You cannot succeed at SEO alone unless you know how to design websites, write codes, create content, analyze data, and manage customers all by yourself.
We doubt many business owners can manage all of this on their own to grow their business. You have to rely on the other teams in your organization to ensure that you have a strong SEO program working for your brand.
You must be aware that getting organic traffic is not the only goal for your SEO efforts. It is also necessary to convert the organic traffic into high-quality leads for your business. That means your SEO strategy should be able to attract existing and new customers to your website and ensure that they convert.
We spoke to some of the leading SEO experts from Leeds in the UK to understand how each department can influence SEO techniques. This is what we learned.
Copywriters
Copywriters have a prime role to play in the SEO strategy. They know the right keywords that you need to use to rank higher on search engine results pages. Sometimes it is not enough to have creative and promotional content.
You need to ensure that you include the right keywords to match your product with the search query. That means these keywords should be a part of your existing or target audience types while looking for a business on search engines.
An efficient copywriter will know how to include the keywords in the content and also target them. For example, if you have a business of flower deliveries, your website should appear when a person from your area types “flower deliveries near me” on a search engine.
Copywriters should be able to find search terms and keywords that can help your website rank high on result pages.
Developers
Developers are required to take care of the technical aspects of SEO at the backend. These are some of the aspects that developers need to optimize for your SEO strategy:
- Every website has a robots.txt file that acts like a map for search engine crawlers. Search engines use this file to understand the web pages optimized for the search bots and those which are not. Therefore, developers need to ensure that none of your website pages are blocked or disallowed on the robots.txt file. That way, search bots can crawl through your entire website.
- Sometimes, you may have a new webpage that you do not want search engines to index. For example, you may be trying out a new design and wish to test it on selective users by privately sharing the URL. In such cases, developers can place a "noindex" tag so that search engines do not index them.
- If you have a large website with a lot of URLs, developers need to set up XML sitemaps to help search bots find all of them. An XML site map will show Google or other search engines the numerous domains and subdomains that exist on your website. However, you do not need an XML site map if you have a small business website.
- Developers need to ensure that your website has optimum performance and speed to meet the Google Core Web Vitals. Website performance and speed are also necessary for optimum user experience.
There are several other SEO aspects that developers need to take care of, such as Canonical tags, structured data, and server-side rendering.
Content Creators
A Content creator’s job is crucial for the SEO performance of your website. They know what kind of content they need to create to match the user intent and fulfill customer needs. They can also evaluate content creation based on the platforms they need to target.
For example, let us say your business needs to engage with existing and potential customers through social media. Analytical data shows that you get the maximum returns from your social media posts and engagements. So your content team can write articles, shoot videos, or record podcasts that will work best on social media.
They are also responsible to include the relevant keywords in the content in a natural way. However, sometimes the content team may not be SEO experts. So they may need guidance from the SEO teams to optimize title tags, meta descriptions, headings, and other aspects.
The SEO teams can also guide them to place internal and external links with natural anchor texts. Both teams can share inputs about the types of content generating the most traffic and leads to replicate the strategies.
Website Designers
Visitors may land on different pages on your website through various sources. Some of them may come through business directories and land on specific pages. Others may visit the content and article pages through search engines.
Your ultimate goal should be to convert these visitors no matter which page they land on your website. The site design can play a crucial role in conversions and lead generation. Website designers can affect the user experience and branding on the pages.
Therefore, they need to optimize the visual aspects, call-to-action (CTA) features, and content placement on the web pages. If you notice that some of your pages are not converting well, you need to ask your designers to make the necessary changes. Website designers can also optimize some of the technical SEO aspects.
So as you can see, SEO must be a team effort at your organization. It takes commitment from every department to achieve the business goals. Do not mistake SEO to be a one-time solution to solve all of your business problems. It needs constant optimization, improvement, and adaptation from each team in your organization to achieve the best results.