SEO

An effective way to report out on these SEO maturities along with content and technical health is through the creation and distribution of scorecards. Collaborate with internal designers and the best data storyteller in your office to develop a template that measures success and benchmarks the maturities of each market. It’s up to you or your leaders to determine the cadence at which SEO should be reported, but I’ve found that generating and distributing scorecards quarterly has been effective. Being able to effectively roll out a program is not an easy feat as there are plenty of potential barriers along the way. Common challenges include:

·  Personnel

·  Training

·  Goal setting

·  Prioritization

·  Timing

·  Measurement

·  Buy-In

Personnel

Teams come in all shapes and sizes and you’ve got to be able to work with what you’ve got. The SEO strategy you helped develop for your team of five in the U.K. will likely have to be adapted to work for your team of one in Argentina. Taking the time upfront to learn about the intricacies of each team will help you immensely in the long run.

Training 

Training across markets should remain as consistent as possible. Some teams might need SEO 101 while others may be ready to jump into an advanced technical SEO workshop. If your organization has an internal learning and development team, work with them to develop an SEO curriculum. Organized training for any tools or platforms utilized is also crucial. If your organization has made investments into SEO technology, it’s our job to ensure they will see positive ROI. This will also make it easier to quickly get a budget for any flashy new tools that may come out in the future.

Goal Setting

Not all teams, audiences, and websites are created equal. This must be taken into account when setting goals. Based on what you have learned about each team, work with their leaders to set attainable goals. Nobody should be expecting an international site riddled with technical issues and no content strategy to achieve page one wins overnight. However, the goals you set should push the team out of their comfort zone. This could be a siloed content marketer collaborating with someone on the dev team to eliminate render-blocking resources and compress files.

Prioritization

As SEO professionals, it’s easy to fall into a state of constantly feeling overwhelmed. A site crawl can come back with 15+ issues, your site migration or redesign checklist might be five pages long, your content strategy may be starting from the ground level, and the list goes on. Being able to prioritize efficiently tends to be a neglected skill in many fields, especially in SEO.

Prioritization can key to get some quick wins which will help gain the trust and budget necessary for long-term success. I like to start by identifying all known projects/initiatives and place them into a chart that maps each item to their level of effort and impact. From there, I can use this visual to align them in my SEO roadmap that gets updated on a quarterly basis.

Timing

Being realistic when it comes to SLAs and turns around time is imperative for any productive engagement. Success doesn’t happen overnight, and neither should your projects. Expectations should be set for both the completion of work, and when results should start to show. Being able to communicate timelines and have others understand what goes into the work you’re doing requires effective and open communication.

Measurement

No matter how complex your approach, the end results need to be easily digestible by a wide audience. Effectively measuring the impact of your hard work and ongoing refinement is not only critical to your SEO success, but also to your perceived value. SEO professionals are often bombarded with tons of data to analyze, which comes with an increased difficulty to reach cut-and-dry conclusions.

To help get a handle on this, make sure your data is prioritized into information that is important for your particular business. Because data can become so overwhelming, I try to build dashboards that lay everything out into one easily-digestible view.

Buy-In

Building your internal brand for SEO starts by getting a seat at the table. It’s critical that other team members understand how their job affects SEO, and that executives understand how SEO affects their job. Oftentimes, having a voice starts with having success. If a market has made some serious non-branded ranking improvements put together an internal presentation on how organic rankings can allow the brand to cut back paid spend, or now have the ability to be more creative and test different paid strategies knowing organic is there as a fail-safe.

One of the biggest roadblocks to implementing and scaling an SEO program is finding the right support. If you do not have internal stakeholders in your corner, you may not be taken seriously when trying to work with other markets. Finding the right internal support can be a challenge as we often must deal with other marketers who have not yet bought into organic search? Being able to demonstrate wins and build cross-functions relationships will help achieve that buy-in from up top. Everything you create should also have actionable takeaways. Create insights and recommendations tailored to each market on their scorecard.

A Recipe to Make Your Own 

There is no secret recipe for how to win at global enterprise SEO, but there are several ingredients necessary for success. What we’ve outlined is a loose recipe that can be tinkered with and updated based on taste. What is good for one company may not be good for the next. At the end of the day, having a program tailored to your brand, teams, and resources that can be effectively measured will give you the best chance to succeed on a global scale.