Search engine optimization does not have to be limited to your online marketing team. Anyone in your company who can write, has a presence online, and works with customers can play a part in helping boost your company website in search. Here are some ways you can involve more people within your company in SEO.
Engaging Multiple Teams to Effectively Scale SEO at the Source
Anyone who can create content in written, audio, visual, or video format should be invited to create content for the company blog. The more quality content you have on your blog, the more you can increase your search visibility by giving search engines more pages to index.
Contribute Content to the Company’s Blog
In order to have a successful content marketing campaign, you will need to structure it. Create an editorial calendar, put content creation responsibilities into your project management system, and keep contributors focused. It’s easy to put things like blogging aside when working on client projects, so be sure that your contributors are allocated an appropriate amount of time for content creation each week.
For those who are not writers, speakers, designers, or videographers, invite them to participate in the company blog by suggesting topic ideas. Let some people provide the vision, while the others create it to get everyone involved.
Be a Guest Author
A great way to build exposure for your company is through guest contributions. Distinguish your strategy from link-focused guest blogging by aiming for only the top online publications in your industry.
Start by creating a set of guidelines for people in your company to use to qualify blogs they find as good candidates by looking at the blog’s content quality, traffic, audience size, and audience engagement. Then encourage them to not become a one-time guest, but an on-going contributor.
By focusing on submitting quality content to authoritative publications, you will not only gain additional exposure for your company, but you’ll be building valuable backlinks in the process. For the backlinks, have guest contributors include a link to your company using the company name as anchor text in their author bios. There’s nothing unnatural about saying that they work for a specific company when describing themselves.
Link to the Company’s Website and Social Profiles
Do people within your company have their own personal blogs and social profiles? Do they use them in a professional manner? If so, connect with them to see if they would be willing to mention your company. It could be something as simple as adding the fact that they work at your company on their blog’s about page or including the company’s Twitter handle in their Twitter bio.
These mentions should be done in a casual, non-keyword focused way. The goal, similar to guest blogging, is to build exposure for your company to new audiences.
Keep a List of Customer Keywords
Those who work in sales or support within your company should listen out for keywords when they correspond with potential or current customers. Customers will generally refer to your company, your products, and your services in their own words. For example, a potential customer might refer to an agency as a digital marketing agency, online marketing agency, Internet marketing agency, or website marketing agency. All of these can be great keywords to use when optimizing your company website.
Keep a List of Customer Questions
In addition to keywords, have those who work directly with customers keep a list of the questions that customers ask. They can be questions directly related to your company, products, and services, or questions about your industry as a whole. You can have the content creators in your company turn these questions into content for your about page, FAQ page, products and services pages, and your blog.
