Search engines are playing an increasingly influential role in the world of online business.
The exponential growth of ecommerce is driving many businesses to improve their rankings in search engines to acquire more customers and generate more profit. Search engine optimization (SEO) has become one of the most effective marketing strategies to promote brand visibility and increase your sales. As a result, effective communication and productive collaboration with your SEO team are essential to growing your business.
Poor communication with your SEO specialists will cost your business customers and potential revenue. You must implement effective team communication strategies in the workplace to improve the quality of your engagement with your SEO professionals. Follow these strategies to maximize effective communication with your SEO team and enhance workplace performance and productivity at your ecommerce business:
Plan Together
You can promote higher-quality communication with your SEO team by involving them in the planning phase of a new digital marketing project. If you are planning a project to increase your company’s online sales within the next three years, create a cross-functional team of SEO specialists, marketers, and salespeople, and allow them to collaborate and share ideas for developing a successful strategy to maximize your business’s conversion rate.
Planning Together Improves Understanding and Team Communication
Giving your marketing and SEO team the time to plan and strategize together will help them better understand each others’ needs and functions. Bringing everyone together at the beginning of a plan will help minimize confusion and misunderstanding, reducing communication failures later on in the project. Allowing your marketing and SEO specialists to work together on a project will also acquaint them with common concepts and terminologies used by other teams, enabling more effective communication between the employees.
Define Specific Goals
To communicate effectively with your SEO team, you must lay out measurable business goals with specific deadlines and expectations. What business goals do you want your SEO specialists to accomplish? Do you want them to increase organic traffic to your website by 15% over the next two years? Setting specific targets to accomplish your goals is an effective team communication strategy that will reduce any potential misunderstandings and ensure everyone involved in the project is on the same page.
Implement Measurable Actions to Achieve the Goal
Work with your SEO team to identify and develop measurable actions to achieve the project’s goal. If you want to increase the number of website visitors, you should specify your desired rate of increased traffic every time you meet for updates on the project. Define your expectations by marking where you are now, and where you want to be in the next three, six, or twelve months down the line. This strategy will encourage more cooperation and promote higher-quality communication with your SEO team.
Promote Psychological Safety at Work
The quality of communication across teams and within a team is dependent on your employees’ psychological safety. Psychological safety is when your employees have confidence that they will not experience any repercussions for speaking up in the workplace. Fear of speaking up and holding back at work reduces the quality of team communication, as it prevents employees from asking bold questions or bringing up controversial ideas.
Recent studies have shown that employees need psychological safety to have more effective and productive communications at work. If your SEO team believes producing more comprehensive 1,000-word blog posts will increase the authority of your site, they should be able to challenge the accepted wisdom that 500-word blog posts generate the best user experience. Promoting psychological safety will make your employees more comfortable exchanging ideas, enabling better team communication in the workplace.
How to Promote Psychological Safety in the Workplace
Developing a culture that boosts psychological safety is an effective team communication strategy that leads to more productive collaboration in the workplace. Many SEO teams believe they’re simply playing a supporting role to the marketing team’s efforts. Consequently, many SEO specialists avoid challenging the marketing team’s strategies for achieving the project’s goal.
Give your SEO team the autonomy, confidence, and ability to speak up and share unconventional methods to accomplish your project’s goals. Allow them to take risks and try new and innovative strategies to fulfill your company’s digital marketing vision. Creating a workplace culture that encourages and rewards employees for speaking up and providing creative and out-of-the-box solutions will improve communication quality and boost business productivity.
Learn the Basics of SEO
If your field of work involves frequent collaboration with the SEO team, you must start educating yourself on the basics of search engine optimization to improve your understanding of the industry. Familiarizing yourself with common technical terms, learning what factors influence domain authority, and discovering the most effective strategies for increasing organic traffic is enough to help you acquire a basic understanding of SEO.
Acquiring a general understanding of how search engines work will prevent misunderstandings and communication failures when your SEO team discusses the obstacles undermining your website’s organic traffic. Investing time in learning about the key principles and workings of search engines will facilitate more clear communication with your SEO team.
Improve Communication With Your SEO Team
The quality of communication between your employees can make or break a collaborative project. The team communication strategies specified above will promote more productive communication with your SEO team so you can maximize your online sales. Adopting effective team communication practices at your workplace will boost performance and productivity in your business.