There are never enough hours in the day when doing search engine optimization - The work is long, hard, and can be tedious at times. One reason for this is that some marketers or optimizers do not spread out the work enough to their team or other individuals who could potentially help them with their work. If you are doing search engine optimization for an organization with other employees, especially an inside Sales or Marketing team, there are often other resources that you can take advantage of, to help lighten the load or free you for other tasks.
Opportunity 1: Source FAQ Questions From Sales
Almost every website has, or should have, some kind of FAQ section available. On the other side of that however, almost every website on the internet is doing their FAQ section wrong. Most websites have the FAQ section presented as one very long page that people have to scroll through, or at best anchor links to move you around the page. These pages are not optimized well, and with that mix of content on different subjects, it will be very hard for that page to rank well.
Instead, let your main FAQ page just link out to individual pages representing your topics. That way, you have many pages that all have opportunities to rank on different subjects, if optimized well. You can take this a step further though to save you time - Find out what questions are likely to rank and bring in traffic by asking your Sales or Marketing organization what questions they frequently get when on the phone or talking to a prospect. If people are asking you those questions, they are going to be asking search engines those questions as well. Use your Sales team to help you understand and answer the questions, and then get in front of those searchers while they are in their research phase.
Opportunity 2: Share Collateral
You probably have all kinds of fantastic sales collateral that you've never shared publicly. Now, don't give it a away for free, but put it behind a form. Offer your great content that is normally only shared after a lead conversion AS the lead conversion, and you'll find that you can get a lot of work out of it. Place it on a prominent landing page, and position it however you like. This is exclusive high-quality content, and so let it attract attention. The best part is that this won't take too much time - The content is already produced and ready to go, and you just need to wrap it up in a bow and let your visitors open it. Find out from your Sales team what their best collateral is, and then offer them inbound leads who saw that content and loved it already.
If you have "Resource Centers" or topic-focused pages already where you highlight some of your best blog posts over time, this works very well here. You've collected your best content in another way that people haven't seen yet. Change the presentation of it, tell the world about it, and build inbound links for your new Resources page on that topic.
Opportunity 3: Encourage Blogging
Now that you've exposed your older content that wasn't helping you generate search authority, it's time to take the battle to the front of generating new content on a regular basis. Print out your blog's analytics each week, and tape them up on the fridge or some other very public place in your office. Then, you can offer a monthly bounty to the best blog post and have the public leaderboard to show who is pitching in on other projects and helping your business succeed and get attention. Gift cards to area restaurants or other swag can be really attractive to people who are already kind of interested in blogging or learning about new things in the business, and help motivate them to success down the road. If your office is known for a competitive atmosphere, this will work even better if you update the leaderboard on a regular basis.
How have you helped spread out content creation or SEO work throughout your organization?
Photo Credit: bengrey
