The importance of teamwork and workflow is often missing from discussions of SEO success.
So I interviewed 31 people, with titles ranging from Content Specialist to SEO Director, to CEO, and asked them about how teamwork and workflow affect their SEO operations and success.
Why did I do this? Because we can all learn from the experience of others. By understanding what works for others, we can hopefully avoid making their early mistakes.
Costs of poor coordination are traffic, conversions, working relationships
These costs are very real. Websites can suffer from less organic traffic and/or decreased conversions.
In the same way that people who run relay races practice how they hand the baton from runner to runner, the various team members working on a website need to work on how they interact and hand off work to each other.
Sometimes the technical SEO suffers, sometimes the design aesthetics suffer, sometimes the user experience suffers. Sometimes tradeoffs between the three need to be made. Something’s gotta give, and you don’t want these discussions to erode team cohesion.
How do agencies and brands coordinate SEO tasks effectively?
While there is almost universal agreement about what matters, there are interesting similarities and differences in how teams prioritize what matters. To use the relay race analogy again, there are differences in how people define a “smooth handoff”.
Can we learn something from each other in taking a high-level look at how we organize our SEO and content work? I think so. This belief is the basis of this article.
This article describes similarities and differences in SEO operations
When I started interviewing people for this article, I wasn’t sure what shape it would take. After