SEO Setup

The SEO setup is a vital part of understanding SEO. All SEO projects that fail, fail because of setup issues. In this chapter, we will discuss your SEO goal, SEO key areas, the SEO point of view, and setup recommendations. If the SEO setup fails, then SEO will fail, too.

The Goal

As we defined previously, SEO is all business activities that contribute to the goal of getting found online. One of the most important parts of SEO setup is your goal, so let’s start with that. If you do not have a measurable goal, or you cannot easily measure your progress towards that goal, don’t start with SEO. Otherwise, you will:

1. not reach any goal
2. have already achieved it
3. do nothing
4. do the wrong things.

Your SEO goal must correlate with your business goals. Some companies measure their SEO success via:

• revenue
• customers
• sales
• sign-ups
• visitors
• pageviews

Any Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that works for you and that you can easily and consistently measure is okay. It is important that you know where you are (measure the status quo of your KPI) and define where you want to be using the same metric. My recommendation is to use simple “visits via organic search” as your main metric. The traffic must fulfill some quality criteria. That means it must be sustainable and sensemaking.

One off acts that increase traffic for a short period are fine - and are even possible via search - but do not contribute to the overall business goal if they are not replicable. From a long-term view, the goal must be sustainable traffic growth. When your website is receiving search traffic, it must be possible to keep that traffic, iterate on it and to get more traffic using a new or existing strategy.

However, the traffic must be sensemaking. The users must have searched for words that make some sense for you and your business. They must have to do with your topic. If you show up for [poker bets] but are selling lawn mowers, then this does not make sense.

Making sense also means that the traffic must fulfill some minimal value requirements. For example, the organic search traffic should have a bounce back rate below x% and an average time on site of about z min. I will not give figures of x and z at this point because it depends on your individual business and the vertical (the segment of the market) you are in.

Why do I recommend “sensemaking traffic” - a simple and even fluffy metric - as a KPI, if you could use more business relevant metrics, such as net sales, customers, and sign-ups? Well, first of all, visits via organic search are easy to measure on a regular basis. They can be easily assessed via Google Analytics (or another analytics tools) and with Google Search Console.

Look at your number of visits for the last 12 months, find an average, multiply it by 1.5, 2, 3, or 5 and you have a good enough goal for 12 months down the road. I can’t say if 50% or 100% growth on your webproperty is a valid traffic goal for your business. Only you know that.

If you are just starting with SEO, I would suggest going for the 200% goal, which should be easily achievable if you implement the recommendations in this book.

The second reason I recommend such a simple goal is that as soon as you measure something that happens “later”, such as sign-ups, you are adding in factors that are unrelated to your SEO strategy. The biggest lever to increase sign-ups is - quite often - not more traffic but a simpler sign-up form. Optimizing the sign-up funnel is not SEO but conversion rate optimization (another fascinating area).

Is conversion rate optimization complementary to SEO? Sure, but is it SEO? No. Let’s keep it simple. You must be able to measure your progress towards your SEO goal easily.

Key SEO Areas

SEO acts in the key areas of:

• development
• marketing
• content

Development ranges from your internal IT department to an external service provider, through to your favorite niece who put together your website.

Marketing is everyone and everything that communicates your website to the public. That includes traditional marketing, business development, communications, PR, sales and well actually, all of your staff. Yes, I have a very broad notion of marketing!

Content is a widely used term that involves your product-development team, your database maintainers, editors, journalists, company bloggers… everyone that contributes the stuff that appears on your website.

When these key areas work together, it should look something like this:

The image below is the Perfect-World Scenario. Everybody can excel in their own right while working together - fast, direct and unbureaucratically - on critical topics.

However, things can get tricky. Why does it get tricky? Because the thing is, for SEO these areas overlap. For small companies and startups the team structure usually looks like this:

In this case, the team typically sits in one room, and only one person is responsible for two or sometimes all of these areas. At most, the relevant team member is within earshot of the rest of the team. If the marketing team has a cool feature idea, they can discuss it immediately, and development can get to work.

The small companies and startup scenario can be search engine optimized. They will - in the current setup - never be the absolute best in any of these areas but, overall, they can make search engine optimized decisions.

If it’s a blog, most of the time all of the key functions rest with one person and the scenario will look like this:

Content creation, technical development (for example, installing a new plugin) and marketing (such as promoting new posts via social media) are all done by the blogger. A blog - if the right technical decisions are made - can be highly search engine optimized. On this note, if you are looking to make a blog search engine optimized, the right technical decisions for you are:

• WordPress
• on your own domain
• on a fast server
• with YOAST SEO Plugin
• W3 Total Cache
• a lightweight, responsive and unbelievable fast theme

With this setup, a blogger will get 80% of SEO platform optimization for an editorial webproperty right and can start focusing on content and marketing immediately.

Then, well, there are the big companies and the scenario looks like this:

The marketing and development teams are not only in separate buildings; they are not allowed - by some internal business process - to talk to each other directly. And even if they did, they are usually chasing very different KPIs. Maybe the marketing and development teams have been in a Cold War-like relationship for years. Perhaps the marketing and content teams believe they work better separately.

Companies such as these cannot be efficiently search engine optimized. You might achieve some quick wins where you suddenly perform with much better traffic. Nevertheless, you will still underperform compared to what you could achieve.

How does this look in your company?

For certain companies - especially small startups - the SEO setup will not be an issue. In successful cases, the founding team wants to be found; they will share a lot of knowledge, and they give each other immediate feedback. For others, it will be an enormous and defining issue of their SEO project.

Neither development, content nor marketing are optional aspects. If you optimize your technical platform, and your content does not fulfill some quality criteria, you will not have sustainable SEO success. If you do not communicate your content via a marketing channel, you will always underperform. And, if your content does not have unique URLs (for example) because of unresolved technical issues, SEO will not work.

Therefore, neither development, content or marketing can be neglected. Every part must be optimize-able! Every part should be optimized. If one part fails, SEO will not work. If one area is not interested in getting found, SEO will not work. All SEO projects that fail, fail because of SEO setup issues. SEO is solved! The execution is the challenge!

There has been quite a buzz about content marketing in the last few years. From an SEO perspective, if you get the development right and have a “good enough” technical platform, then you can focus on content and marketing, otherwise known as “Content Marketing.”

The rise of content marketing has been possible for many editorial-led websites (for example blogs and magazines) because a “good enough” technical platform became available for free, namely WordPress + Yoast + W3 Total Cache. This setup is not perfect (and very often not a feasible option due to other requirements of the platform) but definitely “good enough” for an editorial webproperty from a SEO perspective.

SEO Point Of View

The three SEO key areas of marketing, development and content I have outlined are the reasons that people can make so many different claims about SEO. Quite often these things seem mutually exclusive.

• From a content point of view: Google is the biggest content marketplace in the world.
• From a marketing point of view: search is just another way to promote your company, products, and offerings to an audience.
• And from a technical point of view: the website must fulfill some technical requirements to get crawled, indexed and displayed by Google.

All of these points are true. None of these viewpoints are more important or valid than the other, nor are they optional.

SEO Setup Recommendation

Now that you understand that SEO is a challenge that crosses several different business areas, how do I recommend implementing it? Here’s what you do: you assemble your head(s) of marketing (and everybody who communicates in the name of your company), your development team and your content team in one room. Most of the time, this will be more than three people.

From there, make sure they are completely on board with the goal of “getting found.” Make it abundantly clear that they will need to change how they work together. Assure them that success in this area will be their success and that they will get their reward (whether it be praise, bonuses, raises or a handshake). Then set their shared KPIs.

Don’t let them out of that room until you are convinced that they are totally dedicated to achieving the common goal. If one of the involved parties “does not have time” to meet, give them time. A “does not have time” excuse is always a sign that priorities are not properly set.

The biggest risk is that one part does not want to “get found” or just does not commit to the goal of “getting found.”

• I once had a developer make it abundantly clear that he had worked at the company for ten years, that the website was his baby, and he could explain exactly, with flawless reasoning, why the website is the way it is.
• Another time, I encountered a marketing team that decided that they cannot communicate online at all, because “the TV commercial takes up all the budget this year!”.
• And on another occasion, the editorial team of a news magazine did not show up to my SEO workshop, because they were “independent from the company.”

They all had - to them - valid reasons. However, if you want to get found - with the goal of growing sustainable, sensemaking traffic - then the content, development and marketing teams must all want to get found. You cannot solve the problems created by the old way of thinking, by using the old way of thinking.

After your hands-on meeting and once all the stakeholders are in agreement, I recommend naming an SEO manager. But be aware: the role of an SEO manager is a very unthankful one! If the company succeeds SEO wise, it will not be their success alone. It should also be mentioned that the SEO manager will never be granted their own big department.

I would even strongly recommend not naming the role “SEO Manager.” Label it product manager, project manager, delivery manager or something entirely different. Regardless of their title, this individual will work across all three departments. The task of an SEO manager is:

• to sync between the departments
• to share knowledge
• to push SEO tasks
• to provide timely feedback on progress, and
• to double down on all topics concerning SEO.

So once again: the SEO manager is not assigned to their own department (at least not a big, parallel world one) and they will not claim SEO success as their individual success because it isn’t. After you have got your SEO setup together and agreed on your goal, you should take the time to make sure everybody understands precisely what SEO is.

Common SEO Setup Mistakes

The SEO Department Mistake

Do not build your own SEO department. SEO must always be a shared responsibility. If you create your own SEO department where you implement parallel structures, for example:

• SEO Programmer vs. IT
• Link Building Team vs. Marketing
• SEO Texter vs. Editorial Team

Then you will

1. waste of a lot of money
2. lose a lot of time
3. underperform.

The CEO SEO Mistake

CEOs are terrible SEOs. They fulfill the first criterion “work within all three areas,” but they are horrible with the second key responsibility of “sharing knowledge” and the third of “delivering timely feedback.” CEOs have a lot to do and their time and resources are not always best invested with SEO.

The Good Looking Wordpress Theme Mistake

If you let a custom themes designer “polish” your theme, there is a very high likelihood that they will screw up your website. If you have just started your first WordPress based website, use a standard, simple, unbelievable fast theme and just add your own logo and colors, nothing more. Speed must be your first priority for choosing and adapting a Wordpress theme.