Why you should unite your content and SEO teams

It’s essential to create data-driven, customer-focused content. You need to use robust data to support content and ensure the customer is central. But when it comes to search optimisation – how integrated are your SEO and content teams?

There needs to be synergy between your search and content people. Activity from both teams must ladder up to a combined strategy. Yet there are still misconceptions about SEO and misjudgements about how integral it is to creating successful content.

This is a co-written piece by Natalie – a content consultant and Phoebe – an SEO analyst. We explain why these teams should never be siloed, how they should function iteratively and the success you’ll see if you approach your strategy in this way.

The challenges

We both have experience of tension between SEO and content teams, leading to a lack of understanding or a breakdown of communication.

A small amount of an SEO specialist’s work is to provide keywords and optimisation recommendations for content already on a website. SEO also helps a content team measure the effectiveness of the content, the amount of traffic, and conversions a page has produced. In turn, this partnership benefits the SEO team – they can make suggestions for new pages or content, which they have identified as important for a brand’s customers to find.

Misconceptions about SEO or how SEO and content can work together can obstruct truly excellent work. You may need to re-educate teams, handle resistance and get people communicating.

At Brilliant Noise, SEO and content are integrated. We collaborate on content, ideas and strategy. We’ve fostered this partnership through regular catch-ups, a joint yearly plan and a clear process of creating and optimising content. Plus, we love learning from each other.

WHY you should integrate your SEO and content

Get collaborating

This must be an equal partnership – neither discipline should act as a sidekick, rather they must work in unison. Content is what people want and are looking for. SEO’s primary focus is to serve that content to the users.

Delivering content the customer wants and needs is the shared goal and uniting force between the disciplines.

Great content is ace, but it’s no good if customers can’t find it when searching online or navigating a website. SEO helps with discoverability. It makes your content work harder for you.

Get creative and on trend

Search is also a generator for customer-focused creative ideas, we look at Google Trends to find seasonal and trending topics. We want this content to appear when an increasing number of people are looking for it.

Go organic

Investing in organic equals long-term success. Many brands think you have to invest extensively in paid to achieve results, and it does have a part to play. However, organic search is a way to future-proof your brand’s online presence and produce profitable results.

HOW to integrate SEO and content teams

Challenge each other and the brief: get an open dialogue going.

Get a robust process in place: have regular catch ups, planning sessions and creative sessions.

Get SEO and content people in every conversation: get all views and make sure everyone is included.

Let SEO and content equally inform each other: be prepared to adapt and adjust content.

Make sure the content creation process is iterative: content goes between SEO and content teams to hone and tweak.

Never create a page and leave it alone: content needs constant nurturing to perform at its best. Put in regular reviews to monitor and refresh content if needed.

Still not convinced? Here’s the evidence!

For one of our clients we achieved an increase of 217% in impressions for the sections of the site our SEO and content teams collaboratively optimised. In numbers, that’s an increase of over two million impressions year-on-year. We also increased clicks to those sections by 71%, that’s over 20,000 clicks to the new, fresh content.

We also used our method on a client’s blog and in one year we created content that brought over 40,000 visitors and produced 1.1million impressions. The majority of the clicks were from completely new visitors to the website, so the blog is creating a heap of brand awareness as well.

This was all free, organic activity – not paid for traffic. These are results that many blog owners dream of achieving!

Want to achieve these results? Get in touch with our team of experts.