The Art of SEO

Building a Culture of SEO into Your Organization

SEO is a marketing function, and like any other marketing function, its goal is to help your organization grow and prosper. For a business, this means bringing in more revenue. What makes SEO different from any other function in your organization is the depth and breadth of its influence on every other role that influences and/or touches the website.

SEO is also a bit of a strange beast, because much of it is nonintuitive. As an SEO practitioner, you can explain things to people and then they will look at you like you have three heads and say, “Huh?” Building an SEO culture requires that you get the organization as a whole to accept a few really important facts:

• Organic search engine traffic is essential to the growth and success of the organization.

• Search engines impose some specific constraints on how you can structure your website.

• Search engine success requires specialized marketing programs.

• Embrace these limitations and requirements, and you can gain a strategic advantage over your competition.

These concepts are pretty high-level and very simple by design. If you can get all parts of the organization buying into them, though, it will have a very powerful impact on your chances for success. Once everyone agrees that SEO is needed, you will have taken the first step in building an SEO culture.

The value of this is that you will have all team members aware, at least at a basic level, of how SEO affects them. Before the senior manager ...