The ultimate 7 best project management practices for in-house SEO teams

 Introduction- How can project management practices improve your team’s performance:

Your in-house SEO team does so much to ensure your company’s success, from building new projects to researching competitors’ work to technical maintenance and so much more. If you own a multi-faceted company, it’s very likely that your SEO team will face the pressure of handling several tasks simultaneously on a daily basis. The dashboard must be full of these numerous tasks- such as launching product X, decommissioning product Y, migrating websites and various others. Therefore, it’s important that your team follows some effective and well-planned project management practices. Because without a proper strategy, your in-house SEO team might fall apart from the pressure of overwhelming workload.

Here, in this article we discuss some major project management practices for your in-house SEO teams.

 Improve your SEO game with these practices -

 Organize meetings from time to time.

The SEO team must organize meetings with other teams with the goal of learning their planning methods as well as planning pace. In these meetings, they will openly share their projects, listen attentively, and ask as many questions as possible. The more you learn about project management skills from other departments, the more ideas you will get about managing your own project. Don’t be embarrassed to take notes. Document the important details in bullet points and log the necessary action items in your project management tool. Another important element of a successful meeting is following up the important details with others.

Know the purpose.

As a member of an in-house SEO team, you first need to understand the purpose behind the project. Understanding the goal will give you clarity and also ensures that your efforts align with the company’s business goals. Before indulging in the project, understand what your Key Performance Indicators are. Another important point is to check whether the project is relevant to the company’s short-term or long-term goal. And lastly find out when is the desired due date of your project.

Prioritize the most important projects

Your in-house SEO team must have a distinct prioritization strategy. This means that you must give your all to the projects that are most important. But it is difficult to make other teams understand why some of their projects are being ignored for the time being. Therefore, even though you do not have an infinite set of rules for all the quadrants, the highly critical ones might just need that much detailed attention. Now the real question is how to determine which projects are the most relevant. For this you need to look out the following parameters

• Whether the project has any global impact.
• Are other teams waiting heavily on your delivery to map out their local content calendar?
• If the project has been delayed by other teams. Or if the project has the potential of altering the current situation.

The answers to these questions will determine the relevancy level or urgency level of the given projects. Whenever working on a pure SEO project, always take a double prioritization approach- both business and SEO.

 Use project management tools.

There are a number of tools that can improve your project management process such as Google Sheets, Excel, Trello, Monday etc. Also, look at all the tools other teams are using. If you are a big cross-team project, then working on the same platform will make it easier. Also, this will ensure that the stakeholder gets a better project overview.

 Identify stakeholders.

In-house SEO teams usually need to work with different stakeholders, for example, it can be a colleague or the VP of marketing. Therefore, sometimes it can be really confusing as different people take interest in different aspects of the same project. Hence, the smart move is to identify your stakeholders because the person who will submit the project may not be the ultimate decision-maker. Also identifying the stakeholder helps when you have a number of projects in line having similar scope and thereby need special guidance from the final decision-maker.

 Validate the project thoroughly.

It’s highly crucial to build a validation process. Before you launch the project, run tests on it. Also remember to create short recommendations that target a team or a certain aspect of a campaign because no one is really interested in reading long pages. Here is an example-

Make a file on word document explaining all the details of your required blog. State clearly what are the things that you are looking for, mention the style of writing, link usages, and which are the areas the content write must focus on or avoid.

 Stay updated on the latest techniques.

Even when the project is complete, you need to keep revising your strategies. As Google keeps launching new updates regarding which content will be ranked higher, companies are bound to adapt according to these changes.

Conclusion

Google has hundreds of factors which determine the ranking of a certain webpage. And what’s even more challenging is the fact that these factors keep changing. To ensure maximum growth of the company, owners need to make sure that their in-house SEO teams have the latest information about SEO techniques, content creation, backlinks and all the other strategies.