As SEO professionals, it’s challenging to get people to buy into and care about what we do.
Sometimes it’s even hard to get them to remember what SEO stands for.
However, more and more companies are putting their efforts and attention into building out their digital marketing teams, especially within organic marketing or SEO.
The last couple of years has shown us that companies can no longer rely on their brick-and-mortar or traditional marketing methods alone.
With companies across all industries now prioritizing a digital-first strategy across the organization, it’s essential that you’re optimizing workflows to support the best possible ROI.
This article provides the foundation for the optimal way to run a marketing team, implement SEO recommendations, and increase efficiency in your organic marketing workflow.
Why Is The Organic Marketing Workflow So Important?
For far too long, SEO professionals have been considered the janitors of their organization.
We get tasked with“SEO-ing content” months after production, or we’re not consulted regarding technical changes and only learn about them when issues need cleaning up.
We need to be more proactive when using our SEO insights and make sure that the SEO experts at your organization have a seat at the table.
SEO professionals and the organic marketing team can no longer be siloed from the rest of the digital marketing department or the organization.
The key is learning how to break down these silos and enable SEO across the entire organization. It’s not an easy task, but it’s necessary if you want to drive efficiency and see organic success.
When organic marketing is involved in the conversation, it allows SEOs to ensure that content is set up for success.
Wouldn’t every organization want its content to do well right from the start?
Organizations with the best performing content tend to have the most efficient organic marketing workflow and are the most mature companies from an organic marketing perspective.
What Is Organic Marketing Maturity?
Being a mature organic marketing company means you have the right combination of people, processes, tools, and metrics to help inform the digital marketing and overall company strategy.
Let’s break down each of these areas to see how we can create a proactive and efficient organic marketing workflow.
How to Create A More Efficient Organic Marketing Workflow
One of the easiest ways to make your workflow more efficient is to make more people in the organization aware of SEO and the benefits it provides when prioritized across the board.
Educate And Evangelize Your Organization Around SEO
By educating and evangelizing the organization around SEO, in-house experts can instantly make more people aware of SEO best practices.
Wouldn’t it be great to have 10 people all thinking about SEO vs. just one individual tasked as the SEO expert?
At the very least, doing so helps expand knowledge around what SEO is and how to fit into the organic marketing workflow.
Within organizations, collaboration and alignment between many different departments are key.
For example, when creating content, SEO specialists need to involve the marketing team, content team, legal team, development, and design teams.
This means there are usually a lot of different stakeholders involved.
But, educating them along the way about SEO best practices makes it easier to speed up the process the next time.
The main point here is that it doesn’t matter how limited your company is with SEO resources (obviously, the more we can get, the better!) because almost anyone can be SEO with the right knowledge.
If SEO experts can teach different departments more about SEO and use these insights to help convince them why it matters, we can create more SEO professionals internally.
This is why educating and evangelizing SEO are important things internally.
Once you take the time to explain why we care about things from an SEO perspective and how it can increase results and make their jobs easier, there is less push back.
Remember the last time the developer ignored your request for a month?
Educating them on SEO best practices can help you learn to prioritize technical issues without disrupting their queue.
Improve Your SEO Process And Program
One of the benefits of educating more of the organization and other team members about SEO best practices is to help improve the overall SEO and organic process and program.
Optimizing the SEO process and program internally is one of the biggest ways SEO experts can help make the organic marketing workflow more efficient.
By improving the process, we can ensure that everyone is thinking about SEO when creating, updating, or implementing content.
Communication with all the stakeholders is the best way to ensure that SEO is incorporated into the process moving forward.
For example, when everyone is thinking about SEO metrics or best practices, prioritizing content to optimize and refresh becomes less hassle for the content team. Everyone begins to understand the purpose of a content audit and what we gain by optimizing old content.
In addition to improving the process, SEO professionals also need to ensure that the program and tools are correctly leveraged.
The company’s tools and programs allow us to efficiently and effectively share data or insights that can help others in the company understand how we are performing.
Whether we are using a bunch of smaller tools, internal analytics, or enterprise SEO software, we must continuously monitor how our content and keywords are performing from an organic standpoint.
This way, we can benchmark our performance, easily share wins with the organization, and be alerted if we need the support of a specific stakeholder to fix something.
Create Metrics And KPIs To Hold Each Department Accountable
Any successful organic marketing workflow and organization will need specific metrics or KPIs to measure success.
You can educate and evangelize SEO as much as you want and improve our SEO process. However, if you don’t define what you are trying to achieve before you set out to do it, it will make the success story harder to tell.
Half the story is always using SEO insights/data to make recommendations.
But without implementing the recommendations and measuring the results it produces, you won’t know what truly happened or be able to measure the ROI of your efforts.
To make sure you have the most efficient organic marketing workflow possible, SEO experts need to set up clear KPIs to measure the impact on the organization.
This enables us to be more agile and take action faster when we notice an issue.
Also, this allows us to see if our strategy is actually working.
SEO is a long-term lead generation strategy vs. the short-term gains paid search provides, so it’s important to consistently report wins along the way to close the loop and bring visibility to the ROI of our efforts.
ROI within SEO is tough to prove, but there are metrics we can use within content marketing, such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates, to prove our success.
It’s up to us to keep stakeholders in the loop that our SEO efforts are reaping the rewards and driving revenue.
Doing this helps everyone buy into the organic marketing workflow, making us even more efficient moving forward.
In Conclusion
Today, most organizations don’t have a mature or efficient organic marketing workflow because they haven’t taken these steps.
But having the awareness that changes are needed to drive efficiency means you are already ahead of most organizations.
The best part of SEO is that Google doesn’t necessarily care if you are an enterprise, an SME, or a mom-and-pop shop.
If you are the most relevant result to show the user and have the best experience, Google will reward you with a Page 1 result.
This is why effective (and efficient) organic marketing is one of the most critical parts of a successful foundation in digital marketing.
Educating and collaborating with other team members internally, improving SEO processes and programs, and creating metrics that clearly measure SEO ROI is the winning formula for driving an efficient organic marketing workflow.
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