Most SEO teams are quite small, and because of this, those individuals are forced to wear many hats. While communication within the team is often smooth, having to take on roles and responsibilities that they otherwise wouldn’t presents problems with communicating with other departments.
In fact, a discord exists between the majority of teams involved in digital marketing in one way or another.
Technical experts try to communicate with IT teams and engage them in their projects. SEOs try to guide content strategists and writers to produce content that’s not only engaging, but can rank for relevant phrases.
Paid search teams bring their input to the landing page copy, content, and much more to ensure it all acquires a higher “quality score” and so on.
It’s often a mess, something that can only be overcome with one thing: data.
The problem, however, is that when everyone looks at different data sources, unity dies.
That’s why, in order to succeed, organizations should embrace an enterprise SEO platform for digital teams. One that delivers cohesive data points that all of those teams need, and makes it easy for them to collaborate.
Before I show you what insights various digital teams can extract from an SEO platform, let’s define what an SEO platform is, exactly.
What is an Enterprise SEO Platform?
An SEO platform is sophisticated SEO software that caters to the needs of enterprise organizations that need to improve overall search visibility.
An SEO platform, typically, allows such companies to strategize, research, implement, and manage strategies and campaigns aiming at taking their organic presence in the search results to a whole new level.
A typical platform includes the functionality to track, monitor, and evaluate the website’s current performance.
It also allows you to conduct extensive research and come up with strategies for improving rankings, traffic, and organic leads, and more.
How Does an SEO Platform Help Digital Teams?
Commonly, different teams in an organization work with their own data. They use different software or analytics packages, and as a result, the findings never align with that of the other teams’.
One of the biggest benefits of having an SEO platform, aside from all the functionality it provides, of course, is having access to a single source of truth.
With an SEO platform, teams don’t have to work with information and data scattered across multiple tools and other data sources. Instead, they can all base their decisions on the same data and gain a complete picture of the marketing performance of the organization.
Recommended Reading: 9 Ways SEOs Bring Value to Every Team in Their Organization
Types of SEO Platforms
Choosing a platform can be a challenge, and for one particular reason: there are many different tools that claim to be platforms, although their functionality or product architecture fails to provide the benefit I’ve described above.
For that reason, I believe it’s critical that we discuss briefly the different types of SEO platforms a digital team could use.
There are three types of SEO platforms:
- All-in-One SEO Platforms, as the name suggests, provide all the functionality needed to scale SEO and content strategies. seoClarity is such a platform – we offer all the tools an organization needs to manage all SEO programs.
- Niche SEO tools are platforms that focus on specific tasks. They might still offer a number of capabilities, however, their focus is typically on helping a single department (i.e., SEO, PPC, email, etc.).
- Specific tools deliver only one functionality. Rank tracking tools offer the ability to track rankings, site crawlers provide insights for site audits and so one. None of those tools, however, provide data beyond their core functionality.
Each type of SEO platform offers its benefits. In this article, however, I’m going to show you how the entire team can use an all-in-one platform to drive their performance and contribute to the overall company’s SEO success.
Recommended Reading: 8 Must-Have Capabilities in an SEO Platform
How to Use an SEO Platform Across the Entire Digital Team
To illustrate the above, let me show you what data different teams can extract from a platform, and what they can subsequently do with it.
Here are the teams we’re going to discuss:
- Data Scientists,
- Data Analysts,
- IT teams,
- Content Marketers,
- The UX team,
- Paid Search teams,
- Product Managers,
- Merchandising Teams, and finally,
- Digital Marketing Agencies
Data Scientists
A platform allows data scientists to access and monitor historical rankings and SEO performance trends, compare those with the competition, and predict their potential impact on the user experience and the content.
Furthermore, data teams can use the platform to understand the impact of Google-owned search features on the company’s search visibility and discover how to pivot or re-target content to benefit from new opportunities.
Data scientists can use insights to forecast traffic and opportunity trends that influence all teams that work with SEO in some way.
Recommended Reading: Using SEO Forecasting: How to Build an SEO Business Case
Data Analysts and Analytics
For a data analyst, access to an SEO platform means being able to use on-demand data about rankings and traffic to identify and flag potential challenges or issues.
Anything can cause potential issues, from search engine algorithm updates to in-house updates that impact the website’s performance.
IT Teams
The website is the IT team’s responsibility. Those people constantly make changes and revise it to improve the UX, UI, content, architecture and more.
The problem? A lot of those activities affect SEO and search visibility.
An SEO platform gives IT teams the ability to crawl both the development and the live version of the site, plus identify and eliminate technical on-site issues before they cause problems.
Content Marketers
Much of today’s SEO revolves around content. Unfortunately, creating SEO-optimized content involves more than just writing.
Content strategists and writers need data to understand the audience’s expectations, the top-ranking content, and what information to include in order to rank.
An SEO platform provides content marketers with data sets, and even the AI-driven ability to distill it into insights that can power even the most demanding content production.
seoClarity, for example, has Content Fusion – our AI-driven content writer that allows writers to create authoritative content without having to be an expert on the subject matter.
User Experience Team
Engagement signals – essentially, the user experience – affect rankings and search performance. Hence the importance of providing a strong UX.
And those teams can find a whole range of data to fuel their strategies within a platform too.
From page speed to organic performance, bounce rate to identifying under-performing pages, UX teams can extract insights to drive their next initiatives and overcome existing user experience challenges.
These insights allow the team to uncover the “what” and “why” at scale like never before.
Paid Search Teams
Even though an SEO platform focuses on the organic channel, it provides information paid search teams will find useful too.
For one, PPC teams can overlay rankings with their ad positions and understand the correlation between the two to reduce spending.
Proper SEO software can also help to identify emerging PPC competitors that can influence the cost per click for their target keywords.
Paid search teams can also use the relationship between organic search and paid search to educate the data analyst, IT, and content teams on what’s not working well (or what is!).
Product Managers
Staying abreast of the competition and their product development is not a small feat.
With a platform, however, product managers can research and identify competitor gaps, and discover what in the product they should invest their time and effort.
Data insights also let them understand performance at the template-, page type-, or product-level to see where there is greater opportunity to improve.
Merchandising Teams
Merchandising teams will find value in SEO software too, especially because of the ranking data paired with ecommerce data that shows trends of which products sell (and if there are any seasonality trends).
These merchandising teams can also see how things like meta titles and meta descriptions affect overall performance.
It’s easy to create A/B tests to see which approach results in the best performance and value for the organization.
SEO or Digital Marketing Agency
Many organizations outsource some of the SEO activities to agencies or consultants. This is only natural, given the scope of work required to manage their search programs.
However, as many in-house SEOs who work with agencies will attest, without the single source of truth, such cooperation can be problematic, at best.
A platform gives both the in-house team and their agency access to data at scale.
Both teams can see the website’s performance and compare it with the competition. They also have the chance to dive deep into the competitors’ strategies and collect insights to inform their future activities.
Final Thoughts
When teams work from the same data set and establish a single source of truth, SEO success can push forward like never before.
The only way to establish this baseline is the integration of an SEO platform into your organization’s day-to-day operations.
Working in a large organization and struggling with managing the SEO program across the entire digital team? Book a demo with us and see how the seoClarity SEO platform can help you overcome this problem.
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