Starting A New In House Search Marketing Job
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by Tony Adam
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As many of you know, I recently joined BillShrink as Director of
Search Marketing, which will essentially be my 4th time leading In
House SEO efforts, as either my full time role or part of my role at
an organization. We start-up folks wear many hats! That said, every
single time Ive had a new In House SEO position of some sort, Ive
had to do something different to get things moving in the right
direction. There are a few things though that pretty much remain
constant, but at the end of the day, you need to find out what works
in your specific situation.
Understanding the organization
From its structure, to the people and process, it is extremely
important to understand the organization that you are working for.
This is always my first step, and I liken it to a General in a war or
an athlete playing sports. You need to observe, understand and adjust
to your opponents actions and reactions. Youre going to need to
adjust your game based on the situation at hand.
Now, you might not want to consider your new workplace to be a war
zone (although, trust me, there are situations where I had thought I
was in a war) you still need to understand the organization and how
things work on a day to day, week to week, and month to month basis.
Some organizations, like a startup, are extremely fast moving and you
are going to be getting stuff done weekly. On the other hand, if you
are at organizations that are large/enterprise level, there are going
to be times where things are going to take, weeks, if not months.
Also, you are going to find there are times where everything is just
rolling and things are great; but, at other times, you might lose
resources, a developer might quit, etcetera. So youll need to
understand how the company is structured, where resources go when
times are tough, and have a contingency plan for when things arent
going exactly as planned.
Personality types & influencers
Dealing with different personality types can make or break how things
get done within an organization. You dont want to run around telling
people what to do, why they are idiots or what they should be doing
differently until you actually figure out the delivery, because that
can make all the difference.
To figure out personality types, start asking yourself questions
about how they work and interact. Are they Social? Anti-Social? Enjoy
lunches? Need a little influence? Need to be told? Think through these
questions and start answering them as you interact with people. Youll
start to see that not only have you learned how people work, but on
top of that, youll notice people starting to warm up to you more and
people actually doing what you need without much work.
Remember, its not just the people, its the structure of the
organization that you are in that is also extremely important. Who
reports to who? Are you in marketing? Product? Engineering? Who do you
report to? While this may seem unimportant, it is extremely crucial,
because this allows you to find out who the�influencers are in the
organization. Once youve figure that out, youll know who to go to
when you really need to push something through.
For example, lets say that you need to ensure that all content on
the page is visible to bots, youre going to want to make sure that
whoever influences decisions on an engineering basis can build
Progressive Enhancement into their processes for development.
Buddying up to a VP or Director (depending on your title ) can also
help you. Its all about the relationships that you make with these
influencers in an organization that can create mini SEO Evangelists
dispersed throughout the company.
Now, this is an important step it is also extremely important to
not get into analysis paralysis mode with this step. Its crucial to
figure this out right away, get a move on building the relationships
and start making a difference and showing results with in your SEO
efforts. So, go get em! Start setting up coffee dates, do drive bys
at peoples desks, and so forth. But, get this done ASAP so you can
start working on what you need to get done.
Start making friends
It is pretty natural for me to try to be friendly, sincere, get along
and even help everyone where I can. Thats my personality, its pretty
much built into my DNA. It is one of the most important traits of
being an In House SEO, because, youre going to have to make friends
with everyone.
SEO is such a holistic process that making friends in all areas of
expertise within an organization can really help you get things done.
Think about it. Think of all the different teams you are going to
interact with while you are at the company. There is technology,
content/editorial, business development, product development,
marketing communications, product marketing, PR, ad sales (believe it
or not)&and the list goes on and on. Each and every one of these
individuals will be crucial to you in one way, shape or form while you
are attempting to develop, implement and deliver on SEO strategies.
Make friends by being social, take people out to lunch, go to coffee
for a meeting instead of a conference room, and the most important,
take people out for drinks. Ive never met an engineering team that
Ive worked with that turned down an invite to free drinks or happy
hour. A little tip that I always give people is to keep a couple teams
fridges stocked with beer. Yes, Im encouraging drinking at the
workplace (no, I am not encouraging it during business hours&) But, I
cant tell you how many times I get teams to agree to working on
projects after Ive cracked a beer or two open with them at the
office.
Another way to make friends is to make people look good and feed
their ego. Lets face it, people have egos and people want to move up
in their roles at big companies. Even if you work with people in a
limited capacity, remember to include them and thank them when
reporting the status of the program, or, when you are presenting the
strategy or update to executives.�Make sure you point out and thank
the people that you worked with!
If your organization has large organizational meetings or weekly team
meetings, make sure to talk up and thank the people that are getting
stuff done for you, it will make them look good (which they want) and
others will want to step up so they can get some recognition. Once you
get someone some credit for something they worked on and they get some
positive feedback because of it, they are going to come back to you
looking for more. Youve just become their SEO Pusherman.
Now, youve made some friends, youre getting people on your side,
start putting them to work!
Quick wins right off the bat
Getting a quick win under your belt will earn you some credibility in
an organization. It gives you an opportunity to have a story to talk
about right away. And, it gives you the ability to prove that what you
are doing is important.
Once youve done that, people will start to listen to you more. At a
big company, it is fairly simple sometimes, because there are
typically a lot of issues that need to be worked out. So fix a title
tag or two, find out if a part of a site is being blocked from robots,
maybe somebody forgot to remove some noindex tags from a page, or
find a trend that will likely drive a ton of traffic and get that to
editorial ASAP. Either way, get one of those under your belt, so you
can take that up stream and show people that you are valuable and
important.
Another reason I really like quick wins is if you show some results,
show that it will make a splash, or an impact of some sort, will get
peoples attention. Guess what that means? Those people that you are
taking effort to become friends with, will start buddying up to you,
because they will want in on that attention and love from management
or executives.
Build and develop a strategy
Now, although you want to get some quick wins under your belt, you
need to simultaneously start thinking about how youre going to
approach things more holistically and methodically. The worst thing
that you can do is start throwing SEO changes at the walls and hoping
they stick. Its not going to work for a larger organization.
What you want to do is take some time understanding the verticals,
audience and target market. Do your basic keyword research,
competitive intelligence and look for areas of opportunity that you
can build strategies out of. Start putting this together into a
report, presentation or whatever form your organization usually
responds the best to. Ive found that putting something together that
is similar to Product Requirements put together by the Product
Management groups will be the most effective for providing the details
necessary that a Product Manager needs to float it up the ranks.
At Yahoo!, we had an SRD, SEO Research (or Requirements) Document,
that details out keyword research, competitive data, development
requirements and/or templates, link development and/or viral marketing
strategies.
This document should holistically detail out your entire SEO Analysis
for a given Market, Event, Vertical, etc. If you are/were an SEO
consultant at some point, think of it as an SEO Audit that you would
deliver to a client. Make sure that whoever you hand the document off
to can understand the requirements and turn it around fairly quickly.
At the very least, they should be able to take parts of the document
and fill it into their overall Product or Marketing Strategy.
Create baselines & goals
I have to admit, Im the type of person that likes to get in, kick
ass, and take names. Im all about being effective, and getting the
quick wins in place while building out an overall strategy. That said,
one of the biggest things that Ive learned in my new role is how to
effectively create a baseline for search traffic and setup goals
around the original baseline set. Now, Ill be talking about this more
in my next post, so I wont go into much detail here.
Essentially, you are going to want to create a baseline of your
search traffic and give yourself an opportunity to show how effective
and/or ineffective certain strategies are. I think this is more
important in helping you determine what is working, what isnt, and
highlighting your effectiveness. At the end of the day, you need
something to measure your performance against, for better or worse.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
Tony Adam <http://searchengineland.com/author/tony-adam/>
is Director of Search Marketing for BillShrink
<http://billshrink.com>
, a service that helps provide unbiased and personalized
recommendations to save consumers money. He is also Principal of
VisibleFactors <http://visiblefactors.com>
, an internet marketing consulting firm that works with startups and
technology companies.
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