About the Author
Corey is the owner and President/CEO of Voltage. He has spent 18 years working in strategic and leadership roles focused on growing national and local client brands with award-winning, ROI-generating digital strategies. He's a recent recipient of the KCDMA 2019 Marketer of the Year award.
Do you like surprises? I’m going to guess that even if you are someone who loves them, that you don’t want them in your digital marketing. Surprises happen all too often, unfortunately, in SEO.
When I started my career in SEO in the mid-00s, it was a lot easier to do it in a self-contained way. I had clients who didn’t mind keyword updates being made to their copy, if I was in the HTML of their site updating meta tags and cleaning up headings, or building links to their site.
However, things have changed (and for the better) over time where standards for SEO have changed to match up much better with the standards or experience that our users (aka site visitors) want from us. That means that people or resources without “SEO” in their title are often critical to the success of SEO. That can include those that need to approve updates, copywriters, UX designers, web developers, IT, legal, compliance, and more. In larger, more corporate environments, or those in regulated industries, this has often been the norm already.
However, what is often not acknowledged up front and is sometimes misunderstood is the people accountable for SEO need a budget or access to resources beyond their role. Whether it is hard costs for software, for contractors, for an agency, or for internal soft-costs for other functions/departments, I don’t want you to be blindsided.
It isn’t a good surprise to invest in SEO to find out later that it costs factors more than you budgeted or thought up front. Or, to be told that you won’t get the ROI you expect because the SEO function is limited in their ability to be effective.
Go deeper and check out my full article, SEO isn’t Just SEO, on Search Engine Journal.