Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex and ever-evolving field. As an SEO professional, you understand the importance of building processes and checks and balances to protect against losing your SEO progress overnight due to simple mistakes made by non-SEO colleagues. But how can you protect yourself and your team from such mistakes? The answer is training.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to use SEO education for stakeholder management so that you can create SEO-aware champions in every key department, with stakeholders who understand the importance of SEO and can make informed decisions that complement rather than hinder your SEO progress.
1. Invest in company-wide education
The first step in using SEO education for stakeholder management is to provide your company or departments who deal with the website/s with a general introduction to SEO. By creating SEO-aware champions in each key department, you’ll ensure that everyone understands the complexities of SEO and can recognize when they need to involve you in their decision-making or quality assurance. This can aid them in realizing when they need to involve you in their decision-making or quality assurance.
2. Keep SEO in the public eye
The second step is to keep SEO front and center for your colleagues. Share the experiments you run and what you’ve learned from them with the wider company, demonstrating that SEO doesn’t always have a straightforward answer. This helps reinforce that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy, and that SEO is an experimental and iterative process. By sharing the impact of your work, you demonstrate the benefits of SEO to key stakeholders.
3. Identify who needs more bespoke training
Take a look at your daily interactions to identify which colleagues would benefit from more in-depth SEO education. Once you’ve identified those groups, assess their knowledge of SEO and split them into three categories: those who need to learn how to carry out SEO-informed activities; those who need to understand the context of SEO; and those who need to understand the importance of SEO for company success.
4. Determine the SEO skills needed for each stakeholder
Once you have your list of stakeholders, split them into three groups based on the depth of training they require. For those who need to learn how to carry out SEO-informed activities, give sufficient SEO context to understand why the activity is important. For stakeholders who need to understand the context of SEO, consider training them on when to involve SEO professionals in their decision-making. Finally, for stakeholders who need to understand the importance of SEO, focus on showing how SEO impacts their bottom line by demonstrating how SEO benefits operational efficiency, revenue, or other key performance indicators (KPIs).
5. Choose the best methods of training them
Depending on the stakeholder group, choose the best training method. For in-depth training, consider workshops or written updates. For stakeholders who need to understand the context of SEO, consider creating video tutorials or guides. And for stakeholders who need to understand the importance of SEO, consider showing how SEO can impact their KPIs.
6. Consider providing external training
Sometimes, it’s best to bring in an external consultant to provide specific aspects of SEO training, especially for technical SEO or E-E-A-T guidance. External trainers can offer a fresh perspective and reinforce the importance of SEO activities.
7. Assess outdated knowledge
Many stakeholders you encounter will bring outdated knowledge of SEO to the table. Correcting wrong or obsolete SEO knowledge can be a challenge, but one way to do this is to create a survey or quiz to identify areas where pre-existing SEO knowledge needs correction.
8. Teach to encourage processes
Use your training to encourage the adoption of SEO-beneficial processes, such as allowing the SEO team to sign off on changes to the website to ensuring that SEO considerations are adopted into relevant processes. Educating process owners is critical to building better processes.
9. Develop a self-serve curriculum
Create a page that houses all the SEO training guides, videos, and workshop presentations your SEO team has made. Tag them by department, project involvement, or skill set to make it easy for stakeholders to find the training they need. By allowing stakeholders to build their own training program, you ensure that they learn at their own pace and can get up to speed on SEO on their own.
10. Get buy-in for your training
Finally, to get buy-in for your training, demonstrate the benefits of SEO education to key stakeholders. Consider metrics that they use to define success, and work backward to identify how SEO-related mistakes may have impacted those metrics. Using concrete examples of how SEO education helps prevent future mistakes can help stakeholders better understand the value of SEO education.
We want to thank the thought leader Helen Pollitt as the source for this content and such awesome teachings on the subject and we hope that this article can help you and your business! Here’s the link to his post https://searchengineland.com/seo-education-stakeholder-management-428068.
