Here’s where fine-tuned SEOs are making their influence felt:
- Advising the Content-Marketing team on keyword implementation. Content marketers are usually Social Media Optimization smart, but they need to be interfacing with the other SEOs on the team in order to amplify their effectiveness.
- Helping the content-marketing team understand which guest posting opportunities are legitimate. While content marketers survey the blogging landscape for guest posting opportunities, the SEOs should be examining their choices to determine which ones will benefit the link profile.
- Coaching content writers on Social Media Optimization best practices such as internal linking, keyword usage, etc. Not everyone understands the value of internal linking, longform copy, no keyword saturation, and other important facts about SEO.
- Informing the marketing team on organic metrics and ROI. The people who manage pay-per-click (PPC) need to take action based on the information from the SEOs. Why overbid on organic search results that are already highly successful? By dovetailing Social Media Optimization and Pay per Click, a company can save money and improve paid and organic visibility.
- Consulting with the developers on SEO best practices for site changes and site redesign. The quickest way for a company to fail is to launch a site redesign without SEO best practices.
- Sharing critical metrics with executive leadership. Every business leader needs to have “SEO” in the back of their mind as they make important decisions for the company.
Anybody who knows anything about search will find out about the latest Penguin or Panda rollout. Innovative SEOs are better at predicting these changes, anticipating their effects, and defending against their negative impact.
This involves adding descriptors in your business title for Google Places, implementing neighborhood name descriptions, optimizing your business website with the neighborhood name, helping Google Maps define your neighborhood, and adding that neighborhood listing to all local citation occurrences.
I envision an era where SEOs sit across the table from CEOs to explain what’s happening and how to fix it. SEOs are awash in a sea of metrics, data, information, and market intelligence. They possess the skill to distill this data into action points and forward progress.
We’re cruising into an age where SEOs are taking the lead as innovators and strategists. Are we going to let the change revamp the marketplace around us, or are we going to direct the change ourselves? I think we can do the latter.
No SEO in a right frame of mind is sitting in his or her cubicle all alone, interfacing with no one. The innovative SEOs have their hand in everything. The digital marketing existence of a business depends on the influence of the SEO.