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In this episode of the Unbottleneck Podcast, Steve Wiideman is joined by SEO expert and inspiring entrepreneur, Jake Bohall, to dive into Overcoming Enterprise SEO Challenges.

About Our Guest: Jake Bohall

Jake Bohall is Co-Founder and VP of Hive Digital, Inc., where he helps empower globally responsible companies and organizations by amplifying their message through industry-leading innovation and digital marketing expertise. 

Sponsored by Ryte

Jake Bohall on LinkedIn 

LinkedIn Company Profile

Jake Bohall on Twitter

  • Building a Strong SEO Team
  • Understanding Clients
  • The SEO Pyramid 
  • Overcoming Enterprise Challenges
  • Essential SEO Tools

Building a Strong SEO Team 

A strong team is the foundation of a successful SEO agency. In building a dream team, it is important to create a structure that focuses on the people by fostering talent, transparency, trust and training. 

By having an ongoing system that is dedicated to advancing your people, you create accountability and synergy among your team that increases productivity in order to deliver results that will make the clients happy. 

Understanding Clients: Red Pills vs Blue Pills 

Not every Search Engine Optimization strategy is going to work for the same client. While there are SEO fundamentals that must be implemented, you can’t go into a project with an unchangeable checklist because there is not a “one size fits all” framework. 

A great way to approach different client projects is to understand who you are working with. Much like The Matrix film, you have to learn what type of “pill” to give your client: a “red pill” or a “blue pill.” In the case of giving your client a “red pill,” you’re able to give it to them straight and give honest feedback in order to move into the next stage. 

On the other hand, with a “blue pill,” the client may be a bit more ignorant to all that SEO entails and may just want to follow through with one thing that they may have read in an SEO article that might not be appropriate for their project. 

The SEO Pyramid

There are different areas of SEO that work together to create the best possible outcome for clients. But how do we know what to make a priority? According to Bohall, we can use the model of the SEO pyramid to establish a hierarchy of tasks that will allow us to focus on what matters most. 

The bottom tier of the pyramid is all about technical SEO. Before you can rank for anything, Google has to be able to actually see it. This includes elements that impact the user experience such as, accessibility, mobile-friendliness, and security. 

The middle tier consists of relevant content that solves for the user’s intent based on their query. These user’s should be redirected to your landing page with targeted messaging that’s either in your description or heading. 

The top tier is the cherry on top – links that build authority! Links should be the final focus after you have established content. Building authoritative links serves as a ranking signal that helps Google suggest your content to users once they are able to index it. 

Overcoming Enterprise Challenges

Anyone who works on an agency level has experienced discourse with a client when objectives collide. This can be quite difficult for large corporations with different teams that share different interests. 

To offset these moments, agencies must take an initiative to get “buy in” from the client in order to prioritize the appropriate SEO tasks that will get them the results they desire.  

Many C suite executives do not speak in SEO terms, but they speak in dollars. Therefore, it is imperative for you, as an agency, to do the research to assess potential roadblocks due to SEO. For example, demonstrate the correlation between ranking loss and income loss – “”We lost $_______ dollars because __________” or “Your forecasted value is ______ based on this search volume.”   

SEO Tools to Take Your Efforts to the Next Level 

Having the best SEO tools enables you to maximize your team’s productivity and seamlessly deliver client results. There are many SEO tools available that provide real-time updates that will crawl your client’s website for errors, duplicate content, accessibility issues, among other technical issues that can be hindering user experience. 

Here are some helpful technical tools that you can integrate into your day-to-day SEO tasks: 

  • Botify 
  • Deepcrawl 
  • Ryte
  • Screaming Frog 
  • Sitebulb
  • Site Liner 
  • Content King 
  • Visual Ping 
  • Ignitur 

Here are some popular project management tools that will help you and your team organize tasks and meeting deadlines: 

  • Asana 
  • Harvest 
  • Jira 
  • Monday 

Keep up with the latest in SEO strategies and digital marketing practices. Follow Steve on LinkedIn!