Natural Referencing: Understanding SEO and the Algorithms of Google, Bing, and ChatGPT
Natural Referencing: Understanding SEO and the Algorithms of Google, Bing, and ChatGPT
Kevin Coppens
November 15, 2024
.
Reading Time 10 mins
Contrary to what than you might think, SEO is not just a matter for SEO experts. Other actors, from different departments, are also involved. However, companies often struggle to coordinate these different actors and to distribute the tasks between them. Consequence? Too few implementations, disappointing SEO results and widespread frustration.
In this article, we help you better understand the SEO workflow principle and give you some tips on how to increase your organic visibility by defining your own SEO workflow.
In a few words, the SEO workflow includes all the activities that the company must implement to obtain a result in natural referencing.
The notion of workflow also includes all project stakeholders, the responsibilities of each of them, the prioritization of tasks as well as the associated deadlines.
Here is an example of an SEO workflow:
Setting up a good SEO workflow in your company allows you to clarify everyone’s role and to rely on their expertise to gain efficiency. The main challenge for an SEO Project Manager is to mobilize the right expertise around him to focus on his core business: SEO strategy and identification of the best optimization levers.
Once clarified, the SEO workflow allows you to eliminate potentially unnecessary steps and prioritize each one.
In other words, it will allow you to make your project as efficient as possible, by improving the coordination of your teams, speeding up the decision-making process and reducing errors. The result? You see your positions rise much faster!
First of all, it is important to define your SEO strategy, which is based on 3 pillars:
The SEO manager will need to communicate this strategy to each stakeholder who will play a role in the implementation. SEO goals must be shared by all, and everyone must understand the impact their actions will have on the project.
Once you have defined the work sites, you need to identify the tasks that are performed several times during the same year, such as creating landing pages, creating blog content, optimizing existing content, correcting SEO markup errors (several H1s for example), …
For each of these tasks, it is worthwhile to define who is going to do what, in what time frame and with what tools. The SEO strategy will then allow you to prioritize your actions, starting with the SEO quick wins, i.e. the tasks that allow you to have a maximum impact with a limited effort. Ideally, each action will be assigned to a specific person who will be responsible for its execution within the allotted time.
Don’t forget the most important thing: follow the implementation of the tasks and monitor your progress. A good practice is to set up a reporting system from the beginning of the project by answering the following questions
Avoid the classic trap of providing as much data as possible to your management. In SEO as in design, “less is more”. Consider the priorities and level of expertise of each person in selecting the type of information to be included and its formatting.
In most projects, a lot of time is spent on the organization of the project itself, wondering if the teams working on the project are progressing properly and meeting their deadlines. Many messages are then exchanged, and sometimes lost or forgotten. This is where some project management tools can help. These will allow you to centralize all the tasks and to see the progress of each person involved.
To help you manage your SEO processes, you can use project management or communication platforms like Slack, Asana, Teams or even Trello. However, these are not specifically designed for organic referencing. You will have to take care of the set-up, feed the platform with your different analyses and make sure that the tasks and their impact are followed up.
You can also simplify your SEO workflow by choosing a dedicated platform that does some of the work for you. This is commonly known as an Enterprise SEO platform.
When an SEO workflow is set up and approved, all stakeholders share a common goal. It’s no longer about performing a tedious task but about contributing to a better organic visibility. For this to work, it is essential to be able to show that each task serves this SEO performance objective. “What impact did my action have? This question is tricky in SEO because it is often difficult to link a single action to an improvement in visibility. And yet, it is key to motivation and commitment!
There are solutions, such as Semactic Enterprise SEO platform, to help you make that connection between implementations and impact. In a context where SEO competition is increasing, keeping your teams motivated over time has become crucial to continuously optimize your site.