How to be an effective seo within your organization: PubCon 08 - be positive

This year was my first presentation at pubcon and I was super excited to get the opportunity to participate. The area of my presentation was to evaluate how to be an effective in house SEO and I was lucky enough to be on the panel with Aaron Shear, Tony Adam, Jessica Bowman and Scott Polk. Lou Ragg was the moderator which in Vegas was pretty cool.

The main topic of all our talks was how do you convince your company to support you in doing SEO and the talks split into two fronts… play company politics or push positive results and momentum. I was definitely in the second bucket.

I essentially had 5 points:

1. alignment
   • You must be aligned with your companies #1 goal in SEO
   • Discard everything but that target: eBay = ROI, facebook = user growth
2. measurement
   • sometimes you can get support just by measuring how much value seo is generating
   • whatever happens you are in a measurable field, you can quantify your impact and so be that guy, measure your results and hang your hat on them
3. results
   • do something simple and get a result to build credibility…
   • for example a really really small thing like swapping “<company name> | <page title>” to “<page title> | <company name>” can drive results and doing that and instantly driving the company’s #1 goal is so powerful
4. double down
   • you got a result… now get more. Keep it small, keep it coming and show that you are an expert
   • I think this momentum building is 10x more positive as an approach rather than going out and producing a powerpoint strategy deck
5. share
   • now start to share your success, start to teach people how to do it themselves. Build that powerpoint and let the senior folks know what you need to do even more.

I think this is the secret to be successful in almost any internet marketing role to get success. You can be the person who says “I am positive”,”I can do more with less than you believe” and above all let your work speak for itself and you can do no wrong.

Comments

[alexschultz]

thanks for the kind comments darkfall. I try to only post content with depth here or at least that is very useful. I have a couple of series of posts coming in Q1. One investigating the importance of looking at medians rather than means in internet marketing and the other taking a deeper look at using the stats package r and in particular the igraph package and the image function to create heatmaps.

[darkfall gold]

I don’t know If I said it already but …I’m so glad I found this site…Keep up the good work I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say great blog. Thanks!

[Sulumits Retsambew]

Thanks for the info.

[SEO Company India]

Thank you for this informative read, I really appreciate sharing this great post. Keep up your work.

[seo philippines]

It is very practical and thanks for sharing this to us!It helped me a lot of knowledge so I really believe you will do much better in the future .Great post!

[Michelle]

Good note on changing the page title around to show the relevant content before the company name. I looked around and, sure enough, Google and Wikipedia have titles like that.

Michelle

[seo melbourne]

Very nice informative post. I am really pleased to post my comment on this blog . It helped me with ocean of knowledge so I really believe you will do much better in the future .

[Jon Forster]

Awesome stuff Alex, congrats on speaking at PubCon and great to read your tips for those of us that couldn't be there!

[Dan Wilson]

Really nice post. Good, practical tips.

I think your final point re sharing is really important. By spreading knowledge of the boring shit like getting people to write good link text, be mindful of keywords in titles, good sexy keyword rich text etc across everyone in the organisation you can see some really good results.

I'm quite happy to find myself explaining the basics of SEO again and again to folks in the organisations I work with because dymystifying it enthusues people.

It must be said, results from good SEO do speak for themselves. And it's great when a broader team can take responsibility for those great results.