Organizing Your SEO Campaigns – Best Practices

Leading an SEO campaign usually involves a group of talented and ambitious hard-working people juggling many tasks with the aim to produce the best results. According to imFORZA’s SEO statistics, 70% of the links search users click on are organic.

Well-organized teams are the key to success, and it is of major significance to keep your team happy, satisfied and on the same page at all times. However, despite the high effectiveness and knowledge of your team, there are many factors that can distract and prevent them from expressing their full potential.

Here are some useful techniques and tips on how to make your team well-organized, create a positive working atmosphere and increase the overall productivity.

• Have all of your work in one place – First and foremost, make sure that your entire team, the project manager, and the client are all on the same page. That page has to have a place to track updates and see what you and your team have to work on next. Also, that page has to be unique for all of your team members, as well as your client – you don’t want your client to see everything.
• Create a project template – Create a template for an SEO campaign you usually work on, and have a full project ready instantly, without having to adjust almost anything. This approach will significantly help you plan your SEO campaigns better, and you will spend less time planning and more time working on the campaign.
• Collaborate with your team – Working on an SEO campaign alone, without a team can be very confusing and very difficult. By using a digital projects tool, your team will be able to keep track of their tasks and their working hours. Once they are done, they can attach files and request clients feedback. That will significantly increase a team’s productivity and performance and will enable you to assign them to future projects – accordingly to their progress.
• Set a deadline – A lot of problems can occur when you don’t set a deadline for your ongoing projects: you can stress your team members, and they will be less productive in return. To be sure that none of this happens, set a deadline in the app. Even though different projects have different deadlines, setting a deadline in a project tool will significantly help you with better organization of your project and the team that is working on it.
• Track Progress – Progress tracking can be beneficial when you want to have an insight into your team’s progress – project or task vise. If members are struggling with something, you can see the progress they made and the problem itself. To do all of this, a tool that will do all of this for you is necessary.
• Collaborate with clients – During the project, your clients will usually want to see a report of some kind. Making a report is not something that can be done quickly unless you have a tool that can do it for you. Another benefit is to have all of your reports ready to send to your clients so that they can access them anytime they want.
• Set a budget – It is crucial to set the campaign budget upfront. This will help you in a better understanding of the client’s needs, means and reach (how far are they willing to go when it comes to spending on keywords, for example). This is also beneficial when you have one account with different business units – like a software company with different products or a large company that has many different brands.
• Send your invoices – If you want to save yourself from posting an angry letter to the client’s website, and the client from embarrassment, send proper invoices with custom branding (so that the busy client knows who he’s paying). By using a project management tool that has an “invoicing” feature, as well as time tracking, you will get paid based on your real hourly rates. No fuss no hassle.
• Add clients information – If you don’t have a customer database, then you are missing out on an effective marketing tool that will help you grow your business. Keep all your customer details up to date in your project management tool, so that you can easily find the info when you need it for invoicing or for feedback requests.

In his book, A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber writes how the world is constantly evolving and how with every new step, everything gets more and more complex. This is also the case with SEO, which is going to get more and more complicated as the years go by. You can adapt to these changing times by using a proper project management tool.

Just remember that it should include project templates for campaigns, team overview and collaboration, client reports, time, progress and cost tracking, as well as billing, invoices and everything else that is needed for an SEO campaign to be successful.