For companies that rely on the cultivation of their digital brand, a strong SEO strategy is essential. But while high-level SEO planning is crafted by SEO management, the technical implementation of concrete enterprise SEO measures are often the responsibility of programmers or developers. For this reason, the interface between SEO managers and technical teams is critical.
In our recent SEO Summit, Jordan Koene, Advisor to Searchmetrics and a technology leader in the industry, offered six tips that can help streamline SEO implementation across the entire organizational structure.
1. Make data usable
“Whether you’re working with small or large teams, it is absolutely critical to be able to understand how to create integrations in order for you to scale.”
Jordan Koene, Advisor to Searchmetrics
Jordan acknowledges that data can be complex, but being able to collect, analyze, and put data to use is a crucial part of identifying and solving problems before they have a negative impact.
Data quality is a prerequisite
“Understanding core technologies and limitations is the first step to successful data collection and usage. The second step to the process of ensuring that you’re recording reliable data points that you can align across the organization.”
Jordan Koene, Advisor to Searchmetrics
According to Jordan, there are two core requirements for high quality data: Consistency and completeness. This means that data collected over time should come from the same source to avoid discrepancies and inaccuracies. Data sets should pursue an identical insight goal over a longer period – only then are they consistent.
Jordan also reminds SEOs to consider competitor data, which often gets pushed into the background. Competitor comparisons provide a clear picture of where a company’s website performance truly stands. With the right tools, SEOs can easily record both their own data and that of their competitors.
Software provides a critical source of data
“The reality is that crawl data is very complex. What we often do as SEOs is we download the list and send it over to somebody, but this doesn’t actually create any inspiration for someone to work on it, because it doesn’t tell anyone anything meaningful. It just says I have a whole bunch of errors.”
Jordan Koene, Advisor to Searchmetrics
In order to identify problems at an early stage, data must be collected, stored, tracked, and understood by all internal stakeholders in order to draw…