An SEO playbook acts as a guide for creating, executing, and sustaining effective SEO strategies.
It ensures that all participants, from marketers to developers, adhere to a unified and methodical approach.
Typically the playbook encompasses essential elements that steer SEO initiatives, aligning them with business goals and promoting teamwork across different teams.
Communicating and working with the majority of the C-suite is rewarding and collaborative. Although overall “SEO knowledge” might not be as high (which is why we, as specialists, are brought into the fold), the core objectives provide common ground to align on:
- Creating effective contribution of SEO (as a channel) against overall marketing key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Effectively communicating with all business departments (C-suite, product, brand, sales, engineering) and getting “SEO buy-in.”
- Reaching your Serviceable Available Market (SAM), Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM), and Total Addressable Market (TAM) with relevant brand touchpoints.
This is where developing SEO playbooks come into effect.
In my experience, your SEO playbook needs to be put together in collaboration with other MarComm teams and agencies and teams like product and engineering.
When I was consulting with Gitlab, one of the biggest opportunities we found was from holding a call with the product team and asking them for their unfiltered opinions and input on how products were being represented on the website.
Combining these insights from engaging non-marketing teams enabled more streamlined buy-in for SEO initiatives.
By integrating SEO into every aspect of an organization’s marketing communication strategy, brands can ensure that all channels function together effectively to enhance visibility, engage audiences, and contribute towards the overall, meaningful KPIs.
Developing SEO Playbooks
The first step in developing a successful SEO playbook in collaboration with sales, brand, and engineering teams is to understand the unique goals, priorities, and workflows of each team.
While all teams are pulling in the same direction to the overall business goals, their individual team goals, KPIs, and how they contribute to the bigger picture will differ.
By understanding and respecting each team’s unique priorities, you can create a foundation for a collaborative and impactful SEO playbook, as well as how to more effectively communicate how your SEO initiatives can positively impact their objectives.
Sales Team Priorities
The sales team’s main focus is on converting leads into customers and driving revenue. Their priorities (and direct responsibilities) often include:
- Using data to improve the likelihood that prospects will complete desired actions (e.g., signing up for a product demo, a trial, or making a purchase).
- Understanding pain points, objections, and decision-making factors of potential customers. Then, providing feedback to other MarComms teams on how products/features are being represented at the various touchpoints.
- Meeting or exceeding monthly, quarterly, and annual sales targets.
- Ensuring that leads generated through SEO efforts are effectively managed and nurtured.
Brand Team Priorities
The brand team’s goal is to create a cohesive and compelling identity that resonates with target audiences.
There is substantial overlap here with the SEO team. More likely, we see elements of the brand team in any content tone of voice guides we receive. Their main responsibilities include:
- Ensuring all communications reflect the company’s tone, voice, and values.
- Building strong relationships with customers through storytelling and emotionally resonant content.
- Maintaining a consistent look and feel across all digital and offline touchpoints.
Engineering Team Priorities
The engineering team plays a critical role in ensuring the technical infrastructure supports SEO initiatives and provides a seamless user experience.
Understanding their processes from the get-go is imperative to not only implementing any technical SEO recommendations you provide, but also to proactively keep you in the fold and informed of any deployments that could affect SEO performance.
Depending on the structure of the engineering team, their responsibilities will range from proactive development and bug fixing to managing infrastructure.
Define The Objectives Of The Playbook
The basic definition must outline a playbook for SEO purposes so that all teams have collective common goals.
Such goals create the guiding principle behind measuring SEO impact with the business and sales priorities of the brand.
Establish clear objectives to align SEO with business priorities:
- Increase organic traffic, improve conversion rates, and boost brand awareness.
- Track keyword rankings and clicks from keyword clusters (aligned with stages of the funnel/your audience segments).
- Measure organic leads, SEO-driven conversions, and revenue attribution.
- Branded search volume, content alignment, and engagement (measured through events in Google Analytics 4).
These objectives create a measurable framework for success.
Create Playbook Sections For Each Team
Create specific sections for each team in order for the playbook to ensure actionability and relevance to teams.
Specific strategies and guidelines should stem from the goals and responsibilities of each section.
Encourage sales team members to submit content addressing typical objections or questions from prospects, ensuring SEO efforts bring in qualified leads and the content not only ranks for search terms but resonates with prospects at a level that keyword research tools and basic level intent classification don’t tell us.
Brand teams should contribute clear guidelines for brand consistent maintenance of meta-descriptions, headings, alt texts, and other SEO elements.
They need to share positive reviews, customer testimonials, and stories to help build trust and credibility and provide a better understanding to the SEO teams on what the target audience values pre- and post-conversion.
Engineering teams need to contribute and (working with the SEO team) define a process for issue raising, prioritization, and deployment.
They should also share their overall processes and include the SEO team in scrum notes or agendas so any major potential issues can be understood and mitigated if necessary.
Feedback Loops And Reporting
Regular check-ins create a continuous cadence for teams to hear updates on progress and address issues.
Weekly or bi-weekly meetings would provide an opportunity to review ongoing SEO initiatives, address impediments, and maintain alignment across departments.
Sessions of this nature would also provide an open platform for communication and keep the focus on the same objectives.
Cross-departmental reporting interlinks core SEO performance metrics like keyword rankings and organic traffic to tangible business outcomes like conversion and brand engagement.
This would illustrate the impact SEO efforts have on revenue or the brand’s visibility to stakeholders concerning the strategic worth of SEO and its continued investment.
An SEO Playbook Is A Dynamic Resource
Your SEO playbook should contain actionable insights to guide the next steps in underperforming pages, highlighting technical issues or suggesting areas for strengthening conversion paths so that teams could address such problems quickly and seize new opportunities for growth.
Data visualization takes these further. Instead of dashboards, charts, or interactive tools, show stakeholders the different possibilities the data presents.
Monitoring and analysing metrics at a more granular level will allow you to better visualize user engagement, making it a lot easier to spot trends, measure progress, and prioritize strategic actions.
Incorporating structured feedback loops and transparent reporting turns an SEO playbook into a dynamic, ever-evolving resource.
It adapts continuously, driven by new data, open communication, and collective insights, ensuring each SEO initiative delivers maximum value.
More Resources:
- Working With Cross-Departmental Decision Makers for SEO Success
- 5 Ways Brands Can Build an Enterprise SEO Culture
- 5 Key Enterprise SEO Priorities CMOs Need To Get Right
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