Aligning SEO with Your Sales Teams

What does an SEO program aim to do? It allows your company to be seen in the search results by your target buyers. This, in turn, generate leads for your sales team as enquiries stream in through the contact page. Much has been written on how vital it is for the marketing team to be working in tandem with the sales teams, through an effective SEO program — one that brings in quality leads that will translate into revenue for your company. Here’s how you can align SEO with your sales team.

Creating an Effective Channel of Communication

Ensuring everyone, in your marketing and sales teams, knows what is happening, why it is happening, and how to go about addressing it, is pivotal to the success of your company. When your marketing team launches an SEO campaign without telling the sales team, how will the sales team be able to sell a particular product or service effectively? For that reason, you should create an accessible channel for both teams to have open lines of communication and shared knowledge.

Creating a SEO Strategy to Actuate Sales

Let’s look at how the marketing team and the sales team are intricately connected.

The marketing team sells; selling ideas, data drawn from analytics (web analytics, email tracking programs, customer buying patterns), and more importantly selling the company through branding efforts.

On the other hand, the sales team market; marketing the company to clients and also marketing themselves as trustworthy advisors helping in the growth of their clients’ business by providing solutions to problems.

How immensely powerful when the sales and marketing teams are truly aligned!

Thus, identifying your target buyer, decision maker and key issues that surface during a sales process, are essential to help determine how buyers search. Thereafter, your marketing team can craft content that is relevant to your target audience.

Informing Sales through SEO Data

A lot of time has been spent in analytics to understand how the company’s site is performing, the behavioral patterns of your visitors and the areas for improvement. Additionally, time is also invested in looking at search results and competitors. Is this information also shared with your sales team?

The following can be communicated to your sales team to give them an edge in their sales processes:

• If the sales team is aware of any content themes that are considered top-performers, they can create topics that resonate with clients during sale calls or share the materials with prospects.
• Clients are spoilt for choices. They look at what your competitors have to offer too. The sales team should be informed about the performance of competitors, narratives they are using and updates that they roll out.
• The sales team should be aware of how your company is being portrayed virtually, through reviews or complaints. In this manner, they can promote positive reviews and address potential concerns in a proactive manner.

Summing It Up

Setting a process in place will be an ongoing journey. Changes to come can create a fair amount of discomfort. However, with clear and effective communication at the forefront to aligning efforts between SEO and sales, revenue growth for the company will follow suit.