Advice to Senior Managers: Red Tapes And SEO Don’t Mix
Why do some SEO-oriented companies still fail to achieve the best potential results? We are talking about businesses that have strong focus on SEO and are willing to invest to create strong SEO functionalities within the organizations here, not just any company that barely know that there is something called SEO that could bring in free traffic.
The reason is very simple, the upper management has not done enough homework and preparation before making the decision to create an in-house SEO function group or bring in external agencies. Although these executives or business owners have strong belief in SEO and are dedicated to make the most out of this new marketing channel, bureaucratic red tapes and autocratic management styles often render the whole SEO initiative all but futile and meaningless.
The first thing that the upper management of a large corporation, and especially owners or decision makers in a small business need to learn, is to loose their grip on the SEO process. When you hire some external search marketing consultants or in-house SEO Specialist to handle the matter, you should offer them reasonable freedom and power to make and execute decisions based on their professional analysis and recommendations, as long as the decisions align with overall business goals.
There isn’t a worse feeling from an in-house SEO perspective than knowing how to optimize the sites for better search engine results, but not having the ability or permission to execute the changes because the people with power have different personal opinions regarding the matters. I call those “personal opinions” because otherwise they wouldn’t need to hire you, someone who is a professional SEO.
It’s a well known fact that there are always some people who claim to know a certain degree of SEO within any company, and that also include the upper management. Not only does it hinder the progress if all decisions have to go through rounds of debates and negotiations with the upper management, it also wears down the SEO and deflates the morale and productivity. How would you feel if you need approvals for something as simple as changing page titles for the site? Not impressive, right?
Another major reason of failure is the lack of communication between the management and the SEO regarding the overall business goal and the long term plan of the company. SEO is not all about tactical executions like changing page titles and link building. It also involves short and long term planning and many factors could affect the decisions and final outcome.
Without knowing the business goals and plans, the SEO would not be able to develop and document useful, feasible and attainable SEO objectives and goals. This is important especially when most SEO executions regarding domains do not materialize until a few weeks to a few months time.
If you want to learn more about how to develop in-house SEO functionality, there is a great article on SearchengineLand that includes a 5 steps approach.
