As a competent SEO growing over time, you may have handled optimization projects of several small to medium sized businesses and managed their moderate needs. However, when you get elevated to the post of an Enterprise SEO, your work profile can change a lot more than you may have imagined.
As a professional Search Engine Optimization expert, your days and nights may have been spent in launching new campaigns, optimizing web pages and links, analyzing your client’s web data, extracting analytical reports, and a lot more. While these skills will be helpful in your future role as an Enterprise SEO, you will not really be required to use these analytical skills directly since your new role will require you to actually monitor teams that engage in this tactical work.
If your new job involves working for a very big company with a website that has millions of published pages then you can be sure that this mammoth task will require dedicated teams handling different interlinked departments. These include content development, link building, SERM, PPC, and many more. Your new work profile will include seamless integration of all these departments and this will require building up of communication and people skills.
Your job may now be strategic in nature while the tactical work will be allocated to specific teams that need to be brought together to ensure that the project moves forward smoothly. It is here where your people skills need to come to the fore even as you interpret the reports generated by various teams in the huge organization.
A large advantage on your side is that as a professional SEO, you already understand the work that is done and needs to be done by your tactical teams. However, you need to ensure that you respect and guide each member of the team rather than showing disrespect or goading them constantly with an aim to get the desired results. You need to motivate them, understand their goals, and compliment them on successful implementation of each project.
On the other hand, as an Enterprise SEO, you can get pro-active and take several steps to boost the efficiency of your teams. For starters, you can provide training or start workshop sessions that include covering the development of new features or pages along with other SEO functions by discussing one point at a time. Each team member should also know how their efforts can help the project. You should remember to dedicate some time at the end of each session for answering queries and clearing doubts in the minds of your team members.
You can then follow it up with a written summary of these sessions delivered to your team or a SEO cheat sheet outlining the highlights of the workshop. You can also make training videos of the same to ensure that new team members can get the same training experience.
All these actions require you to develop excellent communication skills as well as understand the individual traits of each member of each team that communicates with you. This will enable you to get the most out of each SEO task at hand and integrate all departments for any project to be launched rather that fumbling around to locate SEO bloopers after a disastrous launch.
You must remember to publicly acknowledge the efforts put in by various teams and individuals to boost their confidence and motivate them to work harder in future. While chances are that it will be your work that goes unrecognized, this should not stop you from doing your job to convince each team to perform at its full potential. If you are truly good then others in your organization will certainly notice and appreciate your hard work.
You must also learn to identify your limitations and work on them to remain on top of your job. As an Enterprise SEO you may need to provide all answers, but if you do not know a few of them, it is okay to admit the same and work towards getting the right answer. This move will display your humility and will save a lot of awkward moments in the future.
The job of an Enterprise SEO needs you to possess a lot more than just technical knowledge that you may have focused on in the past. You will need to develop people-handling skills, communication skills, and leadership skills to get all members of different teams to work on the same wavelength.