Cultivating and maintaining a successful business requires appealing to your target audience and making sure they buy your products or services. However, you can only increase sales and gain more traffic by enhancing visibility among your main audience. If potential customers don’t see your marketing or content, you won’t be able to grow your company.
Among the most important aspects of running a business is optimizing your website and marketing materials to ensure visibility with your target audience. Higher visibility means more traffic on your website and in your stores. Because of how important search engine optimization (SEO) has become to companies in all industries, it’s highly recommended that you develop an SEO Center of Excellence (CoE) within your organization.
A Center of Excellence (CoE) is a model that focuses on improving SEO efforts throughout your entire company. This team will apply SEO best practices and ensure every employee is on the same page. CoE teams can deliver support through research, knowledgeable leaders, and comprehensive training.
Whether you’re attempting to grow your company or improve your SEO efforts, you can benefit from creating an SEO Center of Excellence. Over time, the CoE can help your organization mitigate any limitations or deficiencies related to search engine optimization. In this guide, you’ll learn more about the SEO Center of Excellence ideas and best practices you can implement.
Understanding the SEO Center of Excellence Model
The purpose of an SEO Center of Excellence is to integrate best practices into your marketing campaigns. It also allows you to scale your SEO efforts by simplifying this form of optimization. The Center of Excellence (CoE) model has been around for more than 30 years. While it began in the manufacturing industry, it has since been adopted by companies in all fields.
While it can take different forms depending on the industry it’s being used in, the CoE model is designed to provide a centralized body that can improve company output and operations. If you want to strengthen your company’s SEO efforts, you can create this type of CoE.
Developing a CoE will make it considerably easier for your entire organization to properly use SEO. You can also overcome the many challenges associated with enterprise-level SEO, which include the following:
- Thousands of web pages, categories, and sections to deal with
- Many different stakeholders and users throughout the company, each with a distinct level of knowledge
- Constantly evolving technology and SEO techniques
When implemented correctly, this strategy can produce consistent results and overcome these challenges. An SEO CoE can simplify this form of optimization for everyone in your company. You’ll also be able to leverage various services and technologies that can help your team scale its efforts.
Key Traits of a Successful SEO Center of Excellence
To develop a successful SEO Center of Excellence, you must understand the demand in every region that your company operates in. You’ll also be tasked with creating localized content that reaches your target audience.
Inherent Understanding of Demand in Each Region
Does your SEO team have a thorough understanding of customer behavior in the regions you’re targeting? In the United States, Google is the most popular search engine by far. However, the way that search queries are entered can vary substantially from region to region. The content within the search results can also differ.
When you’re creating an SEO Center of Excellence, it’s crucial that you study regional search behavior and search engine preferences. If you want your company to scale internationally, you’ll need to learn about search engines like Baidu and Yandex, which are the most popular ones in China and Russia respectively. Search engines can interpret queries differently, which is why this research is necessary.
There are many processes you can use to investigate and optimize search results across different regions. When optimizing your content, consider localizing your SEO elements, creating location-specific landing pages, and building local backlinks.
Localized Content Creation
Localizing the content on your website is more effective than translating it. When you translate your content, the intent and meaning of the words largely remain the same. Localization usually goes much further.
You can use localization to create content for specific postal codes, neighborhoods, or cities. By localizing some of the content on your website, you can appeal to new customers in places where your brand isn’t that well-known. Properly localized content involves:
- Local knowledge, such as videos, references to buildings, and photos
- Search trends throughout the region
- Local slang and dialect
With Google, it’s easy to explore search trends in the region you wish to optimize for. When using Google Trends, you can find this information by entering a search query.
When you scroll down, you’ll see the search interest by country. Once you click on a country, you can see interest by region. Areas that have a darker shade to them also have a higher interest for that search term. An SEO Center of Excellence will ensure that you properly localize your content.
Integration of Global, Mobile, and Local SEO
Your SEO efforts won’t be the same in every region. However, your global, local, and mobile strategies will intersect. It’s highly recommended that you avoid operating these departments separately from one another. When implemented correctly, your global SEO strategy should provide best practices that all departments can take advantage of.
For example, your teams can learn how to properly use hreflang tags. This type of code allows Google to understand the specific language and country a piece of content is intended for. With hreflang tags in place, it’s unlikely that Google will flag duplicate content. The mobile optimization you make can improve local rankings, which will bolster your entire SEO strategy. Maintaining a centralized CoE team can benefit your whole organization.
Building and Scaling Your SEO Center of Excellence
To build and scale your SEO CoE, you’ll need to have the right team and techniques in place.
Promoting SEO Maturing in Your Organization
When you start creating an SEO Center of Excellence, it’s important to focus on developing a strong SEO team with executive support. Don’t hesitate to hire experienced and knowledgeable SEO consultants to join the team. Your team may need to interact with every department in your organization to promote best SEO practices, which is why its members should be experts in the field.
It’s also a good idea to establish formal SEO processes and standardized platforms that your company will use. Let’s say that you decide to use Google Analytics to track and analyze the data from your SEO campaigns. In this scenario, Google Analytics should be standardized throughout the company.
Scaling SEO and Digital Capabilities
As your company grows, you’ll need to scale your SEO efforts, which is made possible by expanding your team, creating content calendars, and streamlining keyword research. Make sure you use advanced SEO tools and technologies to save time and reduce costs. While you can develop internal SEO tools to more effectively implement your strategy, there are also plenty of third-party technologies that you can take advantage of.
Architecting an Editorial and Content Engine
A key component of search engine optimization is high-quality content. To support your SEO goals, create a robust content strategy that focuses on relevant articles and blog posts. Build a home ecosystem that’s based on editorial excellence. Along with evergreen content, you’ll need to have expert voices on hand who provide your content with authority.
A comprehensive content strategy can drive brand awareness, revenue, and site traffic. Consider hiring a Director of Editorial and Content Marketing to help with building teams, creating processes, and adopting effective technologies.
Creating an In-House Search Marketing Center of Excellence
You’ll also need to create an in-house search marketing CoE. Every member should be knowledgeable about SEO and what it entails. Your team will be responsible for developing best practices that your entire company will follow, which is why you must bring in the right stakeholders.
Centralized Expertise and Knowledge
Your CoE will act as a central repository of search marketing and SEO knowledge. Every employee at your company will learn about SEO techniques and how to optimize content from the same source, which makes it possible for one company to maintain consistent SEO across all locations.
Development of Search Marketing Best Practices
To ensure the employees in your company are on the same page, it’s important to create and maintain best practices for every SEO function. The functions that require best practices include everything from link building to content creation. Standardizing processes across your organization minimizes SEO mistakes.
Cost Reduction and Efficiency
Search engine optimization is a highly measurable technique. Once you create a CoE, you can measure different metrics to determine how your team is reducing costs and improving efficiency. An SEO CoE team can create new optimization techniques and adopt more advanced technologies without needing to use outside resources.
Enhanced Visibility through Continuous Training
When you create a CoE, your goal is to make sure every employee understands SEO best practices. Your team will be responsible for scheduling continuous search marketing training for all employees.
Centralized Suite of Reporting
With a CoE, reporting templates are standardized across every search marketing campaign. For example, all referral traffic, search visibility, and search ranking reports will use the same templates, which is an effective way to reduce per-report costs. Consider tracking similar metrics when measuring SEO and PPC performance. For example, you can track impressions, clicks, and cost per conversion action.
Practical Steps to Implement an SEO Center of Excellence
To set up a CoE within your organization, begin by focusing on your target user’s search experience. You’ll then need to develop a framework that provides your team with structure and organization. Your organization must create and implement SEO operating procedures that adhere to company goals. Every member of your team needs to follow the same plan.
Identify key personnel who will be part of your team. You should also look at your company’s budget to ensure you have the resources needed to create a CoE. Once you know the objective of your CoE, you can begin measuring and tracking its success. As mentioned previously, Google Analytics is among the most effective tools for keeping track of different metrics.
Conclusion
An SEO Center of Excellence can help you scale your optimization efforts and resolve any limitations that your current strategy consists of. Once the CoE is in place, you’ll benefit from better process consistency, risk management, and business agility. To obtain improved SEO performance, it’s highly recommended that you explore the CoE model and take the first steps toward implementing your own.
