SEO

How to Build (And Structure) an SEO Team

Published

2 years ago

March 24, 2022

Entireweb News Bot

How to Build (And Structure) an SEO Team

SEO is a difficult task to do on your own. So having a team can make ranking on Google much easier.

But how do you build an SEO team? Is it worth the investment? Where do you find the people you need?

Today, we answer all these questions and more.

Should you build your own SEO team?

Is building an SEO team even worth it? The answer depends on your goals and budget.

Hiring a team is right for anyone who wants to build and scale their SEO while also training people who will become assets to their company.

It is not for those who aren’t willing to go through the lengthy process of finding, hiring, managing, and potentially firing people and going through the whole process again.

It’s also not right for those looking to minimize their in-house overheads, as they’ll typically pay a $30K-60K salary per team member, plus an additional $2.5K to $4.5K per year in SEO tools. This means building a team (1–10 people) will range from $32.5K to $300K+ per year.

Here are the benefits of building an SEO team:

You get full control over your SEO.
You’re not reliant on third parties for your business’s income from search, as is the case when hiring an SEO agency.
You’ll often save money (compared to hiring an SEO agency, which usually costs anywhere from $3K to tens of thousands of dollars per month).

On the other hand, hiring an SEO agency means a lot less work finding and training employees, less overhead, and you can have an expert come in and do everything for you.

PRO TIP

One way to save money on an in-house SEO team is by utilizing freelancers. You can hire a full-time SEO team lead, then use freelance writers to create content. This way, rather than having a full-time writer who may not have enough work to fill those hours, you can use the freelancers on an as-needed basis.

How to structure your SEO team

If you’ve decided building out an SEO department in your company is the right move, you need to fill four key roles. This doesn’t mean you need four people (one person can technically fill all roles); it just means you need to fulfill these tasks.

Your SEO team structure needs the following four roles:

Manager/team lead
Web developer(s)
Content team
Outreach team

You need developers to fulfill technical SEO requirements, a content team (writers and designers), and an outreach team to promote your content and build links. Lastly, of course, you need someone to manage all these people so things move smoothly.

Note that you don’t need to hire a giant team to get this done. You can hire one or two people to do many of these tasks. It just depends on your financial resources and how competitive your keywords are. More on that later.

How to build an SEO team

Building an SEO team falls into three steps:

Determining your goals and hiring needs
Finding your talent
Setting up your task management software to manage it all

1. Determine your goals and hiring needs

The size of your team depends on what you’re trying to do and how much money you have.

The first thing you should do before hiring anyone is to figure out your competitive landscape. You can do this using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and Content Gap tool. You’re trying to figure out three things:

What kinds of keywords am I going after?
How competitive are these keywords?
What roles do I need to fill the most?

For instance, if you currently have a lot of content but it’s not ranking, you’ll need to allocate more budget to link building, especially if you’re targeting highly competitive keywords. But if you don’t have much content yet, your focus should be more on building a content team.

There are two quick ways you can use Ahrefs to determine your team needs:

1. Use the SERP overview in Keywords Explorer to determine if you need links

The SERP overview allows you to see what pages are ranking for a given keyword and how many links those pages have. You can also see each page URL’s Domain Rating (DR) score.

Using this tool, you can determine if your pages need more links in order to beat the competition. For example, if we take a look at the keyword “seo tools,” we can see that Ahrefs is currently in position #6, with 1,389 backlinks from 450 referring domains.

The competitors beating us have thousands more links than we do, so this tells us that we may need link building to rank higher for this keyword. (I say “may” because Google’s search algorithm is complicated, and we can never say with 100% certainty that one thing alone is the cause of rankings.)

If you have a lot of content already and—after reviewing your keywords—find, on average, you’re not beating your competitors due to a lack of backlinks, then you should prioritize putting together a link building team.

2. Use the Site Audit tool to check your technical SEO

Ahrefs’ Site Audit allows you to take a peek inside your website’s technical SEO.

When you run an audit on your URL, you’ll be given a Health Score that shows you how healthy your site’s technical SEO is. This score is based on a variety of factors, including page speed, CSS and HTML, meta tags, and more.

Overview of technical SEO showing health score and pie charts on crawled URLs distribution, error distribution, etc

If you run an audit on your site and find that you have a poor score, you know you need to hire a developer to help take care of your technical SEO issues. Better yet, you can give them the audit report. They will know exactly what they need to do in order to fix your site’s issues.

2. Find your talent

Once you’ve determined who you need, you have to learn how to find and hire them.

There are many ways to find people to work for your company. These include searching online job boards, asking friends and family, going through talent agencies, etc.

A few great options include:

Indeed or Zip Recruiter for general job listings
ProBlogger or Mediabistro for finding writers
Upwork or Fiverr for hiring freelancers

You can also check out some of these job boards for marketers. This “job boards” article is written for marketers looking for a job, but you can go to the boards as an employer as well.

Note that the quality of people you attract from these job boards is directly related to the quality of your job listing. If your listing doesn’t sound interesting and enticing, the higher-quality candidates won’t even apply. Feel free to borrow our SEO specialist job description template.

If you need more help figuring out how to hire great people, I strongly recommend the book “Who: A Method for Hiring.” It was written by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, two serial entrepreneurs who developed a four-step process for finding, hiring, and retaining the best talent.

3. Set up your task management software

Once you’ve found your team members, you’ll need to keep them organized and efficient. This is where task management software like Trello or Asana comes in.

I’ve used both. But I prefer Asana, as it’s more robust. You’re able to build to-do lists, Kanban-style boards, projects for specific tasks or teams, and more.

Here’s an example of the board-style project page:

Inside Asana, you can create different projects for different teams within your business, which you can see in the bottom left corner of the screenshot above. I have separate projects for separate businesses, as well as a “personal tasks” project for things I need to take care of that my employees and colleagues don’t need to see.

For your SEO team, you can create a team called “SEO,” then create projects for each SEO process.

For example, you can create a “Content” project, which only includes the content team and the upcoming, in-progress, and finished content; a “Developer” project to assign tasks to and work with your developer; and an “Outreach” project for link building and content promotion.

Here’s an example of one of the content planning boards I use in Asana:

Content planning board showing 4 columns titled "Ideas/Important Links," "In progress," To-Be Uploaded and Published," and "Complete," respectively

From there, your SEO manager can have access to and oversee each project. They can comment directly on the tasks within Asana to keep everyone moving. But I also recommend setting up a chat channel like Slack for real-time communication that’s faster and less cumbersome than comments or emails.

Need more help with Asana? Here’s an excellent video overview on how to set it up and use it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKsO9zx9n2Q

Final thoughts

Building an SEO team can help you “outscale” and outpace your competitors on Google’s search results page. And having an in-house team gives you a competitive advantage. This can also save you some money—especially on things like link building, where links can go for hundreds of dollars apiece (if you pay someone else for them).

However, it is a big commitment to hire and manage an entire department, so this method isn’t for everyone. Think long and hard about which method is right for you before you make a decision.

Want to learn more? Check out some of these other great guides to SEO:

SEO

brightonSEO Live Blog

Published

55 mins ago

April 25, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Hello everyone. It’s April again, so I’m back in Brighton for another two days of ~~sun~~, sea, and SEO!

Being the introvert I am, my idea of fun isn’t hanging around our booth all day explaining we’ve run out of t-shirts (seriously, you need to be fast if you want swag!). So I decided to do something useful and live-blog the event instead.

Follow below for talk takeaways and (very) mildly humorous commentary.

SEO

Google Further Postpones Third-Party Cookie Deprecation In Chrome

Published

4 hours ago

April 25, 2024

Max

Close-up of a document with a grid and a red stamp that reads "delayed" over the word "status" due to Chrome's deprecation of third-party cookies.

Google has again delayed its plan to phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser. The latest postponement comes after ongoing challenges in reconciling feedback from industry stakeholders and regulators.

The announcement was made in Google and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) joint quarterly report on the Privacy Sandbox initiative, scheduled for release on April 26.

Chrome’s Third-Party Cookie Phaseout Pushed To 2025

Google states it “will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4” this year as planned.

Instead, the tech giant aims to begin deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome “starting early next year,” assuming an agreement can be reached with the CMA and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

The statement reads:

“We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem. It’s also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence, including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June.”

Continued Engagement With Regulators

Google reiterated its commitment to “engaging closely with the CMA and ICO” throughout the process and hopes to conclude discussions this year.

This marks the third delay to Google’s plan to deprecate third-party cookies, initially aiming for a Q3 2023 phaseout before pushing it back to late 2024.

The postponements reflect the challenges in transitioning away from cross-site user tracking while balancing privacy and advertiser interests.

Transition Period & Impact

In January, Chrome began restricting third-party cookie access for 1% of users globally. This percentage was expected to gradually increase until 100% of users were covered by Q3 2024.

However, the latest delay gives websites and services more time to migrate away from third-party cookie dependencies through Google’s limited “deprecation trials” program.

The trials offer temporary cookie access extensions until December 27, 2024, for non-advertising use cases that can demonstrate direct user impact and functional breakage.

While easing the transition, the trials have strict eligibility rules. Advertising-related services are ineligible, and origins matching known ad-related domains are rejected.

Google states the program aims to address functional issues rather than relieve general data collection inconveniences.

Publisher & Advertiser Implications

The repeated delays highlight the potential disruption for digital publishers and advertisers relying on third-party cookie tracking.

Industry groups have raised concerns that restricting cross-site tracking could push websites toward more opaque privacy-invasive practices.

However, privacy advocates view the phaseout as crucial in preventing covert user profiling across the web.

With the latest postponement, all parties have more time to prepare for the eventual loss of third-party cookies and adopt Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox APIs as replacements.

Featured Image: Novikov Aleksey/Shutterstock

SEO

How To Write ChatGPT Prompts To Get The Best Results

Published

23 hours ago

April 24, 2024

Max

How To Write ChatGPT Prompts To Get The Best Results

ChatGPT is a game changer in the field of SEO. This powerful language model can generate human-like content, making it an invaluable tool for SEO professionals.

However, the prompts you provide largely determine the quality of the output.

To unlock the full potential of ChatGPT and create content that resonates with your audience and search engines, writing effective prompts is crucial.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the art of writing prompts for ChatGPT, covering everything from basic techniques to advanced strategies for layering prompts and generating high-quality, SEO-friendly content.

Writing Prompts For ChatGPT

What Is A ChatGPT Prompt?

A ChatGPT prompt is an instruction or discussion topic a user provides for the ChatGPT AI model to respond to.

The prompt can be a question, statement, or any other stimulus to spark creativity, reflection, or engagement.

Users can use the prompt to generate ideas, share their thoughts, or start a conversation.

ChatGPT prompts are designed to be open-ended and can be customized based on the user’s preferences and interests.

How To Write Prompts For ChatGPT

Start by giving ChatGPT a writing prompt, such as, “Write a short story about a person who discovers they have a superpower.”

ChatGPT will then generate a response based on your prompt. Depending on the prompt’s complexity and the level of detail you requested, the answer may be a few sentences or several paragraphs long.

Use the ChatGPT-generated response as a starting point for your writing. You can take the ideas and concepts presented in the answer and expand upon them, adding your own unique spin to the story.

If you want to generate additional ideas, try asking ChatGPT follow-up questions related to your original prompt.

For example, you could ask, “What challenges might the person face in exploring their newfound superpower?” Or, “How might the person’s relationships with others be affected by their superpower?”

Remember that ChatGPT’s answers are generated by artificial intelligence and may not always be perfect or exactly what you want.

However, they can still be a great source of inspiration and help you start writing.

Must-Have GPTs Assistant

I recommend installing the WebBrowser Assistant created by the OpenAI Team. This tool allows you to add relevant Bing results to your ChatGPT prompts.

This assistant adds the first web results to your ChatGPT prompts for more accurate and up-to-date conversations.

It is very easy to install in only two clicks. (Click on Start Chat.)

Screenshot from ChatGPT, April 2024

For example, if I ask, “Who is Vincent Terrasi?,” ChatGPT has no answer.

With WebBrower Assistant, the assistant creates a new prompt with the first Bing results, and now ChatGPT knows who Vincent Terrasi is.

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

You can test other GPT assistants available in the GPTs search engine if you want to use Google results.

Master Reverse Prompt Engineering

ChatGPT can be an excellent tool for reverse engineering prompts because it generates natural and engaging responses to any given input.

By analyzing the prompts generated by ChatGPT, it is possible to gain insight into the model’s underlying thought processes and decision-making strategies.

One key benefit of using ChatGPT to reverse engineer prompts is that the model is highly transparent in its decision-making.

This means that the reasoning and logic behind each response can be traced, making it easier to understand how the model arrives at its conclusions.

Once you’ve done this a few times for different types of content, you’ll gain insight into crafting more effective prompts.

Prepare Your ChatGPT For Generating Prompts

First, activate the reverse prompt engineering.

Type the following prompt: “Enable Reverse Prompt Engineering? By Reverse Prompt Engineering I mean creating a prompt from a given text.”

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

ChatGPT is now ready to generate your prompt. You can test the product description in a new chatbot session and evaluate the generated prompt.

Type: “Create a very technical reverse prompt engineering template for a product description about iPhone 11.”

Reverse Prompt engineering via WebChatGPT

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

The result is amazing. You can test with a full text that you want to reproduce. Here is an example of a prompt for selling a Kindle on Amazon.

Type: “Reverse Prompt engineer the following {product), capture the writing style and the length of the text :
product =”

Reverse prompt engineering: Amazon product

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

I tested it on an SEJ blog post. Enjoy the analysis – it is excellent.

Type: “Reverse Prompt engineer the following {text}, capture the tone and writing style of the {text} to include in the prompt :
text = all text coming from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-bard-training-data/478941/”

Reverse prompt engineering an SEJ blog post

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

But be careful not to use ChatGPT to generate your texts. It is just a personal assistant.

Go Deeper

Prompts and examples for SEO:

Keyword research and content ideas prompt: “Provide a list of 20 long-tail keyword ideas related to ‘local SEO strategies’ along with brief content topic descriptions for each keyword.”
Optimizing content for featured snippets prompt: “Write a 40-50 word paragraph optimized for the query ‘what is the featured snippet in Google search’ that could potentially earn the featured snippet.”
Creating meta descriptions prompt: “Draft a compelling meta description for the following blog post title: ’10 Technical SEO Factors You Can’t Ignore in 2024′.”

Important Considerations:

Always Fact-Check: While ChatGPT can be a helpful tool, it’s crucial to remember that it may generate inaccurate or fabricated information. Always verify any facts, statistics, or quotes generated by ChatGPT before incorporating them into your content.
Maintain Control and Creativity: Use ChatGPT as a tool to assist your writing, not replace it. Don’t rely on it to do your thinking or create content from scratch. Your unique perspective and creativity are essential for producing high-quality, engaging content.
Iteration is Key: Refine and revise the outputs generated by ChatGPT to ensure they align with your voice, style, and intended message.

Additional Prompts for Rewording and SEO:
– Rewrite this sentence to be more concise and impactful.
– Suggest alternative phrasing for this section to improve clarity.
– Identify opportunities to incorporate relevant internal and external links.
– Analyze the keyword density and suggest improvements for better SEO.

Remember, while ChatGPT can be a valuable tool, it’s essential to use it responsibly and maintain control over your content creation process.

Experiment And Refine Your Prompting Techniques

Writing effective prompts for ChatGPT is an essential skill for any SEO professional who wants to harness the power of AI-generated content.

Hopefully, the insights and examples shared in this article can inspire you and help guide you to crafting stronger prompts that yield high-quality content.

Remember to experiment with layering prompts, iterating on the output, and continually refining your prompting techniques.

This will help you stay ahead of the curve in the ever-changing world of SEO.

More resources:

Featured Image: Tapati Rinchumrus/Shutterstock