Study As a Marketing SEO

Marketing For SEO

Marketing, Sales, and Public Relations make up a corporate SEO trifecta. Get all three excited about your SEO campaign and you’ll have built your “brain-trust” foundation for success. Here’s some food for thought that might come in handy when you need to deal with these departments.

Marketing: VIPs of SEO In most organizations, the majority of the tasks relating to SEO will be performed by people in the marketing department. We’re guessing you’re a member of this department yourself. It’s a natural progression: the marketing department may already be handling the website as well as offline marketing such as print ads, television, radio, billboards and online marketing such as banner ads and direct e-mails. The marketing team will likely be instrumental in the SEO tasks like keyword brainstorming and research, writing text for descriptions and page titles, writing pay-per-click (PPC) ad copy, managing PPC campaigns, and executing link-building campaigns.

The folks on the marketing team have, quite literally, the skills to pay the bills, and they probably don’t need any convincing that SEO is a worthwhile effort. What they will need, however, is some organization and some focusing. What does your marketing team know about the importance of robot-readable text, keyword placement, and PPC campaign management? Maybe a lot. Maybe nothing. Maybe they know something that was worthwhile a few years ago but is now outdated. Since you’re in charge of the SEO team, it will help you to know what the general knowledge level is and then think of yourself as the on-site SEO educator.

We have found that marketing staffers are almost always open to a little education about how the search engines work, as long as the information is provided on a need-to-know basis. For example, whenever we brainstorm for keywords with a marketing manager, inevitably their list contains terms that are extremely vague (“quality”) or so specific that nobody is searching for them (“geometric specifications of duckpin
bowling balls”). When we trim down that list, we always explain the basic concept of search popularity vs. relevance. But when it comes to educating the team, a little bit of  information at a time is key; you don’t want to drown your colleagues in too many details.

But what if you’re not working in such a receptive environment? Maybe you are the only one convinced of the positive powers of SEO. Perhaps, for reasons of budget or time, you don’t have the buy-in you need to move forward. Perhaps other marketing programs are taking precedence or the department can’t seem to make the leap from offline to online marketing. If that’s the case, it’s time to convince the marketing manager of the importance of your SEO project!

Here’s one way to approach it: Focus on the needs of the marketing department. Yes, it’s time for you to go into therapist mode and do a whole lot of listening. Is there something that they’ve been dying to get done? A new tagline, perhaps? Maybe some changes to the corporate website? Are they feeling overworked? Do
they secretly want to drop one segment—say, billboard advertising—out of the marketing mix? Are they having trouble getting help from the IT department? Tell them SEO can help.

SEO can provide the trackability that they’ve been waiting for. It may provide justification for dropping less-successful advertising venues. It can forge new alliances between Marketing and IT. On the “warm and fuzzy” side, it may provide an outlet for a creative soul who feels trapped in marketingspeak and wants to do more creative writing. And SEO is an extremely telecommuting-friendly enterprise. Is there a
new dad in the department who would love to spend a portion of his week working from home?

Once you’ve found some common ground and the enthusiasm is starting to grow, look through your conversion goals from Chapter 1, “Clarify Your Goals,” and consider starting Your SEO Plan with a a pilot project that you can focus your SEO efforts on together. Pick something close to the hearts of the marketing staff: a recent or upcoming launch, a section of your site devoted to a special event, a promotion, or
a product line that’s down in the dumps. Cherry-pick if you can! It’s important that these early experiences be positive ones.