Team Work & SEO Tasks
Team work is a large part of the SEO professional's career. Unless you are a web designer guru, branding expert, marketing automation genius, IT whiz or project manager ninja, working as part of a team that has these folks and others will be the norm.
The reason why team work is important for the search engine professional is because unlike days of yesteryear, you can't just "do" SEO a couple times a year and call it good. Advances in web technology, web surfer demands, better internet performance and the expectation of a total user experience all now dictate that you have one full time function already.
Being part of a team means being able to negotiate, compromise and depend on others to reach the finish line on a program or project. Sometimes the negotiated outcome or compromise may not make you, the SEO professional, happy, but the other members have competing interests, and sometimes nobody is completely happy.
Team Work Challenges
I am part of a team now that's trying to do a web site redesign and relaunch - soon. We have a graphic designer on the team, a web developer, me, and two principals who own the site. Some of the challenges facing us are an alternate design proposal that came in late, conflicting goals on color palettes, web fonts, interior page layout and new content.
These are daunting, and I'm not sure how we are going to end up. There were certain SEO tasks I wanted to get done a few weeks ago, and they aren't going to happen, no matter what I think, because until the principals can get past the design distractions and milestones, my stuff is going to wait. I had to negotiate with the principals because they're running other things simultaneously, and the graphics person has a lot of other competing work to complete as well.
Part of our challenge is that we haven't met as a total team since the project kicked off. Team work means meeting together, as well as in smaller cohorts. Communication suffers and deadlines slip because some team members are waiting on decisions.
I share this with you to let you know what you may be up against with your SEO agenda, milestones and tasks. If you can't change the dialog, practice patience and accept that expectations may have to change to accomodate reality.
In the end, I am confident we will push this over the finish line together without major butt hurt. Right now, I am being reminded of what it means to be part of a team with more moving parts than just page and post optimization tasks.
Until we meet again, stay safely between the ditches.
All the very best to you,
Nancy McDonald
Image courtesy of SweetCrisis at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
