Alright. We finally did it last session up until now we focus on the tools and the processes you should use to do S. C. O. Project management how to report on your progress and how to report on the impact and in the final lesson of this course, I wanted to talk about how to communicate about all of the work that you're doing as you know, S E. O. Is hard and if you talk to a lot of S. C. O. Practitioners you'll notice that they had a very similar experience and that experience is that you have to work across many teams. You have to answer many hard questions from stakeholders when you don't have necessarily analytics to get those questions right? I know I know if you're a product manager watching this course you're probably thinking even this guy is saying this stuff but it's truly why SEO is both an art and a science and here's my tricks to managing expectations for your stakeholders. Number one track a portfolio of keywords rather than a single keyword keyword fluctuations and rank ha...

ppened constantly within a month. You might see a keyword rank From nine then back to 10 then the following month it ranks at five only to jump to 25 later. With that said if your site or page is favored by Google or penalized by Google, you should see many keywords not just a single keyword jump in rank. So I'd recommend steering away from tracking one keyword and opt into tracking a portfolio. Number two. If you're forced to forecast your SEO efforts use competitive trend analysis although this is an easy way to do it, you can go to SEm rush and see how quickly your competitors traffic growth curves went so to set your stakeholders expectation, show them these examples and then you can use those relative growth numbers to forecast what your efforts, what will happen with your own campaign. Number three when telling your stakeholders your theory about how to improve rank. Remember that it's a theory and presented as such. Don't tell them that this is the problem without also giving them away to confirm if this is the problem always include a way to measure the correctness of your theories and assumptions or they will stop leaving your recommendations entirely. Number four bundle your theories together in terms of impact or ranking factors. I think a lot of us have this experience list out 40 things you want to do in S C 08 of which have to do with internal linking, your stakeholder executes one of these internal linking suggestions and asked when will we see results for some projects or recommendations? Their best to be bundled together. A because they might require more work and be they often address the same ranking factors. So just doing one thing that will address the same ranking factor may not really move the needle with that ranking factor number five when writing recommendations, make sure that each recommendation is actionable and divvy it up into tasks. Don't write out, update the sites page speed instead right, install plug in for page speed or investigate page speed changes number six sync with your development teams, launch cycle. So you can check for errors before the site changes occur. And if you need to run a big crawl using a third party tool, let your site admin know ahead of time and crawl at a time when there aren't a whole bunch of people coming to the website. I think many of us have accidentally taken down websites from time to time using any kind of crawler. So I'd really, really strongly urge that you follow this rule, especially if you have a big site with a lot of traffic. Number seven, try to get as many of your coworkers or teammates invested in sc Oh, by sharing credit. Did the content team help you optimize content. Did the marketing team or the pR team help you get a link, share the credit around because it's truly a full company effort. Number eight, if you're launching a new site, a new campaign or a new page, track how quickly this new pages index and how quickly it ranks for new terms. It's gonna be hard to rank a page immediately when it's new. So what you want to do is show that the keywords are moving from position 100 to 50 to over time to give your stakeholders confidence, you know what you're doing number nine, if your stakeholder wants you to forecast the impact, which many do remember and try to forecast two years out, give a short term forecast, but also a two year forecast. S. C. O. Is not a short term strategy. Remember that companies plan to be around longer than two years. So they should be considering these kinds of strategies as future strategies. It should be a part of their long term vision for their company. Number 10, try to run a. B tests when selecting a group of euros or a single euro and only apply a particular strategy to that euro and clearly define the metrics of your tests. A long while ago the pictures team wrote something called the S. C. O. Experimentation framework. And while what they wrote applies mostly to websites with a lot of traffic already. You can apply the principles to most sdo experiments. So long as you track the right metrics number 11, the best way to produce content that is on brand is to work with your internal content teams to update the style guides and add S. C. O. Constraints and let them know what requests are flexible and what are not. Again, you're working in a collaborative nature with people. If you want to get things done, you need to be flexible Number 12 when managing an organic budget, meaning you are setting aside budget to hire writers or build content or for outreach, you know, maybe you're hiring people from fiber, Remember that time lines can be flexible. Some publishers take 6-8 weeks to publish their content once they've received it. So consider using a project-based way approach of accounting rather than a month to month budget. If you use a month to month budget, you can find that your contacts often paused in the middle of the month without warning to make sure that they're under budget for the month. Sometimes it's better if they continue onward, so long as they're under budget for the total project rather than a month to month basis. Number 13. Track pages instead of keywords, you'd be surprised at what kind of keywords your pages can rank for. Keep a constant eye out to make sure They aren't competing with each other for the same keywords and that you're growing the total number of keywords that the page ranks for number 14 when in doubt admit you don't know but offer ways to get closer to an answer. Your stakeholders may be frustrated that you don't have a definitive answer to their question, but nothing is more frustrating then admitting you don't know the answer and that you're not offering a way to find that answer. Granted there are some questions within the S. C. O. Sphere that are really hard to answer and maybe unanswerable, but make sure that you explain to your stakeholders why that is the case S. C. O. Project management is all about accountability. It's up to you as the S. C. O. Practitioner to work across many teams and to move the project forward. And we hope these tips and tricks help you do that a little bit easier.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

SEO Research Spreadsheet

buy this class

$00

Buy Class

Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

79.7K Students

99% Recommend this Class

00 Student Work

0 Video lessons in HD
00h 00m of class content
Exclusive bonus content
Lifetime access, anywhere, anytime
Streaming access on desktop and mobile browsers
Download and offline access with class purchase
Offline sync with our iPhone & iPad apps
100% satisfaction guarantee

Cleo Kirkland

An SEO expert, entrepreneur & business owner with 12+ years as an in-house specialist & consultant

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

Top Tips for Project Managers

Top Tips for Project Managers

Lesson Info

41. Top Tips for Project Managers

Lessons

Intro- Course Overview

What is a Search Engine, and how do they work

What Kind of Work do SEO Practitioners Do

Popular Tools for SEO

The Evolution of Google's Algo

Quiz: Chapter 2: SEO 101

Analysis Introduction

Reporting your Findings

Checking Google's Index

Checking Google Search Console

Setting up Crawler Tools

Interpreting Crawler Tool Reports

Interpreting Page Speed Tool Reports

Checking Schema Markup

Quiz: Chapter 3: Technical Analysis

Content Audit - Introduction

Basic Keyword Research

How to Determine What Type of Content You Should Create

Qualitative Content Audit

How to Take Your Content Inventory

Reviewing site Architecture

Keyword Optimization

Keyword Gap Analysis

Keyword Opportunity Sizing

Quiz: Chapter 4: Content Audit

Competitive Link Audit

How to Find Short Term Opportunities

How to Check if a Domain Link is High Quality

The -Oops Something Happened- Audit

Quiz: Chapter 5: Link Audit

Finding Great Contributors on Fiverr

Finding Great Contributors with Ahrefs

Finding Contact Info using NinjaOutreach

Sending Emails Through NinjaOutreach

Quiz: Chapter 6: Outreach

SEO Project Management - Introduction

Wireframing and Product Specs

Reporting on the progress of your work using Asana

A word on Weekly-Monthly Reporting

Reporting Your SEO Impact