Thread by @GiordMarco96

Some actionable tips for in-house SEOs like me.

I am learning a lot of new #SEO things but here are my personal considerations.

This is a personal thread with my suggestions 🧵

Learn to be organized and methodical. Prepare templates for everything if possible and automate processes that add little value.

You want to reduce the amount of time spent for some activities where you are totally sure there is no need for supervision.

Be patient. Corporations and large companies go at a slower pace and it's quite normal for people to handle multiple tasks at the same time.

For this reason, don't expect changes to happen overnight, it can even take months in some cases.

Education comes before everything else. You need to train the organization and make people understand what is necessary for SEO and what is not.

One of the very first things to do is to inject the proper mindset into people.

Prioritize correctly. You will most likely be overwhelmed with tasks.

Choose which issues need to be addressed first and proceed with the rest later on.

Don't start project that add no value or where you are sure there will be no support from other colleagues.

It's not said that you will have a team with other SEO Specialists. You could be a "SEO Champion" and be left alone with the role of evangelizing people.

It all comes down to the industry and the field you are working on. There are cases where you will actually have a good team!

Be involved in site migrations or redesigns. This can be stressing at times but you need to be part of such projects.

IT should be involved as well, you cannot do all by yourself!

Keep a list of tasks and assign them a priority. This point is related to what said before.

I usually group small tasks together and get them done by a given deadline.

"Politics" is an important factor in corporations. This is a good behavioral training and can teach you to handle different scenarios.

At the same time, I do understand people who don't like this type of reasoning.

Spend some time alone to learn useful skills or to improve current processes.

Write documentation for everything useful and be sure to record changes.

People will have a lot of questions, it's better to write them down and create a FAQ with answers.

In general, the idea is to be extremely organized and managing stress.

This is very tough to learn, especially if you are relatively fresh from university.

I do enjoy educating people and updating docs tho.

Limit the time for calls/meetings. I set an ideal timer for each call.

Simple problems don't require 1 hour, adjust time accordingly.

This adds value to your time and makes you more desirable.

This advice seems super banale but I think it's not so obvious instead: don't overwork.

Learn to separate your job and your personal life.

Bond with supporters firsts. Colleagues who love what you do and think SEO is crucial.

You don't have to convince people who are skeptical, start from those who believe in your work.

Upskill yourself and master the business. This takes years I guess, business/domain knowledge takes quite a lot of time.

Your background plays an important role in defining the understanding of some concepts.

Explain the importance of SEO with examples and stories. Show potential benefits to stakeholders and provide realistic scenarios.

It's better if you promise less and then show you have managed to do way more!

Stay in contact with the IT, obvious advice. What is not so natural to think is that you may also need some help for data pipelines.

You need some place where you need to store and retrieve SEO-related data, be sure to think about that.

Be prepared for discussions about metrics, busting myths and fighting over SEO migrations.

That's part of the job.

Companies are starting to understand the value of SEO (finally). This doesn't imply that they know exactly what they want.

It's part of you role to tie business requirements with SEO and come to a meaningful conclusion.

These are my personal considerations for in-house. Some people recommend starting in an agency instead, I think it all comes down to n̶o̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶r̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ finding what's best for you at a given time.