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05.10.07
Internal Departments & Your SEO Firm - A Play
 By
Scott Buresh
Many companies are not aware of the different roles that various departments in their organization will fill when they begin to work with an outside SEO firm. What follows is a demonstration, in play form (bear with me), of which internal departments are involved in a typical SEO campaign and why. It also demonstrates some of the resistance that may be felt by those departments as well as what valuable contributions a company can make to help its SEO firm craft a successful campaign.
The Players
Sales - These folks are the front line of the organization. They know how prospects speak, and they are generally very useful when it comes to keyphrase suggestions. Most of the salespeople are out for themselves, but they will gladly participate in a joint initiative if it means that they will have more targeted leads. The Sales team has an uneasy relationship with Marketing and often questions exactly what it is that Marketing does, since they do not believe that Marketing is helping them in the least. They generally cannot stand IT people, a feeling which is reciprocated with gusto.
Marketing - These people are in charge of the company message and finding more leads for Sales. They are generally creative and are in charge of seeing campaigns, such as SEO, through from beginning to end. As a result, they usually initiate an SEO campaign and are responsible for its ultimate success. They may also be the ones to find an SEO firm with which to work. They view Sales as a necessary evil, but feel that they are greatly underappreciated by the department. They have a better relationship with IT than Sales does, primarily because they have to work with IT on the corporate website. This does not mean that the two departments are best friends, however -- they rarely have nice things to say to each other unless they are in the same room.
IT- The people in this department are a legend in their collective mind. The IT team fails to see the need for any other departments besides their own – according to them, salespeople are arrogant and marketing people are ignorant. On the other hand, they think that IT people know everything that there is to know. They feel that SEO is an IT issue, so they are sullen with the outside SEO firm and sometimes downright hostile. It is the job of the SEO firm to gain their cooperation in order to make the campaign a success.
SEO Firm - The hero of our story… of course.
It should be noted that the above are, by necessity, stereotypes. We have worked with more than a few companies that all seem to be on the same page and who do not have much interdepartmental conflict, but those seem to be the exception rather than the rule. We have also worked with some excellent IT departments who were extremely open to new ideas and were nothing but helpful (and were also, believe it or not, reasonably humble). However, such experiences are also fairly rare.
And so, without further ado:
Act 1: Building Blocks
Sales: Here’s a list of the terms we hear our prospects using all the time. We also called many of our recently landed customers and asked them what terms they would use to search for us.
Marketing: We’ve looked the list over and added some ideas of our own, and we eliminated phrases that we definitely cannot use due to our marketing and messaging.
SEO Firm: Thanks. We’ll check out the phrases, add some others you may not have thought of, and work with you all to finalize the phrases.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, a search engine optimization company. Scott has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, Lockergnome, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld, serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, Cirronet, and DS Waters. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.
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