It's no secret that a lot of work goes into an SEO campaign. Many people are fortunate enough to have an entire team hard at work executing their strategy. But as a team grows, it becomes increasingly important to make sure your team is functioning as efficiently as possible. It will not only help keep your project running continuously, but it will help avoid duplicate work, improve morale and just make the team function as a whole better. And as you may have guessed, I have a few recommendations on how to do just that!
Don't let your meetings be a waste of time
Meetings are a HUGE time suck. We all feel like we need to have them, but we spend the majority of the time joking around, shooting the shit and not actually accomplishing anything. I'm a big fan of keeping meetings as short and to the point as possible. I like the idea of having everyone stand during the meeting. It helps everyone focus on what you're there to discuss so they can get back to their desk and take a seat.
In my agency days, one of the key problems I found was anyone who had even the smallest interest in a project was invited to the meeting. Is that really necessary? Try breaking meetings up into chunks and only including the people who have to be there. I understand you want to keep everyone informed, so once the meeting concludes send out an update to the entire team letting them know about any major decisions that were made.
There isn't going to be a cookie cutter solution for you to implement that will work right away for your team. You need to figure out what your team best responds to. But remember, respect everyone's time so they can use that time they saved to get more work done. The last thing you want is for a project deadline to be missed because you spent half of your workday in a meeting that you only participated in for about 15 minutes.
Make collaborating easier
One of the biggest struggles of a team is that it can be difficult to make sure everyone is working with the most up-to-date information. As a result, you have people making key decisions without all of the facts and duplicating work. A good example of this is during link building. You have multiple people contacting website owners about setting up a link to either your site or your client's, but what you don't know is who on your team has already reached out or already has a relationship with them. That's where tools like Raven's link building tools can come in handy. They'll keep everyone aware of what links are being built, what the status of those links are and who already is connected to the contact/website you're trying to acquire the link from.
Whether you're an Excel grinder or your a web app to share project information, you need to find the right solution that keeps everyone as up-to-date as possible, without having to hope they have the most recent document to work from.
Make project management easier
There are dozens upon dozens of project management tools out there. Everything from simple todo list apps, to complicated gantt charts. Why are there so many? Because every team functions differently. You need to figure out which management system is going to help your team excel and stay updated. It could be that you don't need an app at all! All you may need is a giant whiteboard setup with everyone's projects on them. Take a poll from your team and see which form they prefer the most. Have them rank them since it will be difficult for everyone to get their top choice.
Utilize everyone
Not everyone is good at taking initiative, but you can still help get them to do more than what's on their plate. My recommendation is within the project management setup you have in place to have a section dedicated to those small, non-critical tasks that need to be addressed. As people finish their projects, they can move directly over to this project list and start claiming them. That way when someone gets freed up they don't have to wait for you to assign them a new project!
Keep everyone motivated
It's easy to feel overwhelmed and bored on any project, and SEO is no exception. Try setting up both small and large goals with some type of reward to keep everyone chugging along. That could be everything from a happy hour to ordering lunch from everyone's favorite place. The point is, you want to reward your hard working team so they enjoy what they're doing and have a desire to hit those goals. With everyone working with a purpose in mind, you'll find work getting done faster and better.
What tricks are you using to keep your team firing at all cylinders?