How to Get Your SEO and Content Teams to Play Nice Together?

Anybody working in a company with a website – which means almost everyone nowadays – know this. Sometimes, it can get very hard to make a technical and a creative team work together. Yes, I am talking about the SEO and the Content Creation squad. And yet they can’t do their work apart. While the SEO is responsible for the technical aspects of site optimization, such as adding codes, sitemaps, robots.txt, and more, the Content Creation writes, shot videos, and prepare other video resources. Meaning that they might speak two different languages.

How to Get Your SEO and Content Teams to Play Together?

But, in the end, what you want is to offer content that rank well on search engines and that your visitors or clients love. And to achieve it, these teams must work well together. So, let’s see how you can make it happen.

# 1 – Update Their Understanding of Great Content

Google Search and other search engines have been improving their algorithms. And they are learning quite fast. Their goal is to be able to “think” like a human so to provide the perfect answer to our questions.

In this quest, they have started to consider user experience as the most important aspect of any online content. What you write and how you write is crucial for your ranking. On the other hand, they aren’t quite there yet. So they need that you to give them information that a search engine can understand. In other words, content optimization can only be achieved at its highest level when SEO and Content Creation teams decide to join forces. Their goals and tasks should be perfect aligned. Otherwise, they won’t achieve what they want.

# 2 – Offer Them the Right Tools and Resources

Sometimes, all that takes to get teams to work better together is to offer them resources and tools that can allow them to create a more efficient workflow. And here you will find several apps and services that can help you on it, such as these options below:

• Asana: a great task management tool. You can use it to track projects from beginning to end, distribute tasks per teams and improve collaboration. All personnel involved will be able to see the status of any project without the need for meetings or phone calls. Plus, Asana is free for the basic features.
• WritingDaddy: if your teams can’t agree on the quality of a certain piece of content, then it might be time to ask for a third-party opinion. One that comes from an expert, of course. And Writing Daddy is one of the best online services when it comes to editing and proofreading.
• Trello: for visual people, Trello brings the best solution for project creation. Think about it as a whiteboard, which doesn’t need to be white, and in which you can stick whatever info you need. Workflow can be nicely organized on boards, allowing each member of the team to see what it is ben done. Trello is also free of charge.

# 3 – Keep Your Goals Very Clear

Another thing that you should consider is if the confusion between your teams is not coming from who is in charge of the website, or the digital marketing as a whole. If you are this person, take a moment to think if you are sending the same and the right message to both SEO and Content Creation team. It is possible that, because they speak in different tongues, you might have been adapting what you say to the point of being misinterpreted, for instance.

So maybe it is time for a general meeting during which you, or whoever is in charge of the digital marketing, will explain what the goals are, what is expected from them, and how work should be done. This will also be the right time to discuss any communication issues that might be disrupting the quality of the workflow.

# 4 – Accept the Differences

Last but not least, you should accept the fact that there will be differences and struggles here and there. We are talking about people with very different backgrounds that just recently have started to work together. You also know that both SEO and Content Creation are new disciplines, still building its principles.

They also have in common the fact that they constantly are under pressure to improve and learn, as the requirements of the search engines are frequently changing. So it is easy to understand why they can’t agree sometimes. In many cases, there isn’t a definitive answer to which they are discussing, and an educated guess from someone above will have to be the final answer.

The Bottom Line

As you can see, getting your SEO and content creation teams to play nice has a lot to do with people management. It is no different from getting the financial and the customer service team to work together. You just need to understand their specific requirements and do your best to guide them by offering the information and the resources they might find useful. Beyond that, it is more about discussing case by case and making the most of their skillset.