Integrated SEO: The SEO Secret To Take Your Program To The Next Level

Many organizations treat SEO as a silo.  It’s one person’s job to “do” SEO, or it’s outsourced to an SEO Agency without integrating it into other important marketing functions. This approach means that you’re only getting a small part of the value of all your SEO work.

Traditional SEO techniques, such as updating HTML tags with relevant keywords, are all good, but most organizations are missing close integration with their own website, content and digital advertising teams to take their SEO programs to the next level.

SEO and Your Website

SEO has always been about making your website attractive to the search engines, so you can be more visible on selected keywords to gain more traffic. To achieve SEO goals, organizations invest in research to find the best keywords, update website HTML tags, build website links, and clean up any website issues that are blocking the spiders.

This level of SEO work requires very close cooperation between the SEO team and the people running the website. I’ve been involved in many SEO projects where we are not allowed to make content changes to a website, or we are only allowed to make changes to the website once, and there is no ongoing process for keeping new website content optimized or adding new website content based on keyword visibility metrics.

The best SEO programs have a continuous and fluid relationship between the SEO team and the website team. Before new pages are published or updated, the SEO team reviews them to make sure they are optimized to get the most SEO value while making them as valuable as possible to the readers.  After each month, the SEO team reviews keyword results and they can let the website writers know which keywords are most important to focus on for the coming month. These may be keywords that are visible on the second page that we’d like to move up, or a keyword that is not visible at all on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

One approach to better integration is to schedule a monthly meeting between the two groups to share information and get in the habit of working closely together. The SEO team will bring data about keyword visibility and organic traffic, while the website content team can bring the content calendar.  At the end of the meeting, the teams will agree on which keywords and content to focus on for the coming month and seamlessly integrate them together.  This integrated approach will drive better SEO results and higher quality website content.