Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a rapidly growing field which is swiftly becoming known as one of the most notable methods for businesses to ensure a maximum Return on investment in a realistic time period. Nevertheless, like the beginning of the world wide web, a lot of companies recognize that they want SEO, but do not understand how to build a powerful, committed team to drive natural and organic visitors.
As is the case with most marketing tasks, depending on the size of your organization, this team can be dedicated strictly to the tasks at hand, or may share responsibilities among other duties in their job description. It is best to have dedicated individuals for these tasks but this will vary greatly from one company to the next. If your company is committed to SEO as part (or all) of your marketing strategy, make sure to show that commitment with the proper allocation of resources, whether that is money or personnel, necessary for the tasks.
Either way, your team should be comprised of the following 3 positions:
- COO – Chief Optimization Officer – Your Leader
- Content Producer – Your front line producer
- Link Builder – Spinner and promoter
In many organizations, multiple individuals wear many hats and in smaller shops this may be just one person doing all of the above tasks. Just make sure that you are aware of what is involved and know when it is appropriate to scale.
Chief Optimization Officer (COO)
Your COO is the leader of the team and provides the overall strategy and focus. They spend less time producing content and building links and more time focusing the direction of the team and planning strategy. It is the COO responsibility to keep up with the rapidly changing industry.
As the Leader of the SEO team, the COO must also possess exceptional communication skills, since it is their job to report to the client. Reports should include the results, trends, suggestions, as well as optimization ideas discovered by the SEO team. Additionally they have to be allowed to have direct access to the content writer and link builder in order to communicate effectively with the rest of the team.
Other duties of the COO include, planning strategy, identifying budgets, establishing goals and building the SEO team.
Content Producer
The Content Producer is your foot soldier in the SEO war. They are the ones that produce the information, whether it is written copy, images, video, etc... This information is what makes your site the important information resource that it needs to be. The most important information resource will gain the most links and thus rank the highest (or so the theory goes).
It is imperative to get someone on your team who can be a creative writer or content producer. In an employee, look to hire someone with a communication degree, creative writing skills and work examples, perhaps even some PR background.
Frequent blog posts, unique articles and quality graphics or video are the basis of becoming the information resource in your industry.
Link Builder
The link builder is the mysterious one on the team. Paired up with a great COO and competent Content Producers a quality link builder will have no problem generating the buzz necessary to build inbound links. They are tasked with building quality links that are relevant to the company website. Link networks, social networking and bookmarking efforts, directory submissions, blog posts, article submissions, back-link monitoring, all of these things are parts of a link builders job description. Link builders need to know the proper channels to promote your content in.
When hiring a link builder, look for basic HTML experience, and maybe some creative writing. Find people who possess substantial organizational skills, can’t put together a spreadsheet to articulate their efforts. A good Link Builder will generate the reports so that the COO can easily do the analysis.
Building the proper team is the first step to developing your SEO strategy. Once your members are in place you will have the potential to drive huge amounts of measurable traffic to your website and ultimately producing a high quality ROI.
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