Editorial Articles

The board needs to make cost savings – urgently - and their collective gaze is trained on you, the digital marketer. They need results and they need them FAST.

You have an SEO expert on the team, but the results you had expected haven’t been realised. There are improvements in rankings and sales are up a bit, but nothing like the exponential rise you’d expected.

Why websites fail

Websites (and the businesses that depend on their success) fail for many reasons. Without adequate planning and constant attention to performance, the greatest idea can flounder and fall away.

To succeed in the web’s increasingly competitive marketing space, digital marketers need to be digital strategists. You also need to be effective people managers and to assume the responsibility for making sure the people in your team are working effectively together. If you want your company to be the one that succeeds, go into battle with your best web developer and your best SEO expert by your side and make their relationship your responsibility. Make sure that they know they’re on the same side, and that they understand that without the support of each other the website is guaranteed to fail.

Working as a team

Your web developer must concede that they are not best skilled to manage your site’s SEO. Maybe this was their responsibility in the past, but SEO is now a highly sophisticated practice that should be undertaken by an experienced SEO professional.

Instead, the web developer must now play a crucial role in keeping the SEO expert fully informed of changes to the site. In return, the SEO expert will instruct the web developer on how to optimise the site for SEO.

SEO experts shouldn’t only concern themselves with ‘on page’ optimisation and link building. There can only be one winner in the race for the top ranking and you want to be 100% sure that everyone involved in the production of your company’s website is doing everything possible to ensure that it’s your brand at the top of the pile.

Websites and the companies behind them now live or die by the strength of their SEO. If your SEO expert tells you that your web developers are failing to take SEO on board, then you should waste no time in getting your SEO expert to present to the web development team the risks and opportunities that SEO presents for your company.

Your web developer has a key role to play in supplying your SEO expert with the information needed to help him/her get your website to the top of the results page and keep it there. To be most effective, the SEO expert should always have critical information about the site at their fingertips, including complete details of any changes made to the site over the past month/week.

The relationship between the SEO expert and the web developer should be constant, with each party constantly aware of what the other is doing with the site in terms of site updates and SEO performance. Unfortunately, many SEO experts are only given the opportunity to talk to the web developers once or twice during the life of the project. This is woefully inadequate and leads to the failure of many sites.

When it’s your responsibility

Here’s what it shouldn’t look like: a one or two-page document from the SEO expert, sent to the digital marketer (you) who then passes it on to the web developer. If this is what happens in your company, intervene to put a stop to it immediately. Such documents usually contain only the most basic information about SEO and do very little to help a web developer to create a truly SEO-friendly site. Direct dialogue between web developer and SEO expert is mission critical.

To guarantee success, it’s the role of the digital marketer to make sure that both web developer and SEO expert are working together as members of a cohesive and effective team.

A roadmap for success

Before you get them in a room together, ask each of them to produce a document for the other:

• Ask the web developer to produce a specification or development plan for the site. The document should contain everything the SEO expert needs to know about the site, including wireframes, content layout and CMS specifications.

• Ask the SEO expert to produce an SEO content strategy and a comprehensive list of keywords. The SEO content strategy should detail which pages are important to SEO and how many pages should be created solely for SEO purposes (some SEO experts may have an ‘ideal information architecture’ document that they can provide).

Once the SEO expert has read the web developer’s specification and the web developer has read the SEO expert’s SEO content strategy and list of keywords get them both in a room and facilitate a discussion between them.

Start by asking the web developer some opening questions to get the conversation going. Questions such as ‘How far along are we with the site build?’, ‘Are any updates due to go live in the next five weeks?’ and ‘Have you made any changes to the URL structure of the site in the past six months?’ should reveal any issues that might exist.

Next, ask the SEO expert a few questions that will usually encourage the web developer to come up with creative solutions that will help the SEO expert to get better results, such as ‘What is our keyword strategy’, ‘How do you envisage the keyword strategy fitting in with the existing site structure’ and ‘Do you need the site structure to change to fit with the SEO strategy?’

When they’ve finished talking it’s your turn to speak. Demand results in a reasonable timeframe. Don’t let either side claim they were waiting for the other to deliver something in order to move forward. Hold both parties accountable for the success of the site.

Maintaining the momentum

Make sure your SEO expert and your web developer meet - with you present - at least once a month. SEO needs to develop and improve as the website develops and matures. The two should always be in step with one another. Ask both of them a number of questions to keep them on their toes:

• Ask the SEO expert for a consolidated task sheet that includes everything you have previously discussed (the SEO expert will have to work with the web developer to produce this in preparation for every meeting);
• Ask them both to produce a list of ‘deliverables’ with dates for delivery;
• Ask for a bi-monthly report (no more than one page in length) reporting the progress of both teams;
• Encourage both parties to stay in touch with each other (and you) between meetings so ideas for improved search ranking are shared as and when they come to mind;
• Agree the next meeting date to ensure momentum.

When your SEO expert and your web developer are working closely together your site, your business and your stakeholders will reap the benefits – but keep your eye on the ball. Success depends on a fully integrated approach. If the relationship should break down it could cost your business more than you might expect.

David Deutsch
Head of Search
Fortune Cookie
www.fortunecookie.co.uk