How to make the most out of your SEO resources

In the UK, we experienced a two day heat wave

Infrastructure failed.

People became unwell.

The country came to a grunding halt.

It was only 38 degrees Celcius—a standard temperature for many countries.

But, we’re just not set up for hot weather here:

☀️ Houses are built to maintain heat.

☀️ Roads and train lines degrade in heat.

☀️ People aren’t used to staying hydrated.

It’s all a bit of a mess.

We don’t have the right resources to deal with the challenge.

Similarly, resources are something that marketers don’t consider enough when building SEO campaigns.

The problem with SEO is the vastness of optionality. You can make a case for a 1000 courses of action. It’s hard to know which one is best.

So, you must match your resources with your decisions.

By resources, we mean

• Money.
• Expertise.
• Team bandwidth.

Let’s take a closer look at each.

This should include existing cash resources and the cost of internal resources.

When we start a campaign, we’re always clear that internal management time will likely be required.

As a consultancy, we can run everything with pretty much zero touch points. But,  it usually improves performance to have internal time spent on:

• Helping make keyword targeting decisions.
• Signing off content and plans.
• Reading progress reports.
• Providing access to other internal team members (experts, developers etc.)

We try to minimise the load on internal teams, but it’s never zero hours per quarter, and this needs to be priced into the campaign budget.

As a rule of thumb with a high-quality consultancy, I’d add a minimum of 10% to consultancy fees as internal management time—much higher if you want more than light touch involvement.

We’ve spoken at length in this newsletter about providing unique and insightful content. This often comes from experts (or specific data) you have within the business.

Here’s an example from professional services firm Deloitte:

Here is an example from Prime Time Aquatics:

The lesson? Provide content that gives the reader genuine insights.

Whether dealing with a complex business problem or brightening up their kid’s bedroom, help them solve problems or improve their lives.

Before you go ahead with your SEO campaign, ask a few key questions:

• What do we know that is useful to buyers?
• What questions/issues do buyers ask us?
• What areas of knowledge do we have that are unique?

Look at what you can realistically execute in-house and how much management time you can dedicate to the project.

Because even working with consultants and agencies costs some time.

Each project varies, but from over 100 companies we’ve worked with, an internal project manager is a key role.

Role: Project Manager

Deliverables: Report to management, ensure the team has necessary resources, review strategic direction, allocate budget.

Position: Internal, usually head of SEO, senior writer or director of marketing.

As a consultancy, we can handle all of the above. Still, this internal role has a few benefits:

✅   It gives consultants ongoing perspective on the business.

✅   It provides a forum for debate on the best strategic direction.

✅   Access to other internal resources becomes easier.

✅   Management buy-in over the long term is improved.

We make the project manager role super light because we know how much internal marketers need to sign off. As little as one or two hours a month can be sufficient, but this channel is key 🔑