While this step should be obvious, there are still people who aren’t doing it. Make recommendations and reporting together. There are many situations where you may collect data for reporting from various channels. You put some slides together at the last minute before handing it all over to the client. This usually results in a shallow and virtually meaningless set of data that doesn’t tell a story.
A better method is to get together, share insights, findings, and observations, and then create a meaningful story. This will help prioritize the best marketing decisions for a client based on all the data provided.
Cross-Training Is Essential
The next step is to cross-train. This allows you to build advocacy across all your teams. You can host hands-on training and workshops. You can even conduct a “job swap” where your SEOs create content for product pages. This helps to create a greater sense of empathy and a more significant understanding of what others require to do their jobs properly.
Reintroduce a Team or Capability
Having integrated new processes and people, others in the organization may not understand what it means to them. This is when you need to reintroduce your team or a new capability to the remainder of the organization. This is when you are essentially putting faces with names. Make sure you discuss what the new capability does and what value it brings to the organization.
Making the Most of Your Search Efforts
If you want to make the most of your search efforts, be sure to keep the integration tips here in mind. When everything works together, you will find your efforts are more successful. More information is available by reaching out to the pros.