It's impossible to survive as an online business without your SEO team bringing its A-game to the battle. Your SEO efforts help you climb the SERPs, stand out from other players in the industry, and engage your target audience organically.
Improving your search engine presence may seem like a simple task when getting started. However, as your company grows and your ambitions expand, keeping up with the deliverables may become overwhelming.
This is when you need to put together a reliable SEO team. Building a structured team isn't just about assigning job titles or delegating responsibilities. It's about creating an efficient system where everyone understands their role and works in collaboration to achieve consistent SEO results.
Today, we discuss how you can build a high-performing SEO team for your business.
Defining the Essential Roles in Your SEO Team
You can't build a successful SEO team without having a clear understanding of who does what. Every role plays a unique part in achieving your performance goals and boosting your website's visibility in organic search results.
SEO Project Manager
Unless you decide to manage your SEO team yourself, you may have to consider hiring an SEO project manager. You may have multiple sites as an online business. So, each website serves as a standalone SEO project. An SEO project manager oversees everything.
They are responsible for managing timelines for all SEO projects and making sure that everything is on track. They ensure smooth communication across the entire team and convey their concerns to the top management.
SEO Specialist
Based on your scale of operations, you may need a single or multiple SEO specialists in your team. Now, some may prefer hiring a jack of all trades. It means onboarding an SEO specialist skilled to tackle on-page, off-page, and technical SEO deliverables. However, others may prefer looking for a specialized skill set and hiring on-page, off-page, and technical SEO specialists.
An on-page SEO specialist focuses directly on your website content and website structure. They optimize title tags, meta descriptions, headings, the copy of your page, and internal links. They are responsible for optimizing your pages based on the target keywords and providing a seamless user experience to your visitors. It complements your website rankings and helps boost your organic traffic.
An off-page SEO specialist strives to build authority and trust across the web. They work on acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable sites, managing your online reputation, and improving website recognition. As a result, search engines start recognizing you as a credible and authoritative source of information.
A technical SEO specialist ensures that no technical glitches are compromising the user experience and works to improve the health of your website. They strive to improve the site speed, mobile-friendliness, content crawlability, indexability, and site architecture. A technical seo expert helps fix errors that may compromise your SEO performance.
Content Strategist
According to 53% of SEO professionals, creating high-quality content is one of the most efficient ways to improve your search engine rankings. The role of a content strategist is all about ensuring the creation of valuable internet content.
They're responsible for creating content plans that align with your SEO strategy and objectives. They work closely with your content team and even third-party content creators to ensure that you produce quality content capable of helping you climb the search engine rankings and engaging the intended audience segments.
Outreach Specialist
An outreach specialist works closely with an off-page specialist in your SEO team. They strive to build positive relationships with external websites, journalists, and influencers. It helps them score quality backlinks, a task considered the most difficult by 41% of SEOs.
Data Analyst
It's a wise decision to onboard an SEO analyst on your team. They will help you track your progress and make necessary improvements to your SEO strategy. Tracking your analytics helps you make informed decisions. You can easily explore the areas of improvement and drive optimal results from your efforts.
An analyst helps you make sense of that data and make viable choices. They help the team understand what's working and where you need to improve.
How to Structure a High-Performing SEO Team
Building an SEO team that consistently exceeds your expectations isn't just about filling predefined roles. It requires creating a structure that directly supports your company's unique goals and challenges. What works for others may not work for you. So, you need to tailor your team structure to your specific needs.
Define Clear Objectives and KPIs
Before you even think about hiring or assigning roles, clarify what you want your SEO team to achieve for your business. Your objectives should directly influence the performance goals you set and the skills you seek when onboarding suitable candidates in your team. When you align your team structure with your business goals, you ensure everyone is working towards the most impactful outcomes.
Prioritize Core Skills
Based on your objectives, figure out which SEO skills are most critical for your success right now. If you're among smaller companies with a limited budget and resources, it'll be best for you to onboard a generalist who is familiar with on-page, off-page, and technical seo.
However, you need to identify the issues you grapple with at the moment. For example, if technical issues are holding you back from achieving excellence in SEO, investing in a dedicated technical seo expert is the right decision to make.
If your content is performing poorly, building a strong content team and onboarding an outreach specialist may be a smart choice. You should focus on the skills that will have the biggest impact based on your current situation and future plans.
Assign Roles and Responsibilities Clearly
Once you have prioritized the skills you need and onboarded ideal candidates, you should assign roles clearly within your chosen team structure. It's your responsibility to ensure that everyone on the team knows exactly what they are accountable for.
It eliminates confusion and makes it easier for your team to perform at optimal efficiency. Transparency in your workflows minimizes the likelihood of conflict and ensures that no important tasks fall through the cracks.
Be Flexible
As you grow, your SEO needs will change. So, you must design your team structure with scalability and flexibility in mind. Make sure that you are able to add more members to your team as specific needs arise. You also need to ask yourself if the members of your team can easily shift their focus if your priorities change.
A set-and-forget approach isn't how you ensure excellence in SEO. You may have to pivot as the situation demands. So, you should avoid implementing a rigid structure that's hard to change later, depending on what works best for your organization's future growth.
Consider Ongoing Evaluation
You must consistently evaluate the efforts of your SEO team and guide them to do better. Use analytics to see if what you do at the moment effectively addresses your SEO challenges and capitalizes on opportunities. You should be ready to adjust to the roles, responsibilities, and even the overall team structure as needed.
Plus, you can't rule out the possibility that you may have to go back to the drawing board and redo your SEO strategy. Consistent evaluation helps you identify problems before they grow big. It becomes easier for you to pivot and make necessary adjustments to the way you do things.
Fostering Seamless Communication and Collaboration
Having a great team structure with clearly defined roles is a great start. However, you have to make sure that everyone on your team communicates and collaborates effectively.
Ensuring Clear Communication
An SEO specialist, a content strategist, an outreach expert, and an analyst may be different roles, but they work as a single unit to help you achieve your SEO goals. Their work complements one another and takes you a step closer to achieving your goals.
Clear communication prevents them from accidentally stepping on each other's toes or working on deliverables that don't matter. It ensures that everyone is on the same page and contributes to an enhanced SEO performance.
Establishing Communication Protocols
You must have certain protocols in place to ensure effective communication in your SEO team. It helps avoid confusion and promotes transparency. It's best that you clearly define:
- Frequency of team meetings
- Meeting agenda
- Standard procedure to share progress with respect to the performance goals
- The process for providing and receiving feedback on tasks or strategies
- Channels of communication
- And so on
You can use a number of tools to ensure effective communication and hitch-free collaboration in your team.
- You can consider tools like Asana or Trello for project management.
- Pick Slack, Zoom, or Google Meet for centralized communication.
- Google Drive or Dropbox can help you with file sharing and document management.
It's your responsibility to ensure that no one works in silos. Only through effective communication and collaboration can you achieve the set goals.
Leveraging Data Analytics to Drive SEO Success
You can't acknowledge optimal SEO performance based on guesswork. You need data to tell you what's working and what's not. Analytics helps you make necessary modifications to your SEO strategy and achieve the results that you want. Data helps you learn about your strengths or weaknesses, identify opportunities, and makes it easier for you to improve your search engine rankings.
To know if your SEO efforts are paying off, you need to track the key performance indicators. These are relevant metrics that you define based on your objectives. The commonly used KPIs to assess your SEO team's performance may include:
- Organic traffic
- Keyword rankings
- Conversion rates from organic traffic
- Domain authority
- Bounce rate
- Health scores
Tracking these indicators helps your SEO team see if they are hitting their performance goals and living up to your expectations. You need the right tools to track your data and draw valuable insights.
- Google Analytics: The tool helps track your organic traffic, user behavior, conversions, traffic sources, and so on.
- Google Search Console: The tool enables you to monitor your site's performance on SERPs and identify indexing or crawling issues.
- Other SEO Tools: For keyword tracking, competitor analysis, site audit, backlink profile assessment, and other important SEO deliverables, Semrush and Ahrefs serve as viable options.
Innovative Approaches to SEO Team Management
You need to look beyond traditional methods to truly maximize your SEO performance and get the best results from your team's efforts. The following are a few of the innovative approaches that you may want to consider when managing your SEO team.
Embrace Agile Management
Embracing agile management is helpful when assessing your SEO team's performance. Agile methodologies help you become flexible and tackle unforeseen obstacles with ease.
You break down big projects or deliverables into manageable chunks, which helps make even the hardest of your goals attainable. Plus, your sprints and regular check-ins help your team stay focused, adapt quickly to the new trends, and consistently meet your expectations.
Leverage AI
Artificial intelligence has made some major breakthroughs in the world of SEO. It's giving SEO teams powerful new capabilities, enabling them to significantly reduce time incurred on different tasks and ensure optimal utilization of available resources.
You can use AI-powered tools, such as Semrush or Ahrefs, to fuel your keyword research and content optimization. The tools help you identify your on-page mistakes and suggest necessary improvements.
AI also facilitates your technical SEO workflows. Tools like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl can help you easily find technical issues associated with your website, making life easy for your technical SEO specialist.
With the help of AI, you can even automate SEO-optimized content creation. Of course, you will need human oversight to ensure your content quality. Still, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Jasper come in handy when outlining, drafting, or generating different variations of copy.
Invest in Learning and Development
The SEO best practices are constantly changing. The search landscape evolves rapidly, and continuous learning is the only way your team can keep up. So, you must consider investing in refining the skills of your SEO team and expanding their capabilities.
You should encourage your team to attend relevant conferences and workshops. It helps them stay up-to-date with the latest trends, algorithm changes, and essential tool recommendations from industry experts. Funding course enrollments is also a wise move.
You must build a culture of knowledge sharing. The best way to pull it off is by scheduling periodic meetings where team members share something new they learned, event materials from seminars they attended, or how they achieved success when working on a particular task.
Final Words
Building a high-performing standalone team for SEO isn't an easy task. It demands careful planning. So, a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work. You must clearly define your goals, prioritize the skills aligned with your objectives, be transparent when assigning responsibilities, consider flexibility, and evaluate your efforts consistently.
Effective communication is a must to achieve your goals. Plus, you can't rule out data when making important decisions. It's how you operate at maximum efficiency and create a team structure that drives promising results.
The way you build a team depends entirely on your specific needs, goals, and resources. What we discussed in this article will help you build an SEO team that is perfectly suited to help you get the desired results.
