The Art of SEO

Identifying the Site Development Process and Players

Before you start working on any SEO project, you need to know three things: who your target audience is, what your message is, and how your message is relevant. There are no web design tools or programming languages that tell you these things. Marketing, advertising, and PR have to set the objectives before you can implement them—successful SEO requires a team effort.

Your SEO team should be cross-functional and multidisciplinary, consisting of the team manager, the technical team, the creative team, and the major stakeholders from marketing, advertising, and PR. In a smaller organization, you may have to wear all of those hats yourself.

The team leader wants to know who the target audience is. What does marketing know about them? How did we find them? What metrics will we use to track them? All of this is key information that should have an impact on the project’s technical implementation.

Advertising needs to have its messages well thought out and prepared. You do not want your team bickering over whether to optimize for “hardcore widget analysis” or “take your widgets to the next level.” Advertising serves multiple purposes, but its most fundamental purpose is to compel people to take a specific action: what action are you compelling people to take?

PR has to take your story to the media and entice them into writing and talking about it. What message do they want to deliver? You have to mirror that message in your content. If they ...