July 30th, 2012 @ // No Comments
It was the last day of MozCon 2012, and what a ride it’s been. Thursday we heard from another round of great presenters and Friday’s lineup was just as awesome. Here’s a recap on Alyeda Solis (@aleyda) presentation on different scenarios (episodes) to help us effectively handle SEO project management.
Have you ever had a client that isn’t happy with anything that’s happening in the SEO campaign, regardless of the results? Have you ever been subject to a constant barrage of complaints about link building, results, content, strategy, rankings and ROI? So what can we do to improve the communication and turn dissatisfied clients into satisfied ones? In her presentation, Alyeda tells us to first assess the SEO process and focus on giving realistic expectations at the beginning of any SEO campaign.
During your first initial meetings with the client, it’s important we meet all the stakeholders, decision makers, marketing team, product team, analytics team, social media team and anyone else that’s going to be involved in the SEO campaign. We need to determine their goals and objectives and how they believe SEO can help to achieve them. Having these answers will help us to define campaign strategy and objectives.
So what else? We need to agree with clients on the necessary resources and timings at the start of every campaign. Have you ever been in the position where a client has agreed to implement all on-page optimizations only to realize months into a campaign that most of it is beyond their capabilities and they feel it’s now your responsibility? Alyeda tells us that we need to be able to say to a client that a ROI could take a given amount of time depending on how quickly our recommendations are implemented. Campaign success is a team effort and most likely will require action items for the client. Alyeda also tells us that it’s vital to discuss the following with everyone involved in the campaign:
Aleyda offers the following tips for enhancing the SEO project assessment to make sure a campaign runs smoothly and on schedule:
Did the developer not implement the canonicals correctly? Are the recommended redirects 302s instead of 301s? We’ve all experienced similar issues and understand this can be a huge bottleneck. So what can we do to make sure our recommendations are implemented? Alyeda recommends the following to enhance development performance:
Alyeda also suggests the following actionable items we can implement to ensure that everyone involved has access to the correct resources and tools available for a successful campaign:
So what happens when something does go wrong in a campaign? Are we keeping careful notes and documentation to help us identify an issue and quickly come up with a solution? Do we have accurate records of all on-page implementation and link building efforts? For our SEO updates, are we focusing on a specific set of elements each time – it’s faster to advance and easier to control effects and identify possible issues if you have been.
Alyeda tells us that having this documentation at our fingertips will help us be agile in our response and recommends the following:
As SEOs we should know how to handle SEO project management. It’s important to remember that an SEO project is ultimately about the people, and the people are the key. Make sure you understand and connect with the people in the organization to ensure a successful SEO campaign.
Article source: http://www.seo.com/blog/mozcon-day-3-recap-seo-project-management-alyeda-solis/
Tags: SEO