How to Make SEO Happen

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By: Aaron Wheeler
April 14, 2011

How to Make SEO Happen

Whiteboard Friday

Sure, you know SEO like you know the back of your hand. You know how to linkbuild, and you know how to do keyword research. Of course you’ve got a lot of SEO knowledge – you’ve been watching these Whiteboard Fridays every week, right? =P Well, now it’s time to get crackin’! Unfortunately, it feels like you never have enough time to get done all the things you know you should do. Maybe the people in charge aren’t willing to do the things you know they need to do to get positive results, or maybe you can’t implement all the changes you’d like to in the short time you have because you’re too busy building an encyclopaedic report for your client. There’s a lot of ways to make SEO not happen for your client’s site, but this week, Tom Critchlow from Distilled will show you how to avoid stagnation and keep the SEO ball rolling!

Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Tom Critchlow. I’m currently here in Seattle helping SEOmoz with a few various bits and pieces, and today I’m going to be talking about how to make SEO happen. So, very common in the SEO industry, and actually across all kinds of consulting, I hear a common complaint, which is I know what to do, I know what the SEO technique is, I know maybe I need more links, maybe I need to change something on the site. Figuring out the problem and solution is not the hard part. The hard part is getting stuff done. Today I am going to talk through a few tips about how to actually translate from knowing the answer to actually making the answer a reality. So, let’s start straight in. Number one, no more reports. This is my biggest bugbear with SEO consulting. I see this all the time from other agencies, lone SEOs, in-house SEOs. I see it all the time. Big, lengthy, you know 50 to 100 page reports. I’m really not a big fan. Here at Distilled we try really hard to keep all of our reports really, really short. That is something that I really try to instigate in everyone that I teach within Distilled, because a long report isn’t getting things done. Right? Like, you’ll send across a report. It will be 100 pages, and you’ll think, yes, this is a great report. You send it through to your client. They’re probably not going to read it. Reports don’t actually help get stuff done. So, instead of sending a lengthy report, consider the two primary functions in my eyes for what a report does. There are two things. A report needs to convince somebody to do something, and it needs to tell them how to actually get it done. In my eyes, when you send a report through that is 50 pages or 100 pages, you are very often confusing the two. So, really, to convince somebody to make change happen, you only need one page or maybe you need a phone call or maybe you need a meeting. Let’s say it is a whole bunch of on-page changes and you say I’m going to need a huge amount of developer time to get all these changes done. You go to the marketing director or the marketing boss or whoever it is that you report to, and you go, “I need to get this stuff done.” And they go, “Why?” So, you need to answer that question. But you don’t need 100-page report to answer that question. So, make sure that you convince whoever the stakeholder is, independently of the report, that this change needs to happen, and then as a secondary function, you need to actually make that change happen. But that change is often, like, go work with the developer team or go and have lunch with the guy who runs the developer team or actually go in and do the change yourself on the site. Whatever it might be that it takes to get it done, focus on that separately from the big report. Sometimes, yes, you do need to spec things out. You need to go in and you need to say, “Well, actually, all these pages need these keywords changing, or the information architecture needs to look like this.” There are things that you need to put down in writing, particularly for developers when you need a tight spec, but don’t confuse that with what a lot of consultants will do, which is sending through a big report that has both some justification in it and some nitty-gritty technical details. Try to divorce those two things so you have the convincing separately to the doing. Just generally, write less reports. Just make stuff happen. Secondly, processes. I see this a lot again in reports that people send out and in consulting and SEO recommendations, even in blog posts. I see people saying, well, you should do X. But there is very little explanation as to how a particular company or a particular website will actually go about doing X. For example, guest posting. Let’s say that you put in a report, “Guest posting would be a great way of building links for your niche.” I have seen this kind of thing in plenty of reports. But that is not actionable. How does the client actually take that recommendation, and how do they turn that into actually doing guest posting? Well, the key lies in processes. When you’re doing consulting, when you’re trying to get things done, processes are at the heart of everything a business does. If you want to make something happen that isn’t already happening, you need a new process, or if there is an existing process, you might need to modify that process to make it SEO friendly or make it happen in a particular way. The key to coming up with processes and improving processes is to understand what the existing processes are. So, if you go into a business or you’re consulting for a website or maybe even if you are in-house, understand how things work currently. If you don’t understand how things are working, how on earth can you go in and recommend changes or say you should be doing this or you should be doing that. If you don’t understand how things are working, you’re going to fail. When you are putting forth your recommendation, try not to frame things as, “Go and do guest posting.” That’s not an actionable thing. Instead, try to frame things as, “Here is a process for guest posting that is tailored for you.” That might involve understanding who is going to do it. Do they have the staff? Do they need to hire more staff? Are there existing people who could take on the task within their existing roles? How are they going to do it? Are the people who are going to do it trained? Do they have the skills? Do they have the tools? Is other tracking in place? How much? Should there be five people doing this all day long? Should it be part of one person’s job? So, understanding these three things will really help you get closer to getting things done. Okay. Now switch over here now. Number three, pre-deliver. So, when you are doing consulting or when you are trying to get SEO changes to happen, there’s a big tendency I think to, you want to go away. You want to work in a dark room for days or weeks or months, and then you want to come back and you want to go, “Tada!” I’ve just made this amazing thing or I have just built this big report for you, and here’s what needs to happen. The problem is if the person you are presenting it to, they’re seeing it fresh for the first time, then it’s a surprise to them, and surprises don’t equal getting things done. So, instead, consider pre-delivering what you’re going to be recommending. So say, “I need some time to figure out exactly what the information architecture looks like, but you can be sure that there are going to be some information architecture improvements or changes.” That will give the person that you are reporting to, or the person that you need to convince to make change happen, that will give them the time to prepare. They’ll be like, “Okay, great. Well, we’ve got a new version of the website going live in three months. We’ll need the spec from you by the end of this month.” Great. So, now you have a time frame. Now you have a framework within which to work. There is a very natural tendency, I think, with human beings to want to kind of make things absolutely crystal right before you release it, before you let your baby be seen by other people. But actually, in reality, in the business world, you want to pre-deliver. You want to overcommunicate with people and say, “This is what I am thinking of changing. Is that okay? Does that fit with you? Are you able to make that change?” Again, understanding either the client or internal resources. Understanding how much developer time they have will be a great framework for your recommendations. Number four, communication. So, I have written a quote on here which is that, “Change happens when people like you,” which is a fantastic quote that I got from a management consultant who came in and helped do some training for Distilled. It is so true. You think of businesses as these cold, hard, rational entities, and they’re just not. Businesses are run by people like you and me. Well, maybe not like me or you. But anyway, businesses are run by people, okay. So, if you want to make change happen, you have to make people like you. So, take people out for lunch. Be nice to them. Socialize with people. Pick up the phone to people. Speak to them. E-mails are a very cold form of communication. Instead, try and build a rapport with people. Again, whether in-house or in agency, just make people like you. Make people understand where you’re coming from, understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. If people don’t value or understand why you’re doing something, they are far less likely to actually make that change happen. So, make people like you, and face-to-face meetings are crucial to this. I think, again, whether you are in-house or agency side, face-to-face meetings and beers and lunch, all of that will actually make change happen, because when people meet you face to face, they are so much nicer, they are so much warmer, and you’re so much more able to actually convince them that what you are recommending or what you are working on is important to them. There is a favorite saying within Distilled, which is that communication solves all problems. So, if you are ever stuck with the question of how to make SEO happen, think about communicating with somebody. Whether it is somebody on your team, whether it’s your boss, whether it’s the client, whoever it is, communicate with somebody, and that’s how change will get done. Don’t write a 50-page report. All right. Thanks guys.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

About Aaron Wheeler —
Aaron is an Associate and former manager of the Help Team at Moz. He’s usually thinking about how to scale customer service in a way that keeps customers delighted. You’ll also find him reading sci-fi, watching HBO, cooking up vegan eats, and drinking down whiskey treats!

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